98-0 Senate vote approves another $63 billion for Iraq War 9/24/2006 1:58:17 PM
September 8, 2006- by Associated Press
email commentary By Karl W.B.Schwarz The Senate agreed to spend an additional $63 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as lawmakers on Thursday passed a massive bill that funds the Pentagon. The bill sailed through by a vote of 98-0 after senators added money to help track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and fight the opium trade in Afghanistan that is helping fuel the Taliban's resurgence. The overwhelming support for the overall bill and the money to support U.S. troops in harm's way came despite increasing criticism by Democrats of the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq. The bill now totals $469.7 billion. It grew by more than $16 billion during a debate that began in July before it was suspended during lawmakers' four-week August recess. By a 96-0 vote, senators approved $200 million to revive a CIA unit dedicated to hunting down bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders. News accounts in July said a CIA unit dedicated to capturing bin Laden had been disbanded.
"What does it say to violent Jihadists that a terrorist mastermind remains alive and well five years after killing 3,000 Americans?" said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. "Our bill tells the terrorists that protecting our nation is the first priority - and that we are going to deliver to bin Laden the justice that a mass murderer deserves," said Conrad, who sponsored the legislation with Sen. Bryon Dorgan, D-N.D.
Intelligence officials have said the realignment of CIA efforts on al-Qaida reflects a view that the terrorist group is not as hierarchical as it used to be, as well as a concern about al-Qaida-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said the amendment was unnecessary because the overall defense measure has plenty of money to pursue al-Qaida's leaders. Senators also voted 51-45 in support of an amendment by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to provide $700 million for Pentagon efforts to combat the opium trade in Afghanistan. The Defense Department bill originally contained $50 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some $13 billion was added last month to pay to replace Army and Marine Corps equipment lost or worn out in harsh conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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You DNC types getting the hint? You have been sold out and you do not matter. DNC IS NOT THE ANTI-WAR PARTY. Will Durst is right, DNC is like trying to nail Jello to a tree or trying to staple smoke. The conservatives on the RNC side have been sold out too and it was not for any Greater Good. It was just sleaze and greed. So, you DNC folks don’t feel unique, all of us were sold out. Note the part of that article that the CIA unit had been disbanded and they were looking for Osama bin Laden? Get a clue folks; the GWOT is a total fraud. They fund $700 million for one part of the US government to go chase another part of the US government and catch nobody; Keystone Kops, at al Washington, DC style. One of the ways that the CIA keeps its black budget black is they finance it through illegal drugs and have since the Vietnam War. Wake up folks, the World’s Largest Illegal Drug Pusher is Uncle Sam and the War on Drugs is to suppress competition. It has nothing to do with protecting your children and grandchildren from drug pushers. It is all smoke and mirrors, it is all a fraud, it is time to close down the C-rated Broadway fiction. It is a really bad show with pathetic actors and the script insults the intelligence of amoeba. God only knows why so many Amerikuns fall for it. These folks would not make the first cut on the faux thriller American Survivor. I am beginning to wonder how many times Americans have to be told “there is a problem” before they accept the fact that there is a problem! It is like, knock-knock, wake up, HELLO! The damned house is on fire!
Note the Pentagon assertion that DU is safe. Every document prepared by SAIC said otherwise. Every Army Regulation, including 700-48, says otherwise. DU merely means that the remains are not suitable for nuclear power or nuclear weapons. The residual is still hot and deadly. It is still radioactive and it is still a deadly toxic heavy metal. Those are the facts scientific, medical and otherwise. Simply put, they are lying. To do otherwise means they have to admit to criminal conduct and massive exposures to liability due to willful negligence.
Study: No such thing as Gulf War syndrome. Gulf War syndrome does not exist, a study sponsored by the Veterans Administration finds, further complicating a long-running dispute over special disability benefits. "U.S. and foreign veterans of the Gulf War do suffer from an array of very real problems, according to the Veterans Administration-sponsored report released Tuesday," the Associated Press reports. "Yet there is no one complex of symptoms to suggest those veterans, nearly 30 percent of all those who served, suffered or still suffer from a single identifiable syndrome."
You can read the Institute of Medicine's full 310-page study here, and you can download a 25-page executive summary (PDF). A press release also touts a benefit from the study, saying it "differs from the previous work of IOM in that it summarizes in one place the current status of health effects in veterans deployed to the Persian Gulf irrespective of exposure information."
Maybe for our edification they will explain why well over half of the veterans of Desert Storm are on full or majority disability and are no longer productive citizens due to the deterioration of their health. Furthermore, they can explain why the Iraqi Freedom soldiers are ill, some have died of aggressive cancers, and others facing a wide range of health issues after they served in Iraq. Better yet, maybe they can explain why they refuse to do any DU testing whatsoever and make a medical record of that, or why doctors and nurses at Landstuhl were ordered to take blood, freeze it and they would get back to those soldiers years from now that had tested positive for DU.
I cannot wait to hear their next utterance of a syllable. It is all about avoidance of liability folks. They knew going in for Desert Storm, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq the second time that DU was going to harm our own soldiers. Every expert in the field told them it would and they did it any way for they do not care. They come home sick and dying and the government ignores them, jerks them and their families around. Why? There is big money to be handed out for defense expenditures, not in honoring the word of the US government to the veterans. They even offer blanket immunity to defense contractors that did nothing to protect their employees from DU, knowing all along that it was going to kill many people and ruin their health. Double-speak, babble speak, lame excuses, and inept job performance. It is time for pink-slips over on Capitol Hill and down through about 10 tiers of many federal government agencies. Now the RNC has to have the veteran vote to stay in power. Boo! The DNC is scrambling to get the veteran vote too. Boo! Every approval rating poll says these people are inept and should be fired, so out comes the federal dollars to buy votes.
The Courts jerking around or U.S. soldiers and veterans, after exposing them to toxic waste and DU to ruin their health. Veterans exposed to radiation lose in court. Decision 'closes the door' to those seeking redress for illnesses after atomic blast, biological, chemical agents fallout.
WASHINGTON Contra Costa Times Aug 26 - Radiation exposure took Alice Broudy's husband a generation ago. This week, a court ruling sliced away at her bid for redress. In a quiet ruling that nonetheless resonates nationwide, a federal appellate court rejected efforts by Broudy and others seeking claims on behalf of "atomic veterans." The same court simultaneously rejected bids by other veterans exposed to biological and chemical agents. Taken together, the dual rulings by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will likely impede many veterans hoping for compensation. At the very least, it will complicate future claims. "It's a significant ruling," Washington-based attorney David Cynamon, who represented veterans in both cases, said Friday. "Unfortunately, it's a significantly bad ruling."
A Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman couldn't be reached to comment.
Broudy, a resident of California's Orange County, has long been seeking full compensation for the death of her husband, a Marine major who was repeatedly exposed to radiation. She has company. George Woodward, who lives north of Wichita, Kan., in the town of Miltonvale, was exposed to radiation during a 1955 test blast. Kathy Jacobovitch, a resident of Vashon Island, Wash., lost her father through exposure to contaminated ships in Puget Sound. Ernest Kirchmann, a 62-year-old Navy veteran who lives south of Minneapolis in tiny West Concord, who has filed a separate lawsuit, was exposed during a 1964 nuclear submarine accident. "It isn't just my personal case," Broudy said Friday. "It's the entire veterans community. It makes me so angry."
Broudy married her husband, Charles, in 1948. Three years earlier, he'd walked the war-poisoned streets of Nagasaki. Within a decade, he was facing radiation in the Nevada desert. He died of lymphatic cancer in 1977. Though she has since received partial compensation, Broudy has been confronting the federal government for more. She has now lost three separate lawsuits. "This closes the door," Cynamon said of the latest appellate court ruling, which was issued Wednesday. "It will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for individuals who are victimized by government cover-ups." All told, an estimated 220,000 U.S. soldiers were allegedly exposed to radiation in the 1940s and 1950s. Some, such as William Yurdyga of Sacramento claimed in an earlier lawsuit that they were exposed following the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic blast. Others claimed exposure during Cold War testing.
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The three-member appellate panel wasn't ruling on whether the atomic veterans deserve compensation. A 1988 law provides that. To succeed, though, veterans must prove they were present at a radioactive site and that they contracted a radiation-related illness or were exposed to a cancer-causing radiation level. That will of course be the precedent they use, along with the Feres Doctrine handed down by the US Supreme Court, to jerk around all veterans exposed to Depleted Uranium. What I am waiting to see are US citizen cases, non-military related, for persons who have been exposed and their health ruined and the Feres Doctrine only applies to defense personnel. That is not going to be that hard to document and one of the reasons they keep rolling logs at us. We will document it and they know me well enough to know I will take action.
It is time for Americans to ask the question and ponder the reality of a government that has to work so hard to hide its own sleaze. Exactly what type of democracy and freedom is that? It is not the America I grew up in. I refuse to follow these people across the street, much less into the future.
One of our DU treatment affiliates went to Bahrain, nowhere close to Iraq, and about 82% of those they tested were DU positive. Oooops, another GWOT buddy bit in the arse.
Bush trying to Buy the Vote of US soldiers and veterans
Retroactive Disability Payments Coming. According to Defense Department and Veterans' Affairs (VA) sources, some disabled retirees due retroactive pay could start to see their payments in mid-October if all goes as planned. A small number may see payments before that; however, VA officials caution that, if any unexpected glitches crop up, the payments will be delayed until the second half of January. That's because they'll have their hands full at the end of the year reprogramming and implementing new pay rates for 2007. Over 100,000 retirees now drawing either Combat-Related Special Compensation (CRSC) or Concurrent Retirement and Disability Pay (CRDP) ultimately will receive back payments, and that number is growing daily with new awards. Because of the complexity of calculating who is due how much (individual circumstances vary widely, and many cases require manual review), the majority of the payments will likely be phased in from January through next summer.
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Why is retroactive pay due? While the VA disability award letter usually establishes a retroactive effective date, the VA doesn't initially make retroactive payments for retirees with less than a 100% disability rating. That's because there's usually at least some offset required for retired pay already received. If the VA paid all retroactive awards immediately, it would cause major headaches for many disabled retirees, who would then have to pay back large amounts of their military retired pay. Only if and when a disabled retiree is awarded CRDP or CRSC can the VA find out whether back disability pay is due - but it needs a ton of data from the Defense Department to figure out how much. On the other hand, retirees who experience changes in their disability awards may also be due retroactive CRSC/CRDP payments from the Defense Department. The bottom line is that the new and complicated CRSC and CRDP programs have created major administrative and budgetary headaches for Pentagon and VA administrators. Their first priority has been to get the pays started while minimizing confusion or aggravation for disabled retirees. Now, they've invested months of combined effort to change their policies, systems, and budgets to finish the hard part - figuring out who is due how much in retroactive payments. Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) sources say the affected retirees will receive specific details at the time their retroactive payment is made. DFAS expects to publish a detailed news release later this month.
Retroactive means they have not been doing what the US government committed to do and now they are rushing to get it done in time for the elections. How magnanimous of Bush and Congress to get around to this years later and just before a crucial election. It is just pure sleaze and it is also a clear sign of the depth of desperation. There are votes to be bought and desperate people clinging on to power and wanting you to believe all of their lies. BOO! Look the other way, go back to shopping or grazing. Do you think they care about our soldiers? Don’t for it is just a photo op. I have never said this publicly, but have privately for a long time. What do those yellow ribbons really mean? Someone who failed to question the insanity of our leaders and got all hung up on emotion rather than rationality. People sent off to die for a lie and someone forgot to ask if there was any real threat worth being maimed for or coming home in a casket. The threat is not on the other side of the world, the threat is right here at home. Those yellow ribbons say to me that we have a problem right here at home. I have said this many times publicly – the lowest thing in the world is a leader that will send people to die or be maimed for a lie. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, the Neocons and Congress are all guilty of that. I call it sleazy and treasonous, you call it whatever you wish. That is why I say VOTE AMERICAN.
We the People need to start cleaning this mess up because the DC workers refuse to do it. Solution, vote for America, not them. Fire them for cause.
