Are National Reporters Really Stupid, Lazy or Just Lying?

Deadly Silence
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
February 14, 2015

I remember Valentines Day and looking at the 4 day old engagement ring on my finger. That was 31 years ago. My husband couldn't wait and asked me to marry him on the 10th. Ever since then what war does to the people we send has been my vocation.

One of the other gifts he gave me over the years was a ruby ring in the shape of a heart. After all these years the prongs had worn down on both rings, so I took them to be fixed. I was told it would be an easy fix and wouldn't take long.

When I went to pick them up, I noticed the ruby had a mark on it. Considering I never take it off and it wasn't exactly clean, after they cleaned it, I knew something was wrong. I asked the jeweler about it and he said the heart was bruised.

As I drove home I thought about how the jeweler said it was a strong stone but it had been abused and was only showing signs of how it was treated. "A bruised heart" kept popping into my head. 

There is a very long history of bruised hearts in this country. As the years go by more and more are showing signs of how they were treated but no one is telling the whole story of how they ended up that way.

Everyday my email box is full of glowing reports about the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention Act being a "good first step" and how it is vital to reducing suicides.

On the local level, reporters take what the national news reporters say as the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth. They turn around and spread false statements instead of reporting that this bill was stepping backwards to what was already done and failed!
This is a report out of Iowa KWWL News.
Local veterans react to suicide prevention act

Jesse McCunniff has been a soldier in the Iowa National Guard for nearly two decades.

He's been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

He's seen the toll PTSD has taken on his fellow soldiers, including some of who've taken their own lives.

"We've had some in our battalion and some I've served with, real tragic, have ended their own life. It's affected everyone in the unit past or present. It's really a tough time to go through and it lasts for a long time after," said McCunniff.

He says a suicide prevention act signed Thursday is a good first step.
That's also how President Obama characterizes it.

The great national reporters have vanished. The scandal revolving around Brian Williams is just part of the story. For years veterans have been telling a totally different story about Williams but the press wasn't interested in what they had to say about him or what really happened. Stars and Stripes reporters were the first to pay attention and now we are getting a better idea of what they wanted us to hear.

Unfortunately that fine reporting didn't carry onto the truth behind military suicides. Statements about the Clay Hunt bill make it seem as if nothing had been done before the IAVA pushed for the passage of the bill that Senator Colburn called "redundant"

Coburn argued before the Senate late Monday that "almost everything that's in this bill has already been authorized and approved with the $10 billion [Veterans Choice Act] that we sent to the VA."

Actually Colburn was being uncharacteristically kind. This has been going on to the tune of billions a year but suicides went up afterwards and they just repeated the same old bullshit instead of doing something that wasn't simply deadly!

"From that moment, we wanted to find way to honor his memory and not lose any more friends," said Paul Rieckhoff, head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group Hunt had worked with extensively after his return to the states.

Rieckhoff said Thursday's signing was a "bittersweet" moment in a journey that he described as "incredibly challenging." The group's members held hundreds of events across the country last year, from NASCAR rallies to visits with lawmakers.

"I think we're finally seeing a tone change we needed to see a decade ago," he said, explaining that attitudes about combats veterans and dealing with their mental health finally seem to be changing.

But Stars and Stripes didn't to that report. They simply posted what the Houston Chronicle reported, "Signing of Clay Hunt act ends long, painful journey for mother and father."

What we know is a totally different story. We know about all the other bills that have come out and all the abuses that came with all the "reform" and first steps to reduce suicides. We know these "efforts" started after WWI and began in the proper step down the ladder.

They began within the military when a psychiatrist went to be with the troops and study them. It was carried on into WWII when psychiatric evacuations went up 300% from WWI and then into the Korean War when they tried something new. They sent clinicians to remove soldiers in psychological distress, removed them from combat, treated them and then sent them back to duty. Psychological evacations went down to 3%. Then we knew what they did during Vietnam with their nasty little trick of 12 month deployments so that by the time they knew they had problems, they were already on their magical honeymoon readjustment back to civilian life when everything was brewing but they were too busy "adapting" to notice the war came home with them.

We also know that for OEF and OIF veterans these "first steps" started in the military with the theory of building resilient soldiers with Battlemind and Comprehensive Soldier Fitness in 2009 even though it was already predicted to add to the numbers of dead. Sam Stein just reported what he was told for the Huffington Post. He repeated what he heard in a speech.

U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey laid out the virtues of the newly formed initiative, which he called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.

"We have been looking very hard at ways to develop coping skills and resilience in soldiers, and we will be coming out in July with a new program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness," said Casey. "And what we will attempt to do is raise mental fitness to the same level that we now give to physical fitness. Because it is scientifically proven, you can build resilience."

There were a lot of speeches that should have inspired a lot of questions, follow-up and then investigations.

MAY 1, 2008
Defense Department Health Issues
Defense Department officials spoke to reporters and answered questions about mental health programs for personnel exposed to combat and recent calls by the Defense Secretary Gates for soldiers to use the program.

Transcript

WITH 56 NEW POSITIONS ADDED SINCE JANUARY OF 2003 -- SEVEN -- 2007. 30 ARE ON BOARD AND 19 OTHERS ARE SELECTED AND WE ARE HIT RECRUITING FOR THE OTHER SEVEN POSITIONS. THIS IS AN INCREASE OF 34% OVER THE STAFF PRIOR TO JANUARY OF 2007. WE HAVE ALSO DEPLOYED SOME OF OUR MENTAL HEALTH PROVIDERS TO INSTALLATIONS EXPERIENCING INCREASED DEMANDS FOR THOSE SERVICES AS UNITS RETURN FROM DEPLOYMENT TO OIF AND OEF. OUTPATIENT MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES ARE CRITICAL CARE AND A CRITICAL PART OF SUPPORT FOR WARRIORS IN TRANSITION.

MANY WARRIORS ASSIGNED TO WALTER REED'S TRANSITION UNIT RECEIVED TREATMENT FOR PTSD AND BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SYSTEM -- SYMPTOMS ASSOCIATED WITH TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY. AS COMMANDER OF THE WALTER REED HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, I AM PROUD OF THE SOLDIERS WHO PROVIDE ALL ASPECTS OF HEALTH CARE TO ALL THOSE ENTRUSTED TO OUR CARE AND EQUALLY PROUD OF THOSE WHO HAVE DEPLOYED AND RECOGNIZE THE NEED AND SAW OUT BELOW HEALTH TREATMENT AS PART OF THEIR HEALING.

WE WOULD WELCOME ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS.

PEOPLE WILL STILL BE SKEPTICAL

This is the same women denying reports of soldiers in Warrior Transition Units being abused. But then someone else decided to tell the truth and admit it was happening.

Army official admits Bliss Warrior soldiers were mistreated

Col. Chris Toner, the head of the Army's Transitional Command, last week at a congressional hearing in Washington.

Toner replied: "There were challenges at Fort Bliss, beyond a shadow of a doubt." According to reports, some warrior transition unit soldiers were called "slackers" and told to "man-up and move on."

"Was it leadership, was it processes, was it procedures, a lack there of?" O'Rourke inquired.

"All of the above," Toner responded. "We're talking about a period of time from 2009 to 2013. We had multiple issues over that time, everything from cadre members that did not have the right approach to the soldiers and the family members to failure to implement procedures and policies that created some issues in the program down there."

Patricia D. Horoho Commander Walter Reed Health Care System

Major General Horoho’s most recent assignment as Commander of Walter Reed Health Care Systems began 24 May 2007.

In February of 2007, the Washington Post released the report on the Walter Reed scandal.

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility
By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.
read more here

That reporting was so good that it earned both reporters a Pulitzer

For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper through the use of its journalistic resources which, as well as reporting, may include editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics and online material, a gold medal.

Awarded to The Washington Post for the work of Dana Priest, Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille in exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.

We read all these reports but we don't forget what we read last year, or the year before that or decades before that. So now, full circle. Spin, spin and more spin and the reporters let them just get away with it. So where have all the good national reporters gone? Why haven't they been on suicide watch as if these lives actually mattered enough?