DEC. 31, 2014 - As United States combat operations formally ended, many military families said they sensed they had already been forgotten. read more>>>
Forgotten long ago as the Country quickly Abandoned the Missions and those sent to Accomplish after 9/11, with near full support and, poser patriotic, flags a waving!! And as quickly Abandoned any Accountability as to those leading, with everything done left on the table!!
DEC. 30, 2014 - Daniel Mould’s sense of abandonment was profound.
An Air Force staff sergeant wounded in a chemical weapon accident in 2004, he willingly helped the military study his wounds. From his bed in a Philadelphia burn ward, as blisters from sulfur-mustard agent erupted on his skin, he signed a waiver allowing doctors to gather his body fluids to experiment with new laboratory methods for confirming chemical exposure.
Over the next 18 months, as the military gave him attentive care and doctors prepared peer-reviewed journal articles about his case, another branch of the service, the Army, concluded that it needed to be exhaustive in tracking troops exposed to chemical warfare agents: Citing Sergeant Mould’s burns, it called for monitoring victims for life.
The case seemed a welcome example of the military’s working closely with a patient to improve understanding of a rare battlefield risk and to develop practices to learn from patients’ medical experiences. Then came the shift.
snip
The origins of his case span almost a century of American chemical-warfare policies, and like the experience of Iraq — where troops were wounded by abandoned chemical weapons — his example speaks to the persistent dangers presented by discarded or forgotten munitions.
Almost all of the military’s previous chemical-exposure victims had been World War I veterans or human subjects in classified military tests during World War II and the Cold War. The latter group, tens of thousands of enlisted men, were systematically exposed to nerve and blister agents in gas-chamber tests, field exercises or other efforts to evaluate protective equipment and human reactions to chemical-warfare agents.
Often the human subjects were sworn to silence. The Pentagon denied their existence for decades, until victims came forward with medical claims, prompting a 1993 review of the military’s conduct by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, which noted “a well-ingrained pattern of abuse and neglect” of the human subjects, some of whom had been duped into consent.
That review also found enduring negligence: “No formal long-term follow-up medical care or monitoring was provided” for exposure victims, even though follow-up, the authors said, “could have provided a wealth of information on the effects of these war gases.”
snip His wounding was like a case study in the long-lasting dangers of modern weapons. In 1917 and 1918, the United States brewed chemical agents for use on Europe’s front lines, only to find it had little storage capacity for thousands of tons of chemical artillery shells that had not been fired before the armistice in 1918.
The Army found a solution: Dump them off the East Coast. “War Gas Dumped Far Out At Sea,” read the headline on a New York Times article in 1919, which noted that one vessel dropped 200,000 shells overboard between 60 and 100 miles out. read more>>>
The 'failures!!' by those served are extremely easy to come by, they think the few legislative bills hyped and passed, by their representatives seeking them 'patriotic' votes, are actually funded. While, like with these recent long conflict theaters, they were given, especially the wealthy, two tax cuts! These wars are still not paid for, no offsets demanded to fund them, and the VA budget still mostly borrowed, with interest and costs of under funding in fixing the problems that arise because of rippling out and causing more, Deja-Vu all over again, like a building built while cutting corners to build bigger profit margin causes constant costly maintenance as long as it exists. Every now and then those representatives, mostly the conservatives, rediscover what had already been investigated in previous hearings through the decades and nothing accomplished by but to attack the agencies personal and named 'scandals' a new with the media and those served joining in the blaming, never looking in their mirrors. The oh so many issues are easily ignored and with some very costly ones just plain denied they exist by so called experts feeding the public and their representatives the needed 'proof' so they need not fund nor even think about. Those experts{?} making extremely comfortable livings, and are praised, while doing so.
The ever growing Defense budgets go mostly into the pockets of the Defense contractors and their investors, especially with wars that bring quick growth. Oh how easy it was to brush away the reports on Walter Reed and with representatives excuses that a new hospital was going to be built, still in the talking stages, so no need to fix what was long broken and getting worse as two more wars raged all costs for rubber stamped by same and remember they both came with two tax cuts. In and for mostly open contracts for so called defense needs with more costs often added to because of so called overruns not too mention what they charge the Pentagon to buy the products sought.
The Veterans Administrations budget, decades long and wars from, has been grossly under funded, with those served not building what they promised thus costing them much more then what should be in maintaining and advancing with newer technologies, while they benefit, in the private for profit sectors, from what the mostly dedicated VA personal do. Under Gen Shinseki, with a target on him after speaking Military Truth to the peoples Representatives and the Bush Administration, and with help from the Obama Administration and it's Cabinet long ignored and denied issues were finally being attempted to be address, all while the conservative ideology, to privatize for corporate profit, was being carried out in obstructing any progress, again DeJa-Vu all over again.
No comments:
Post a Comment