Obama Could Issue an Executive Order to End the Wars Tomorrow (Yes, It's That Simple)

By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet. Posted January 29, 2009.

Experts also agree that little to nothing is ever obtained from torture, no matter how many episodes of Fox's "24" series Bush administration officials watched.

We support the United Nation's Special Torture Rapporteur's recommendation that former President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld be pursued for war crimes, especially their orders to torture humans in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

We also support the formation of a "truth and reconciliation commission" empowered to determine the facts about domestic spying, torture and the suspension of habeas corpus during the past seven years. Our veterans should play a special role with this commission … set the record straight that former President George W. Bush lied to start the Iraq war and that our nation must provide for the service members and veterans harmed by Bush's actions.

While we must remember the past so we avoid repeating it, with the election of President Obama, we are focusing on how to move forward and repair VA and honor our nation's obligations to our veterans, national security and civil liberties.

NE: Let's start with a very recent development. In November, the Research Advisory Committee issued a report declaring Gulf War illness to be a "real" illness caused by toxins that troops were exposed to in the 1991 Gulf War. Why did it take 18 years for this clarification? To what extent was the case for causality made earlier? It seems to me compelling evidence was available as early as 1998.

PS: The evidence that the illnesses among Gulf War veterans were related to toxic exposures was compelling in March 1991, when veterans first reported symptoms -- symptoms ignored by the military. That's when the military cover-up of Gulf War illnesses began. One of the first documents produced by the military after the Gulf War cease-fire in 1991 said that depleted uranium should be hyped as successful, lest it be removed from the arsenal because the dust from it is so toxic.

We have made so much progress thanks to the heroic work of Jim Binns, the chairman of the Research Advisory Committee, Lea Steele, the scientific advisor for the committee, Gulf War veterans Steve Robinson and Steve Smithson, and all of the other outstanding individuals on the RAC. They should all be commended for fighting for science, as well as fighting against the small handful of career bureaucrats at VA who blocked research, health care and benefits for the estimated 210,000 Gulf War veterans who remain ill after deploying to Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1990 and 1991.

There are two reasons a few malicious VA employees fought against our veterans. The first reason is the exorbitant cost to taxpayers who were told the Gulf War was nearly free. If DoD and VA had admitted Gulf War illnesses were real back in 1991, the costs for providing health care and disability benefits to hundreds of thousands of veterans for several decades would have easily cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

Second, there is the loss of face. If DoD and VA confirmed the U.S. government was responsible for some of the toxic exposures, such as pesticides and depleted uranium, then that would tarnish the carefully crafted government propaganda machine message that erroneously declared the Gulf War was a clean and low-casualty conflict.

Now that the facts are in, we know that the Gulf War was very expensive, very dirty and resulted in hundreds of thousands of long-term casualties in the form of disabled veterans exposed to dozens of toxins. As of February 2008, out of 700,000 Gulf War veterans, nearly 290,000 had filed disability claims against VA, and nearly 250,000 had sought health care from VA. Congress never asked for, and VA never provided, a cost for medical care and benefits for our Gulf War veterans.

Unfortunately, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are worse in terms of costs and lost reputation. We expect the rate of claims and health care demand among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans to be significantly higher than Gulf War veterans due to prolonged combat, longer deployments, repeat deployments, the availability of five years of free VA health care, and a domestic economy going down fast because of Bush's Iraq war fiasco.

NE: Over the years, the Institute of Medicine, at the request of the VA, has produced many reports on Gulf War illness. They all claimed the relationship between wartime toxins and the symptoms of the Gulf War veterans was inconclusive. The RAC called their research "skewed" and "unscientific." How did that happen? Are there particular people responsible in the VA, DoD or other halls of government? Or is it just systemic neglect and incompetence? Or both?

PS: The RAC is correct. VA, IOM and DoD staff are more than just negligent and incompetent. A few staff remain malicious toward our veterans -- they continue blocking scientific inquiry into toxic exposures and block health care for ill veterans and block compensation benefits for disabled veterans.

There are two reasons why much of the research by VA and DoD was skewed and unscientific. First, the VA research was focused primarily on stress instead of serious and significant toxic exposures among hundreds of thousands of troops in the Saudi, Kuwaiti and Iraqi deserts. As one discredited Army general confessed, the military never thought toxic exposures caused by the U.S. were responsible for the illnesses among so many.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, vietnam, 9/11, torture, afghanistan, robert gates, barack obama, blackwater, mercenaries, george w. bush, military contractors, ptsd, walter reed, department of defense, depleted uranium, gulf war, jeremy scahill, veterans affairs, gulf war syndrome, paul sullivan, veterans for common sense, bonus army, post-traumatic stress dis, penatgon, phil sheldon

Nora Eisenberg is the author of the novels The War at Home, a Washington Post Rave of the Year 2002, and Just the Way You Want Me, awarded the 2004 Gold Prize for Fiction from ForeWord Magazine, the weekly of independent publishing. Her new novel, issued this month by Curbstone Press, is about troops returning home from the 1991 Gulf War, and the unexpected price of war for young victors and their families.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from World! Sign up now »