I received this source link and article from my good friend and fellow Veterans and Military Families advocate Bob Handy in California. It is published in entirety as fair use, because I question, comment or debate various parts of the whole.
Robert L. Hanafin
Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired
Staff Writer, VT
Military Families Speak Out – Ohio
Shinseki Promises to Overhaul Veterans Administration
By Jason Leopold, The Public Record
Sunday, December 07, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama’s choice of retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, a Vietnam War veteran, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs sends a clear message to the hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans that, unlike President George W. Bush, Obama takes the sacrifices they have made seriously.
“When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling even more than those who have not served — higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance-abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate — it breaks my heart, and I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home,” Obama said in an interview on “Meet the Press.”
At a news conference in Chicago Sunday [Pearl Harbor Day] where he introduced Shinseki, Obama said “there is no one more distinguished, more determined, or more qualified to build this VA than — General Eric Shinseki…’No one will ever doubt that this former Army chief of staff has the courage to stand up for our troops and our veterans. No one will ever question whether he will fight hard enough to make sure they have the support they need.”
Shinseki said the military “deserve a smooth, error-free, no-fail, benefits-assured transition into our ranks as veterans and that is our responsibility, not theirs.” That is our responsibility as Veterans advocates regardless if we are leaders of major VSOs or a thorn in their side.
He promised veterans [and our troops] that he will “work each and every day to ensure that we are serving you as well as you have served us. We will pursue a 21st century VA that serves your needs.”
The VA is a Culture of Dishonesty
Shinseki would lead an agency that Rep. Bob Filner, the head of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said last month that the VA created a “culture of dishonesty” over the way it has treated some of the more than 350,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans under its care. Filner said the VA is now at a “critical juncture” and “is on the verge of completely losing the trust and confidence of the people that it is supposed to represent…the very same people it has been entrusted to care for,” he said. These [benefits claims] are matters of life and death for some of these veterans.”
Perhaps the most difficult challenge for Shinseki [because it is the most corrupt and inefficient within the VA system] will be streamlining the process for the hundreds of thousands of benefits claim that have clogged the VA system. On his transition website, change.gov, Obama said he intends to “Fix the Benefits Bureaucracy: Hire additional claims workers, and improve training and accountability so that VA benefit decisions are rated fairly and consistently. Transform the paper benefit claims process to an electronic one to reduce errors and improve timeliness.”
More to the point, last month, (November 2008) internal watchdogs discovered 500 benefits claims in shredding bins at the 41 of the 57 regional VA offices around the country.
The incident resulted in hastily arranged roundtable discussion last week led by House Veterans Affairs Chairman Bob Filner who chastised the VA for creating a “culture of dishonesty” that he said has become so pervasive over the years [at least since the Vietnam War] that it has completely shattered the confidence of war veterans who feel they can no longer depend on the agency for help when they return from combat.
“This episode has further strengthened my belief that VA desperately needs new leadership, and it needs new leadership today,” Filner, D-CA, said. “These incidents and “mistakes,” all occurring to the detriment of our veterans and never to their benefit, remind me more of the Keystone Cops rather than a supportive organization dedicated to taking care of our veterans.
“First, I am not convinced that only 500 documents were saved from the shredding bin. This is merely a snapshot in time. The VA was unable to convince me that more documents have not been shredded in the past and I honestly do not know how many records have been destroyed and how many files lost over the past decades.”
Two days before the Nov. 19 meeting, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. James B. Peake posted a press released on the agency’s website stating that he was “deeply concerned that improper actions by a few VA employees could have caused any veterans to receive less than their full entitlement to benefits earned by their service to our nation.”
Remember, this is the same VA Secretary that most major VSOs reluctant or preferring not to join in lawsuits against the VA prefer to overly defend. Go to any VSO that has failed to render a class action lawsuit and one will find overwhelming praise for Secretary Peake along with his photo. Yes, it’s a VSOs objective to be cooperative with any and all VA Secretaries, but being over defensive to the point of singing his praises as Congress and other Veterans Activists roast him is quite another matter.
Filner said that was not good enough.
“The VA’s outreach has been limited to a reliance on media reports and a message on the VA website. The VA did not report a systematic way of reaching out to veterans to alert them of new policies that may have huge implications in their claims going forward. Congress must hold the VA accountable for a job not well done. A complete paradigm shift is necessary and I look forward to working with new leadership to correct the problems plaguing the benefits claims system.”
Peake is widely despised by veterans and veterans’ rights groups. [Not so those leaders of major VSOs who sing Peake’s praise and take photo ops with him]. He, [his predecessor Jim], and the VA have been sued numerous times for allegedly covering up cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and for likening the disease to “what anyone who played football in their youth might have suffered.”
In May, during a trip to Alaska in to meet with a Vietnam veteran, Peake, said concerns about PTSD were “overblown” and veterans who suffer from the disease just “need a little counseling” and don’t “need the PTSD label their whole lives.”
[In other words, Peake takes the Stolen Valor mentality a step further by using his authority to abuse it. Peake is of the same school of thought on PTSD as Congressman Steve Buyer. Dah, PTSD? What’s PTSD? PTSD is an excuse for troops to get out of combat and a rip off of the American tax payer. Get veterans like Peake and Buyer cornered, and they will honestly tell you flat out in disgust what they really think about Veterans with PTSD!]
Peake’s [incosistent with reality] comments were made just a couple of weeks after the RAND Corporation released a study that said about 300,000 U.S. troops sent to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from major depression or PTSD, and 320,000 received traumatic brain injuries largely due to multiple deployments. It is a known fact that though there are far more cases of PTSD than TBI, there is also a direct connection between TBI and PTSD as there would be between Bi-Polar and PTSD. One need not be a clinical psychiatrist (who happens to also be an MD) to figure this out, out only needs to know how the read what such experts write. Having spent a tour in Medical Intelligence in the Air Force, I for one know how to read what these professionals write if I agree with it or not.
“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Terri Tanielian, a researcher at RAND who worked on the study. “Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation. Unfortunately, we found there are many barriers preventing them from getting the high-quality treatment they need.”
Shinseki is unlikely to follow in Peake’s footsteps. He was, after all, the Army Chief of Staff. In contrast, General Shinseki in February 2003, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and said several hundred thousand soldiers would likely be needed to maintain order from ethnic strife in post-invasion Iraq.
Shinseki on the other hand was publicly criticized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and was forced into an early retirement. He has since been vindicated. But there is no doubt that Rumsfeld’s refusal to listen to career military officials like Shinseki led to the benefits crisis unfolding at the VA today.
In the book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, the authors wrote that “even in 2000, before the war” the VA was the subject of numerous Government Accountability Office studies that “identified long-standing problems, including large backlogs of pending claims, lengthy processing time for initial claims, high rates of
error in processing claims, and inconsistency across regional offices.”
“In a 2005 study,” Stiglitz and Blimes wrote, “the GAO found that the time to complete a veteran’s claim varied from 99 days at the Salt Lake City Office to 237 days in Honolulu. In a 2006 study, GAO found that 12 percent of claims were inaccurate.” The authors estimate that the VA will spend hundreds of billions of dollars in health care and disability benefits over several decades and the process for approving benefits claims could average one year.
Last March, the VA was sued in federal court by two veterans groups who sought a preliminary injunction to force the VA to immediately treat veterans who show signs of post traumatic stress disorder and are at risk of suicide and to overhaul internal system that handles benefits claims.
The federal judge, who presided over the case, ruled last June that he lacked the legal authority to force the VA to immediately treat war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and could not order the VA to overhaul its internal systems that handle benefits claims and medical services. However, in an 82-page ruling U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti said that it is “clear to the court” that “the VA may not be meeting all of the needs of the nation’s veterans.”
On July 25, the veterans’ advocacy groups who filed the lawsuit against the VA, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, appealed the judge’s ruling at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. They are still waiting to hear if the appeals court will hear the case. Now the VA is the subject of a similar lawsuit filed by two other veterans’ advocacy groups who claim that the VA’s failure to process benefits claims in a timely manner has caused severe economic hardships for hundreds of thousands of veterans.
“The VA’s failure to provide timely benefits decisions often leads to financial crises, homelessness, addiction and suicide,” says the lawsuit filed in November in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by Vietnam Veterans for America and Veterans of Modern Warfare.
The lawsuit demands the VA provide veterans with interim benefits while they wait for their claims to be processed.
In a letter to Obama last month, Paul Sullivan, the executive director of the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense, said the VA needs “an immediate overhaul to avert a perfect storm of problems threatening to overwhelm” the agency.
The Economic Recession is the Focus of the Nation but Veterans are hit the hardest.
“The economic recession is forcing more veterans who have lost their jobs and medical care into VA,” Sullivan said. The VA “faces a tsunami of up to one million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans flooding into VA. And…VA faces a surge of hundreds of thousands of additional Vietnam War veterans seeking care for mental health conditions as well as medical conditions linked to Agent Orange poisoning. Our vision is that whenever a veteran comes to any VA facility, his or her medical and benefit needs should be quickly and completely addressed, without red tape, delay, stigma, or discrimination. For too many veterans this vision is a fantasy, however, because recent VA leadership has failed to put our veterans first and has inadequately funded vital services and programs.”
On Sunday, Sullivan said choosing Shinseki is the first step toward rehabilitating the VA.
“As a decorated and wounded Vietnam War combat veteran, we believe he has the bold leadership experience needed to implement President-Elect Obama’s agenda to reform VA for the 21st Century,” Sullivan said.
“I am excited. I don’t know him personally but this is a huge move,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
[I’m patiently waiting for responses of the Pro-Peace movement, who I believe must balance pro-peace activities with veterans’ rights advocacy that WE share with Pro-War Veterans groups setting beside our differences on WAR and PEACE. I will post those responses upon receipt]
Robert L. Hanafin, Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired
Staff Writer, VT
HAVE A GREAT VETERANS TODAY DAY!
Readers are more than welcome to use the articles I’ve posted on Veterans Today, I’ve had to take a break from VT as Veterans Issues and Peace Activism Editor and staff writer due to personal medical reasons in our military family that take away too much time needed to properly express future stories or respond to readers in a timely manner.
My association with VT since its founding in 2004 has been a very rewarding experience for me.
Retired from both the Air Force and Civil Service. Went in the regular Army at 17 during Vietnam (1968), stayed in the Army Reserve to complete my eight year commitment in 1976. Served in Air Defense Artillery, and a Mechanized Infantry Division (4MID) at Fort Carson, Co. Used the GI Bill to go to college, worked full time at the VA, and non-scholarship Air Force 2-Year ROTC program for prior service military. Commissioned in the Air Force in 1977. Served as a Military Intelligence Officer from 1977 to 1994. Upon retirement I entered retail drugstore management training with Safeway Drugs Stores in California. Retail Sales Management was not my cup of tea, so I applied my former U.S. Civil Service status with the VA to get my foot in the door at the Justice Department, and later Department of the Navy retiring with disability from the Civil Service in 2000.
I’ve been with Veterans Today since the site originated. I’m now on the Editorial Board. I was also on the Editorial Board of Our Troops News Ladder another progressive leaning Veterans and Military Family news clearing house.
I remain married for over 45 years. I am both a Vietnam Era and Gulf War Veteran. I served on Okinawa and Fort Carson, Colorado during Vietnam and in the Office of the Air Force Inspector General at Norton AFB, CA during Desert Storm. I retired from the Air Force in 1994 having worked on the Air Staff and Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.
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