Home of the Brave

Remember when you could sing “the land of the free and the home of the brave” with pride? More than 43,000 veterans declared “medically unfit” for combat by doctors have been sent back to Afghanistan or Iraq. An additional 58,000 soldiers have been caught in stop-loss. According to Psychiatric News, 117 members of the Army killed themselves in 2007; 934 unsuccessfully attempted suicide. Those who had served at least once in Iraq or Afghanistan accounted for 61 percent of fatalities and 33 percent of attempts. Forty-four percent of those who committed suicide and 55% of those who attempted it had at least one diagnosed mental disorder, mainly mood or anxiety disorders, or substance abuse. What about those statistics makes you proud?

That’s not the whole story. Editor & Publisher has been examining the “noncombat” deaths in Iraq, “often suicides, which usually come to light only due to the diligence of local newspapers.” The parents of a soldier in Texas were told that their daughter had died of “friendly fire.” Only after the mother became suspicious were they told their daughter had been murdered. It required six months and the help of a congressman to get the 1200-page report that revealed that their daughter had been abused several times by the soldier who killed her and the Army had done little to protect her.

A Washington Times/ABC News investigation revealed that “mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects.” It took the VA three months to inform patients of the mental side effects. The Boston Globe reported that hundreds of U.S. soldiers assigned to guard a chemical plant in Iraq were made ill by exposure to a highly toxic chemical after their KBR supervisors told them the chemical was a “mild irritant.” “These soldiers were bleeding from the nose, spitting blood," said Danny Langford, an equipment technician from Texas brought to work at the Qarmat Ali Water treatment plant in 2003. 

 
What kind of people treat so dishonorably those who volunteer to stand between them and a vague enemy the government tells them they have to fear? And still they faithfully serve. Despite the millions who “support” the war and/or the troops by buying lapel flags and yellow ribbons there is no one to replace them.

There is reason to fear because despite so many warnings of an impending attack that intelligence agencies complained of “information fatigue” the Bush administration was unable to defend the country from nineteen hijackers for an hour and a half. The incompetence of the Bush administration that has made the world more dangerous and America less safe is well known; nevertheless, the brave soldier on. Those who served in World War Two, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and Bush’s war on Iraq have not quailed. They will still honor their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America. 

Four Supreme Court justices won’t. They profess to be so terrified by the administration’s inability to protect America that they agree with George Bush that the Constitution must be tossed in the trash. Justice Scalia, who has always had a problem determining fact from fiction, included a lie in the minority opinion, stating that “at least 30 of those prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.” As law professors at Seton Hall and others have stated, “not a single detainee was released by a court.” They were released by the political appointees of George W. Bush, sometimes over the objection of the military. “According to the Department of Defense’s published and unpublished data and reports, not a single released Guantánamo detainee has ever attacked any Americans.” Congressional hearings determined that the recidivism of 30 prisoners was not true two weeks before Justice Scalia wrote his opinion based on that lie.

Does that sound like “the land of the free and the home of the brave” to you?