Looks like all it took to start improving conditions for convalescing veterans at Walter Reed's Building 18 (background here) was a massive cover story by the Washington Post: "Walter Reed Army Medical Center began repairs yesterday on Building 18, a former hotel that is used to house outpatients recuperating from injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan and that has been plagued with mold, leaky plumbing and a broken elevator. … Yesterday, [the facility's commander, Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman] said a broken elevator in the building had been repaired and soldiers were working to improve the outside of the building, including removing ice and snow. The slippery conditions have kept some soldiers in their rooms. A garage door that has been broken for months will soon be repaired as well. … Walter Reed and Army officials have been 'meeting continuously for three days' since the articles began appearing, Weightman said. A large roundtable meeting with Army and Defense Department officials will take place at the Pentagon early this morning to continue talks about improvements in the outpatient system, he added. Weightman said the medical center has received an outpouring of concern about conditions and procedures since the articles appeared and has taken steps to improve what soldiers and their families describe as a messy battlefield of bureaucratic problems and mistreatment. 'We're starting to attack how we'll fix and mitigate' some of the problems, he said."
Imagine that.
So, here's the thing: They've shown they're motivated not by a genuine concern for the well-being of wounded veterans, but instead by public embarrassment. That means they'll only keep at making improvements as long as a spotlight is on them. And that means the press has to keep the spotlight on them. And that means we have to remember to put pressure on the press to regularly check up on the situation, once this falls out of the headlines.
Amazing
"She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever."
River at Baghdad Burning returns with an absolutely soul-wrenching account of an Iraqi woman going public with her story of being gang-raped by American-trained Iraqi security forces.
She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.This woman, Sabrine Al-Janabi, was taken from her home. She was raped multiple times and then beaten before she was raped some more. What devastates me is knowing that we did this. We turned another country into a place where women are regularly pulled from their homes and gang-raped. And it doesn't matter what you believe our intentions were in Iraq—whether you're convinced it was all about the oil or convinced it was a necessary part of the war on terror—and it doesn't matter how you feel about the war now—whether you hate it with every ounce of your being or support it just as passionately—and it doesn't matter what forward-moving plan you endorse—whether you're calling for a withdrawal or adding more troops—in other words, it just doesn't matter what your feelings about the war are or what your goddamned political persuasion is: You can't ignore that this is what we've done. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. This is the reality of what we've created there, and intentions just don't matter. The only question we need to ask is how are we ever going to account for it?
…"One of them threw me on the ground and my head hit the tiles. He did what he did—I mean he raped me. The second one came and raped me. The third one also raped me. [Pause—sobbing] I begged them and cried, and one of them covered my mouth. [Unclear, crying] Another one of them came and said, 'Are you finished? We also want our turn'."
…I look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries—that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too.
She’s just one of tens, possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons.
If you're asking any other question besides that, like maybe, "How do we know this story is true?"—this story, of a woman who risks her life by telling it, one of so many stories just like it that it is as useful as allegory as truth—then you need to go see Driftglass.
Question of the Day
November 22, 1987. Yours truly, seriously afflicted by high school nerd disorder, is up late, catching an episode of Dr. Who on PBS.
The signal flickers for a moment. Suddenly, the show is interrupted by... someone. In a Max Headroom mask. And this happens: (Possibly NSFW.)
It was like a fever dream. I didn't even know if what I saw was "real," or if it was just interference on my set. It wasn't until I saw it all over the news the next day that I realized, wow, someone had actually broken into the television signal!
The only other thing I've ever seen on television that was as strange as this was when I was living in Manhattan. I was watching the local morning news, and two of the people on the show (sorry, I can't remember names) got in a heated argument on the air. One was out "interviewing" someone, and the anchor in the newsroom began to criticize the questions he was asking. Bristling, the reporter in the field began chewing out the anchor, they argued for a bit, then suddenly, a quick cut to commercial!
That was unusual, but nothing like the Max Headroom pirate broadcast.
So, Shakers... what's the strangest live, unscripted thing you've ever seen on television?
(Edit: I should point out that another cool part of this story is that "Max" has never been caught. That's no easy feat.)
Radio Shakes
If you're so inclined, you can go here to hear me talk with Paul V of Brainshrub and here to hear Amanda and me talk with James and Nate of Heading Left.
Support the Troops
"Are you telling me that I can’t go to the ceremony ’cause I’m an amputee?" asked David Thomas, an Iraq war veteran who was awarded a Purple Heart. Thomas was told he could not wear shorts to attend a ceremony with President Bush because the media would be there, and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row. David responded, "I’m not ashamed of what I did, and y'all shouldn't be neither."They aren't ashamed of what he did. They're just trying desperately to hide what they did.
The insurgents' "way forward"?
The "brazen" and "unusual" attack on a joint US-Iraqi base north of Baghdad that killed two American soldiers and wounded seventeen more may represent a shift in tactics by Iraqi militias. As America moves forward with the new arrangement of smaller joint security stations, insurgents seem to be probing the arrangement for weaknesses - and new ways to inflict harm.
As American troops move into small combat outposts throughout Baghdad for the first time since the early months after the invasion in 2003, today’s attack underscored the inherent risks in the Bush administration’s new security strategy. [...]The American combat outpost, located in the abandoned police headquarters in the center of the town, was fortified by large blast walls. Typically, the Americans keep one company of about 100 soldiers at such outposts.
The suicide bombers who attacked the outpost today timed their assault to inflict maximum damage, witnesses said.
Shortly before dawn, two suicide bombers drove cars filled with explosives into the outer perimeter of the outpost. As American soldiers tried to assess the damage and help the wounded, a third bomber drove his car into the building.
This reads like a blueprint for future attacks on joint stations.
Even as Shiite militias seem to have gone to ground in advance of the surge, possibly following the directive of the notably-absent Shi'a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Sunni insurgents seem to be stepping up their challenge to US and Iraqi security. Even if the Sunnis are responsible for this particular attack, it is certain that their Shiite counterparts are taking copious notes.
Details on the suicide bombing are still being gathered. "Not typical" was all that one US security official would say to describe the attack - but such assaults on joint outposts, fortified but outside the protection of larger bases, may become all too common in days to come.
An assessment of the joint security station approach - or what little is publicly known of the strategy - is up at DKos.
(Cross-posted.)
Caption this Photo
One of these things is not like the other
(Context: President Bush is pictured with Gen. George Washington, played by actor Dean Malissa, after Bush spoke on the 275th anniversary of George Washington's birthday at his estate in Mount Vernon, Va., Monday, Feb. 19, 2007.)
Of Ability and Will
Jill's got a really great and thoughtful post breaking down Christian arguments against the use of birth control in response to a Christian man's contraceptive dilemma.
One of the most interesting parts of the piece addresses the fundamental inconsistency between a rejection of contraception use in favor Natural Family Planning and other ways in which we casually interfere all the time in big and small ways with the natural course our bodies would take:
[W]hat doesn’t make sense to me is the idea that NFP is acceptable, but vasectomies, tubal ligations and condom use aren’t. Either interference with God’s plan for your life and His design of your body is wrong, or it’s not. … After all, cancer occurs naturally, but I don’t think that most Christians would argue that we should just sit back and let God’s plan take its course. We alter God’s design all the time — we cut out hair, trim our fingernails, put on make-up, remove our facial and body hair, get braces, pierce our ears. Perfectly healthy people give their blood, or their bone marrow, or even one of their bodily organs (like a kidney) to people who need those things to survive — people who, without human interference into God’s plan, would be dead. How it is acceptable to give up a functioning, healthy kidney — part of the body God gave you — but not acceptable to alter your reproductive system so that you do no further harm to your body or your partner’s body?One of the curious things about both sides of this argument, by the way, is that they're predicated on the presumption that a psychological readiness for more children isn't part of a "healthy reproductive system." The man whose problem serves as the basis of Jill's post is married to a woman who is terrified of getting pregnant again.
…Anti-contraception people will argue that contraceptives, vasectomies, and other pregnancy-prevention techniques are bad because they screw around with a healthy reproductive system, unlike, say, an appendectomy or chemotherapy, which seek to correct disease. But, as I wrote above, we constantly take steps which alter perfectly healthy bodily functions so that our lives are easier, or so we fit a social standard of acceptable physical appearance (hence making our lives easier).
Shaping his perspective is his wife, who did not want to become pregnant after her second child, but did anyway, despite non-medical efforts at prevention. Before her third pregnancy, she was suffering from postpartum depression. She wanted to go back to work. She thought that having another child would be a “disaster.” She asked her husband to get a vasectomy, and he wouldn’t. She would only have sex with him once a month, the day after her period ended. She slept on the couch so that she wouldn’t be tempted into sex. And when she found out she was pregnant again, she sobbed, and was “devastated.”Only by divorcing totally a woman's will to reproduce from her ability to reproduce could this woman be described as having a "healthy reproductive system."
…It’s been 15 months since this couple has so much as cuddled, let alone had sex. They both want to — but the wife is so terrified of another pregnancy, another difficult delivery, another C-section, another long recovery — that it’s not worth it.
In the same way that the most important sex organ is the brain, the most important reproductive organ ought to be the brain, too. A mind unwilling to reproduce attached to a body capable and likely to reproduce is a malfunctioning reproductive system when mind and body are taken as a whole system—and the only way to treat it is with contraception. A refusal to do so is really about denying a woman's agency, disregarding her choice, divorcing her will from her ability, even when those two are at odds.
Being a sexually active woman who can have children but doesn't want to have children isn't a disease (at least not to most people, heh), but it nonetheless needs a cure. Birth control is a cure. A simple one. One that addresses the conflict between will and ability that most women will face sometime in their lives. If you believe in medical treatment, and believe women should want to become mothers when they do, it's really no more complicated than that.
Uhhh... Okay.
I will restore honor and integrity to the White House!
Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon’s delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: “I will screw him in the ass!”Happy President's Day!
One Word to Describe Bush
Steve Benen covers the latest Pew survey, which included an open-ended question asking for one word to describe "your impression of President Bush." The top 10 list is not so hot:
1. Incompetent
2. Arrogant
2. (tie) Honest
4. Good
5. Idiot
6. Integrity
6. (tie) Leader
8. Strong
9. Stupid
10. Ignorant
Steve also notes: "I thought I’d add that 'ass' wasn’t too far behind, at #13." Ouch.
This reminded me that, back in April of last year, the Question of the Day was: "Your friend Joe has been in a coma for six years and has just woken up, and for some reason that depends on your suspension of disbelief, you have to summarize George Bush's presidency for him in one word only. What word do you choose?" The following day, almost 400 comments later, I summed up Bush's presidency as defined by the Shakers. It wasn't pretty.
Rightward Ho!
A mere three days after endorsing abstinence at a hotdog and ice cream social (seriously), presidential hopeful John McCain has now come out in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade.
"I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned," the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.No room for misinterpretation there. That's some genuine Straight Talk from the Straight Talk Express.
One of McCain's biggest liabilities, even among those inclined to share his positions, is his age. He'll be 71 in August. Certainly the best way to undermine fears that he's an out-of-touch, doddering old geezbag is to blaze radical new political trails like "Keep it your pants, kids!" and "Nice girls don't do that."
Winner of the Most Ghoulish Headline I've Ever Seen Award
Congratulations, AP.
Yuck.
Within this is a post about the truly twisted nature of the celebrity death cult which resides in an ugly corner of our enormous subculture of starfucking, but I'm not going to write it. It's too depressing.
And I don't think I could get through it without unleashing the not totally unrelated fury I feel about the misogynistic under- (and often over-) tones of the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death. To be filed under Ya Learn Something New Every Day is my recently acquired understanding that the only thing worse than being an important woman with a strong opinion and something to contribute is to be a trifling woman with an inexplicable allure (beyond your appearance) to which no one will admit being drawn, even as your beautiful, tragic, charming, infuriating, famous, ubiquitous visage is paraded before us all one...last...time.
Straight Talk Like a Rock
Is John McCain's new website a campaign site or a Chevy advert? I couldn't stop looking for the new McCain Two-Ton Pick-Up with fine leather exterior.
Meanwhile, August is thinking less truck advertising and more fascist zombie robot invasion: "I think I just shit myself. OBEY MCCAIN OR WE WILL FUCKING KILL YOU GRAAAAAH DOOM DOOM DOOM."
In any case, it's a curious choice.
Not only is color pretty, but its judicious use can be an effective way to avoid inadvertently associating your prospective leadership with the devolution of America into a grim, totalitarian state.
Support the Troops
Life in Building 18 is the bleakest homecoming for men and women whose government promised them good care in return for their sacrifices.And that's only the beginning of the abject horror wounded veterans are facing during life as "outpatients" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, some of whom "have been stuck there for as long as two years." Black mold invades the walls. Veterans aren't given the most basic help they need, including assistance finding their rooms. People go missing and no one knows what happened to them. Forms are lost, and lost again, and again. "The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide. Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment." Veterans are required to prove who they are and that they fought in the war. It just goes on and on and on.
One case manager was so disgusted, she bought roach bombs for the rooms. Mouse traps are handed out. It doesn't help that soldiers there subsist on carry-out food because the hospital cafeteria is such a hike on cold nights. They make do with microwaves and hot plates.
Army officials say they "started an aggressive campaign to deal with the mice infestation" last October and that the problem is now at a "manageable level." They also say they will "review all outstanding work orders" in the next 30 days.
Soldiers discharged from the psychiatric ward are often assigned to Building 18. Buses and ambulances blare all night. While injured soldiers pull guard duty in the foyer, a broken garage door allows unmonitored entry from the rear. Struggling with schizophrenia, PTSD, paranoid delusional disorder and traumatic brain injury, soldiers feel especially vulnerable in that setting, just outside the post gates, on a street where drug dealers work the corner at night.
"I've been close to mortars. I've held my own pretty good," said Spec. George Romero, 25, who came back from Iraq with a psychological disorder. "But here . . . I think it has affected my ability to get over it . . . dealing with potential threats every day."
…"I hate it," said Romero, who stays in his room all day. "There are cockroaches. The elevator doesn't work. The garage door doesn't work. Sometimes there's no heat, no water. . . . I told my platoon sergeant I want to leave. I told the town hall meeting. I talked to the doctors and medical staff. They just said you kind of got to get used to the outside world. . . . My platoon sergeant said, 'Suck it up!' "
By the end of the article, I felt nauseous and furious. Jill's spot-on when she says, "when our troops are wounded, they come home and are put into a facility that is more like the weird hospital scenes in the film Jacob's Ladder than like the kind of state-of-the-art recuperative facility these young men and women deserve." It truly does sound like an inescapable nightmare—a place I wouldn't want to convalesce after a paper cut received at an office job, and a place I can't even fucking imagine being sent to to recover from wounds acquired during a goddamned war.
Why aren't we taking better care of these men and women?
Honestly, this should rightly be regarded as yet another planning failure. The architects of this war thought it was going to be a cakewalk; they didn't in their wildest dreams consider the war would last this long, and thusly failed utterly to prepare contingency plans, as has been acknowledged even by the administration. The military healthcare system isn't designed to manage a constant influx of wounded soldiers, and I would bet that not a modicum of thought was given to readying it for that possibility. The war was going to last six weeks, remember? But instead, the war became "a long hard slog," as Donald Rumsfeld described it in November 2003, and now "Three times a week, school buses painted white and fitted with stretchers and blackened windows stream down Georgia Avenue. Sirens blaring, they deliver soldiers groggy from a pain-relief cocktail at the end of their long trip from Iraq via Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Andrews Air Force Base." The Pentagon numbers the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan at 23,000, as of January.
Our wounded veterans, 96% of whom received their injuries after "Mission Accomplished," were first casualties of the utter lack of competent post-war planning for the war theater, and are now casualties of the utter lack of competent post-war planning at home. They're pratically stacked on top of each other in a rotting building, all but abandoned to circumstances unfit for a dog, no less a veteran.
Soldiers, family members, volunteers and caregivers who have tried to fix the system say each mishap seems trivial by itself, but the cumulative effect wears down the spirits of the wounded and can stall their recovery.Of course it does. I can't begin to comprehend the despair and frustration. And again I wonder why it is that "soldiers, family members, volunteers and caregivers" are trying to "fix the system," when the system should have been prepared to care for a significant number of wounded soldiers when we decided to go to not one, but two wars.
"It creates resentment and disenfranchisement," said Joe Wilson, a clinical social worker at Walter Reed. "These soldiers will withdraw and stay in their rooms. They will actively avoid the very treatment and services that are meant to be helpful."
Danny Soto, a national service officer for Disabled American Veterans who helps dozens of wounded service members each week at Walter Reed, said soldiers "get awesome medical care and their lives are being saved," but, "Then they get into the administrative part of it and they are like, 'You saved me for what?' The soldiers feel like they are not getting proper respect. This leads to anger."
As usual, perhaps the worst part about this is the sickening propaganda for which parts of Walter Reed are used, while Building 18 and its occupants are hidden away from view like the flag-draped caskets of their brothers and sisters. Who, exactly, is helped by celebrating wounded veterans as heroes in photo-ops if they're then treated like shit for the next two years of their lives? It ain't the veterans; that's for sure.
This world is invisible to outsiders. Walter Reed occasionally showcases the heroism of these wounded soldiers and emphasizes that all is well under the circumstances. President Bush, former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and members of Congress have promised the best care during their regular visits to the hospital's spit-polished amputee unit, Ward 57.Big talk.
"We owe them all we can give them," Bush said during his last visit, a few days before Christmas. "Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service."
What we owed them was preparation for this eventuality, so that the only conceivable solution to this madness would not be the Sisyphusian task of pulling order from chaos mid-crisis.
Problem is, that ship has sailed.
Quote of the Day
"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from." — Hillary Clinton, speaking to an audience in Dover, New Hampshire, about her 2002 vote for the Iraq War.
The Virtual Bar Is Open
TFIF, Shakers.
It's been another damn long week.
What's your poison?
[Anyone who picks a bar fight will be banned.]
