Instead of providing proper counseling and care for Iraq war veterans suffering from physical and psychological pain, too often the U.S. military is trying to medicate the problem away, according to drug counselors and therapists.
Watch Brian Ross' exclusive investigation, "Coming Home: Soldiers and Drugs," Friday, 11-30-07, on "20/20" at 10 p.m. EDT! If you miss the airing the 5 Report Links are below, read the reports, view the photo's, Get Educated As To What War Does!
This Country has been in DENIAL for over 30 Years, on what War does to many who serve In - Theater, and are once again running to that Denial!!
Why the DENIAL, we think We Are So Supreme and Powerful, We Cheer on the Shock and Awe of Total Destruction of others Countries and Populations in Wars Of Choice, not Justified and Based on Lies of the few!
The We are the Great Majority who Will Not Serve, Will Not Deploy, Will Cheer On Like It's Some Great Sporting Event!!
War is Not Sport, and those, the Great Majority, who act like it is, Refuse to Even Pay for what they have done to others, but More Than Willing to not Question what our Military Industrial Complex Skims off our Huge Defense Budgets!
'Coming Home: Soldiers and Drugs' - In Their Own Words
The video above is a cut of the lead in by Brian Ross with cuts of four, of the five soldiers, telling their stories, there's also another video at the last, Part Five, todays report. Visit the links, read the reports, view the photo's with further descriptions, Start Crawling Out Of Your Denial!
If you miss tonights airing, ABC's 20/20 11-30-2007, the links to the Five Part Series, of reports, are below.
The following Video is the lead in video with Brian Ross and one of the student journalist discussing how the reports were investigated and put together.
THIS COUNTRY, that likes to think of itself as Numeral Uno on the World Stage, in Everything, Is Filled With A Society That's Concerned For The Individual Only, and while condemning others, Never Learns The Lessons It Experiances or Witnesses!!
We've gone through All This Before, a War of Choice {of the arrogant few, with the Country falling in lockstep behind them} and All that evolves from!
Watch Brian Ross' exclusive investigation, "Coming Home: Soldiers and Drugs," Friday on "20/20" at 10 p.m. EDT
The Primer
What was it, 75% of this country were watching as the media were beating the War Drums and that 75% couldn't wait for the promised 'Shock and Awe'! A real live video game brought live into your living room, so One and All could Cheer it on like it was a Friday night High School Football Game, a Battle. Or a Saturday afternoon College Football Game, a Battle. Or a Sunday afternoon Professional Football Game, a Battle!!!
Tens of Thousands of us were hitting the Streets, the Internet, the LTE's, the Phones, warning what was to come, Everything that we said would happen, Happened, including the False Reasons for why we sent out Military into a Collosal Mistake!
What did we get, Few Listening, Many Verbally Spitting on us, and told the Hired Representative Leaders don't listen to 'Focus Groups', and we had Millions of others from around the World knowing Better than our own Countrymen and Women!
There are short video clips at the above links with these Soldiers Speaking about their New Battles, I down loaded 4 other video's and planned on adding them to the one above, but visit the links, read these first two reports w/videos on right, than visit ABC Investigates tomorrow till friday for the other three, and Watch 20/20 on Friday for the Full Report!
This Country Didn't Learn from Our Time, Vietnam, not a F**KING THING, now we have Destroyed a Big Part of another Generation for our Total Stupidity!!
And a word to these present day brothers and sisters, Your Peers Don't Give Much Of A Shit About What You Experianced, You'll See!!!
Do Something Right For A Change People, Make This Happen!!
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead.
Military Spouses for Change are trying to lure Democratic and Republican candidates to address the largest military community in the country face-to-face.
"These candidates are asking to be the next commander in chief. I feel like our families and service members, if nothing else, deserve an audience," organizer Carissa Picard said.
Visit their Site, Support their Everts, Demand the Candidates for the Presidency Answer their Call For An Honest Debate, Contact All the major News Outlets with their call for a Face to Face Debate, Contact All the Televised News Outlets to Carry the Debate, Live, so as many as possible can Listen to these Spouses and Family Members who, besides those Actually Serving, are the Only Ones Sacrificing!
On Tonights ABC News 11-26-07 - There's a short video at site link
They were prepared for war. They were prepared to die for their country. But Fort Carson soldiers say they weren't prepared to come home and fight a different battle -- addiction to illegal drugs.
Many of this country's bravest men and women who volunteered to defend America in a time of war have come home wounded -- physically and mentally -- and are turning to illicit drugs as they adjust to normal life, according to soldiers, health experts and advocates.
Editor's Note from Brian Ross: In the third year of a joint project with the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation, six leading graduate school journalism students were again selected to spend the summer working with the ABC News investigative unit.
This year's project involved an examination of whether, as happened in the wake of the Vietnam War, Iraqi war veterans were turning to drugs as a result of the trauma and pain of war.
The U.S. military maintains the percentage of soldiers abusing drugs is extremely small and has not increased as a result of Iraq.
The students' assignment was to get the unofficial side of the story from soldiers, young men of their own generation.
Today's report is the first in a series of five reports.
Watch Brian Ross' exclusive investigation, 'Coming Home: Soldiers and Drugs,' Friday on '20/20' at 10 p.m. EDT
September's assessment put too much focus on Gen. Petraeus, say officials concerned about the war's effect on public support.
Defense officials believe his testimony succeeded in muting a congressional debate and in giving them breathing room for their counter-insurgency strategy, but at a potentially high cost. In addition to the burden on Petraeus, some officials believe, an incessant spotlight on one general risks politicizing the military and undermining the public's faith that military leaders will give honest assessments of the war's progress.
The military refuses to come clean, insisting the high rates are due to "personal problems," not experience in combat.
Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
over at Alternet.
**********
Military Spouses for Change (MSC)
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead.
Military Spouses for Change are trying to lure Democratic and Republican candidates to address the largest military community in the country face-to-face.
"These candidates are asking to be the next commander in chief. I feel like our families and service members, if nothing else, deserve an audience," organizer Carissa Picard said.
Visit their Site, Support their Everts, Demand the Candidates for the Presidency Answer their Call For An Honest Debate, Contact All the major News Outlets with their call for a Face to Face Debate, Contact All the Televised News Outlets to Carry the Debate, Live, so as many as possible can Listen to these Spouses and Family Members who, besides those Actually Serving, are the Only Ones Sacrificing!
Those of us who served in 'Nam, or really any insurgent conflict, and anybody else who were paying attention understand the Government Propaganda used to make things look rosier than the reality on the ground.
One of the most blatant is "The Body Count". Used to show success, in 'enemy kills', and used to show success in the citizens feelings security because of actions by an occupying force or a puppet government.
Real Honesty is not a popular tool of propaganda!
Newsweek and the New York Times are carrying articles about the returning Iraqi's to Baghdad, looking deeper into the reasons why, reasons anyone paying real attention already understand.
We find this subtitle: Actually, yes. Refugees are returning—but it's tough to resettle them without worsening sectarian divisions.
Why are some returning, and they actually are, is it because of how Secure? Baghdad has become, or are other reasons in play.
Dawood (he won't risk the use of his full name) is a 33-year-old IT engineer, but he couldn't find work outside Iraq. His Lebanese visa ran out, and Canada refused his asylum application. So a few weeks ago, practically broke, he returned to Baghdad. His old district is torn by an ongoing Shia-Sunni turf war, but Dawood says he feels safe in the family's new, mainly Shia area.
Syria, the region's last country that offered free access to Iraqis, has cracked down on new entries and forbidden Iraqis to hold jobs. "They put a stamp in your passport that says NO WORK," Dawood says. Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt enforce similar bans.
The money is about enough to fix all the broken windows, but it won't begin to replace the furniture that was looted in their absence. Besides, the house is a triplex. Hamoud's in-laws used to have the other two units, now occupied by Sunni fugitives from Shiite-led ethnic cleansing in the Jihad neighborhood. Hamoud says when her husband asked them to leave, they refused, saying: "If you get the people out of our house in Jihad, we'll go back there."
It closes with a little girls wish to return to her real home and that her father not leave again:
"She told me to promise not to leave again, but until now I don't promise," says Dawood. "We don't know what life will bring."
The New York Times looks a little deeper into the 'body count' of the returning Iraqi's.
The description of the scope of the return, however, appears to have been massaged by politics. Returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.
Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.
They admit to just 'counting the bodies':
“We didn’t ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry,”
The UN though dug abit further:
A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.
The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.
Furthermore, people are still leaving their homes — 28,017 were internally displaced in October, according to the latest United Nations figures. In all, the United Nations estimates that 2.4 million Iraqis are still internally displaced, with many occupying someone else’s home.
We are getting a number of reports of how we are creating alliances with once insugents, fighting us and each other, by training and paying them to rid their area's of al Qaeda of Iraq.
What are we really doing?
To my view of those reports, added to the reports, reading between the lines of the returning Iraqi's, it seems we are training and arming Militia's that are now protecting their ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, that we allowed, in Baghdad and other cities, as well as pockets of Iraq outside of the cities controlled by the verious sect tribes of Sunni and Shiite.
I fail to see where 'The Surge' main objective is being realized, a functioning Iraqi Government, and especially one creating their own security for the country we destroyed.
We tore open, and destroyed, 'Pandora's Box' of Iraq. The Iraqi's still want All Foreign Troops out of their Country, a Country where these sects, despite what our Allie Saddam did to many lived and worked together, married and had children, were friends, lived side by side.
Can they be brought back together by Buying them off, Nope!
Will these militia's we are creating join forces to really bring about a more secure Iraq, a Big Question!
Or will they once again revert back, or have they really left that, to the Killing and Maiming of each other, and the occupying militaries, in order to keep their own ethnically cleansed area's safe for their own????
In October, Hartman met a man whose very first car not only wins at antique car shows but also keeps the memory of his first and only love alive to him and to all who come see the show.
The two above are GREAT little stories and if you visit the links you can read a short writeup and watch a videos of each, the Car and the Love Story behind it has two videos { I'll bet you get a tear or two wetting the eyes }, as does the Kid with a mower!
The third story, because of the discussions on Immgrants, in a land made up of mostly decendants of Immigrants, and the Illegal part of that discussion, had me download one of it's video's and post it up.
He's known now as "Dr. Q," a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University. But not all that long ago, he was an illegal immigrant from Mexico picking crops in the U.S. Steve Hartman met up with him.
An 'American' Success Story
"My very first job was with these very same hands — the very same hands that do brain surgery now, back then they pulled weeds," Dr. Q says.
The reason that one caught my attention is I'm working with a Mexican National now, who has an interesting story as well, though not a brain surgeon, intelligent and hard working he is. He, like this Doctor, probably had descendants living and traveling in the South West long before Columbus sailed the Oceans Blue or anyone else.
He's a quiet guy, and for a Mexican on the tall side, taller than my 5'7" little frame. He also came across illegally some years back apparently working a number of jobs, including being a 'coyote' for a short time. I don't know his whole story but what we have talked about is interesting. He managed to go to college also, getting a degree in engineering than going to work for a company in California. Somewhere along the line he became a U.S. Citizen. The company opened a branch in Charlotte and he and family were transfered here. Than, like many companies, his closed down to move, guess where, to Mexico. They stayed and he went back to school to study to become an electrician, got the needed papers for that, and I'm not sure but worked as one for awhile. Now he's been working for the small remodeling company I now work for. He's been with this company for over a year handling much more than just the electrical, as I do. Doing a wide veriaty of trades, we rarely use subs for the types of jobs this contractor gets.
I asked him why he hasn't gone back to using his degree, getting a more comfortable, and possibly secure job, his simple response is he just likes doing what he's doing now. And he's good at what he does, real good!
The CBS page closes out with this:
True love that really is best in show; striving to cure brain cancer and be forgiven a trespass; and restoring a city park and a community's spirit.
Good news is about our neighbors, our country and our loved ones. Hopefully hearing it helps us all feel a little better about ourselves, which may be the best news of all.
