Sick, wounded US troops held in squalor

Hundreds of sick and wounded US soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks in Fort Steward, Georgia while they wait — sometimes for months — to see doctors.

The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers’ living conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying to push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 — Veterans Day.

“I have loved the Army. I have served the Army faithfully and I have done everything the Army has asked me to do,” said Sgt. 1st Class Willie Buckels, a truck master with the 296th Transportation Company. Buckels served in the Army Reserves for 27 years, including Operation Iraqi Freedom and the first Gulf War. “Now my whole idea about the US Army has changed. I am treated like a third-class citizen.”

One month after President Bush greeted soldiers at Fort Stewart — home of the famed Third Infantry Division — as heroes on their return from Iraq, approximately 600 sick or injured members of the Army Reserves and National Guard are warehoused in rows of spare, steamy and dark cement barracks in a sandy field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or illnesses.

The Reserve and National Guard soldiers are on what the Army calls “medical hold,” while the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what benefits — if any — they should get as a result.

Some of the soldiers said they have waited six hours a day for an appointment without seeing a doctor. Others described waiting weeks or months without getting a diagnosis or proper treatment.

The soldiers said professional active duty personnel are getting better treatment while troops who serve in the National Guard or Army Reserve are left to wallow in medical hold.

“It is not an Army of One. It is the Army of two — Army and Reserves,” said one soldier who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, during which she developed a serious heart condition and strange skin ailment.

A half-dozen calls by UPI seeking comment from Fort Stewart public affairs officials and US Forces Command in Atlanta were not returned.

Soldiers at Fort Stewart estimate that nearly 40 percent of the personnel now in medical hold were deployed to Iraq. Of those who went, many described clusters of strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among previously healthy troops. They said the Army has tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries and illnesses were due to a “pre-existing condition,” prior to military service. (UPI)

Panel eyes homeland spy service

A former CIA director and a former deputy national security adviser on Oct. 14 advocated major changes to the US intelligence establishment in testimony before the independent commission studying the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

John M. Deutch, CIA director from 1995-1996, and James B. Steinberg, deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration, endorsed two structural reforms: appointing a director of national intelligence separate from the CIA, and creating a domestic security service modeled after Britain’s MI5.

In an interview on the eve of his testimony, Steinberg said US counterterror efforts remain hampered by decades-old walls separating by law the work of the FBI and CIA. The FBI operates domestically and traditionally focuses on catching law-breakers; the CIA works abroad and focuses on learning secrets.

“The beauty of the MI5 model is it breaks down both those walls,” said Steinberg, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

MI5 describes itself as Britain’s defensive security intelligence agency. It is the domestic partner to MI6, the foreign intelligence agency. MI5 cannot detain or arrest its targets, but seeks to “to gain the advantage over (them) by covertly obtaining information about them” for countering their activities.

Besides the FBI and CIA, the US intelligence apparatus includes the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In addition, the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps all have intelligence departments, as do certain civilian agencies, like the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security and State. (CBS)

God put Bush in charge, says general hunting bin Laden

The general leading the hunt for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein has publicly declared that the Christian God is “bigger” than Allah, who is a false “idol”, and believes the war on terrorism is a fight with Satan, it emerged this week.

Investigative reporters from the Los Angeles Times and NBC television have dug up two years’ worth of seemingly incendiary comments from Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, the newly promoted deputy undersecretary of state of defense for intelligence.

Gen. Boykin has repeatedly told Christian groups and prayer meetings that President George W. Bush was chosen by God to lead the global fight against Satan. He asked one gathering: “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.”

In January, he told Baptists in Florida about a victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia, who had boasted that Allah would protect him from American capture. “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol,” Gen. Boykin said.

He also emerged from the conflict with a photograph of the Somalian capital Mogadishu bearing a strange dark mark. He has said this showed “the principalities of darkness. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.”

On the Middle East, Gen. Boykin told an Oregon church in June that America could not ignore its Judaeo-Christian roots. “Our religion came from Judaism and therefore [Islamic] radicals will hate us forever.”

In the same month, Gen. Boykin told an Oklahoma congregation that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were not the enemy.

“Our enemy is a spiritual enemy because we are a nation of believers. . . His name is Satan.”

Gen. Boykin told NBC that he would be curtailing his speeches to religious groups. “I don’t want to come across as a right-wing radical,” he said. (Daily Telegraph (UK))

Flaws discovered in ballot computers

Next year’s US presidential election may be compromised by new voting machines that computer scientists believe are unreliable, poorly programed and prone to tampering.

An investigation published in today’s Independent reveals tens of thousands of touch screen voting machines may be less reliable than the old punchcards, which famously stalled the presidential election in Florida in 2000, leaving the whole election open to international ridicule.

The machines are said to offer no independent verification of individual voting choices, making recounts impossible, and the software is shielded from public scrutiny by trade secrecy agreements.

The shortcomings have appeared in two academic studies and have prompted calls for urgent oversight legislation. They have also cast doubt on the accuracy of last November’s mid-term election results, especially in Georgia, the first state to switch to touch screen voting.

The three leading voting machine manufacturers are substantial Republican campaign donors, and one of their chief executives, Walden O’Dell of Diebold, in Ohio, wrote a letter to Republican supporters saying he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.”

In Georgia, citizens were alarmed at apparent anomalies in the election results for governor and one of the state’s two Senate seats. Both offices were won by Republicans in last-minute voting swings away from Democrats.

Causes for alarm included a serious malfunction in the voting software, discovered after the machines were packaged for shipment, which had to be repaired with a programming “patch”, and the fact that the patch showed up on an open-access internet page. Hundreds of security flaws were identified in subsequent follow-up studies. There were also several election day glitches, including the loss of 67 voting memory cards in the Democrat stronghold of central Atlanta. (Independent UK)

Halliburton accused of overbilling US taxpayers

A Democratic lawmaker has accused Halliburton, the Texas oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, of overcharging the government for gasoline the firm imports into Iraq.

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root has a contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild Iraq’s oil sector, which has included importing gasoline products in short supply to the oil-rich nation.

Waxman said army documents showed that as of Sept. 18, the United States had paid Halliburton $300 million to import about 190 million gallons of gasoline into Iraq.

Halliburton charged an average price of $1.59 per gallon, excluding the company’s fee of 2 percent to 7 percent, said Waxman.

He said the average wholesale cost of gasoline during that period in the Middle East was about 71 cents a gallon, a figure an oil industry source told Reuters was accurate. That meant Halliburton was charging more than 90 cents a gallon to transport fuel into Iraq from Kuwait.

“When we checked with independent experts to see if this fee was reasonable, they were stunned,” said Waxman, adding a reasonable transport cost would be 10 to 25 cents per gallon, especially as the US military was providing security.

Waxman sent a letter on Wednesday to the White House Office of Management and Budget complaining KBR was overcharging for petroleum products.

“From the facts available to us, Halliburton seems to be inflating gasoline prices at a great cost to American taxpayers. The overcharging by Halliburton is so extreme that one expert privately called it ‘highway robbery,’” he wrote. (Reuters)