First They Came for the VA Nurses

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein at 1:28 PM on February 10, 2006.

"This is how it starts people," writes Kos diarist Maccabee. He's talking about Laura Berg, a VA nurse who investigated for sedition after she wrote this letter to the editor of the Albuquerque Alibi:

“I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” it began. “The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!” She mentioned that she was “a VA nurse” working with returning vets. “The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.

“Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence,” she wrote. “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.

Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.” [The Progressive]

Berg's supervisors seized her computer and informed her that she was being investigated for sedition. Her file may also have been passed on to the FBI.

[Kos]

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.