More love for our troops from the top...
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 02:51
VIEWED: 3565
PAGE 4 of 7
Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
And then ... you have people spending months, years in the brig for being AWOL after they were honorably discharged.
Googled a bit, and haven't been able to find anything to back up this claim. Got a cite?
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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There's more going on than that. I'll try to find it, but a number of soldiers wtih traumatic brain injury (and even some with missing limbs) have been dx with "personality disorder" so that their benefits are reduced.
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Always look upstream.
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Ah, here it is...
Quote:
Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town's neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-readyBut instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town's wounds were actually caused by a "personality disorder." Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.
Town is not alone. A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits. The conditions of their discharge have infuriated many in the military community, including the injured soldiers and their families, veterans' rights groups, even military officials required to process these dismissals.
They say the military is purposely misdiagnosing soldiers like Town and that it's doing so for one reason: to cheat them out of a lifetime of disability and medical benefits, thereby saving billions in expenses.
www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/kors
Some of the stories in this article are pretty horrific.
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Always look upstream.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Ah, here it is... Some of the stories in this article are pretty horrific.
Yes they are. Any independent confirmation of Mr Kors' assumptions in his article, or just those anonymous sources 'within the military'? I had a buddy with mental problems who thought the police in New Orleans were after him. He'd never been to New Orleans, and no one was after him.
Still looking for any support for the 'honorably discharged troopse arrested for AWOL' story as well.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Did you read the article?
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Did you read the article?
Yep. Couple of times. And did a bit more study on the 'net.
Just a few red herrings:
1) "Defense Department records show that across the entire armed forces, more than 22,500 soldiers have been dismissed due to personality disorder in the last six years."
Most Chapter 5-13 discharges occur in Basic or AIT, when new troops can't handle the military life due to psychological issues. Several of the folk in my training units back during the Vietnam war were discharged under 5-13. If there were significant statistics on combat veterans discharged under 5-13, you'd expect Mr. Kors to show them.
2) The Defense Department doesn't pay disability benefits, the VA does. DoD doesn't save any money by issuing 5-13 discharges.
3) If the 'anonymous sources' were really willing to blow the whistle on this, you'd think they'd go to a Congressman or to the mainstream media.
4) "Wexler did not reply to repeated requests seeking comment on Town's diagnosis." Yep. Like most of the government, he's prohibited by law from discussing any individual's private information. I consider this a good thing, overall.
5) And you got disagreement between psychologists. Wow.
How about some hard facts, or statistics, or any other journalist or researcher coming up with similar information? The only mentions I see on the web are pretty much just repeats of Mr. Kors' article.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Well Geezer you either didn't look very hard, or you looked REALLY hard for material to support your "do nothing" views because I found this third citation down when I Googled 5-13+discharge+personality
Quote:
Further investigation by The Nation has uncovered more than a dozen cases like Town's from bases across the country. ... All were deemed physically and psychologically fit in a second screening as well, before being deployed to Iraq, and served honorably there in combat.
... Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, acting surgeon general of the Army, was briefed on the problems with the Army's personality disorder discharges.... The surgeon general released a series of memos filled with fabrications. Pollock then informed wounded soldiers that their cases had been thoroughly reviewed by an independent panel of health experts when in fact no such review was conducted.
... The story of Pollock, Knorr and the "thoughtful and thorough" five-month review had been picked up by news talk programs... To stem the tide, officials at Fort Carson did something odd: They released a new memo stating that fifty-six soldiers discharged from Fort Carson with personality disorder actually had PTSD.
www.vawatchdog.org/07/nf07/nfSEP07/nf092907-5.htm
So by the Army's own admission, they had misdiagnosed 56 soldiers at Fort Carson alone. Not gonna waste any more of my evening on you.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Well Geezer you either didn't look very hard, or you looked REALLY hard for material to support your "do nothing" views because I found this third citation down when I Googled 5-13+discharge+personality
Yep. You found independent confirmation of an article by Joshua Kors in...another article by Joshua Kors.
Quote:
So by the Army's own admission, they had misdiagnosed 56 soldiers at Fort Carson alone.
Fort Carson does seem to have a problem, centered in their command staff. NPR reported on this, and the Army should take steps to correct this. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10470048
However, one base is not the entire military, and 56, while too many, is not 22,500. To inflate this into yet another government-wide secret conspiracy is, well, paranoid.
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Quote:
The organization was founded by the conservative-turned-leftist journalist David Brock, who says he created Media Matters “to combat” what he characterizes as the largely successful effort of “the right wing in this country” to “mov[e] the media itself to the right” and to “mov[e] American politics to the right.”"
Exactly what a Left winger would be expected to say, to paint a distorted picture of the media landscape. The Right has been largely successful, true enough, with FOX News and talk radio , both making inroads to what has always been held as the Left's domain. But no longer. The Left's days of total control of the media are threatened, and this is simply a way to counter the rising tide.
Good luck to that.
Quote:- Hillary Clinton
We are certainly better prepared and more focused on, you know, taking our arguments and making them effective and disseminating them widely and really putting together a network in the blogosphere, and a lot of the new progressive infrastructure, institutions that I helped to start and support, like Media Matters and Center for American Progress
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/10/02/audio-hillary-clinton-brags-abou
t-starting-media-matters/
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Quote:If the facts turn out to be true (which so far they have) then Kors should be commended for astute investigation, not marginalized for (gasp!) having written two articles on the same topic. Try focusing on the issues, not the people involved. You'll get a lot farther.
Yep. You found independent confirmation of an article by Joshua Kors in...another article by Joshua Kors.
Quote:I never said it was a government-wide conspiracy. But since the issue seems to go as high as Acting Surgeon General Pollock I think a complete investigation should be done so that if there ARE any wide-ranging problems they can be fixed. What say you?
However, one base is not the entire military, and 56, while too many, is not 22,500. To inflate this into yet another government-wide secret conspiracy is, well, paranoid
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Always look upstream.
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