Congress: "Screw the troops!"

[phantom power]

It's hard to imagine a story that illustrates more clearly than this one that "support the troops" really means "support the lawmakers who send other people's kids off to get mangled in their misguided wars of choice."

USA Today:

Congress appears ready to slash funding for the research and treatment of brain injuries caused by bomb blasts, an injury that military scientists describe as a signature wound of the Iraq war.

House and Senate versions of the 2007 Defense appropriation bill contain $7 million for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center -- half of what the center received last fiscal year.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-08-brain-center_x.htm

And it's not just vets who suffer from TBIs -- the USA Today article cited research by the Brain Injury Center showing that 10 percent of all Iraq vets and 20 percent of front-line troops -- one in five -- suffer concussions during combat tours. Their preliminary research shows "Many experience headaches, disturbed sleep, memory loss and behavior issues after coming home…"

(...)

But what they're really frightened of is the public getting a sense of how many soldiers come back from these "low-casualty" wars with debilitating injuries that they'll carry for life. In the first Gulf War, there were 147 U.S. combat deaths. But less than a decade later, in 2000, 325,000 Gulf war vets were receiving disability payments -- 56 percent of those that served. Nobody knows whether that's from depleted uranium or any of a dozen other toxic elements on the modern battlefield, but these "clean" wars have a huge cost for those that fight them.

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200634#2947

[Monkeyman]

1. Commentary by Joe Galloway in McClatchy Newspapers

Shame on Congress for mistreatment of military great read dam can't find link

[acmejack]

2. Selling our military down the river

The last guy in the first of those eight-hour London airport security lines searching for mouthwash and hair gel bombs hadn't even gotten close to the point of throwing away everything but his passport and clothing when Republican congressional campaigners were forming a conga line to celebrate a splendid opportunity.

A splendid opportunity to scare the wits out of the American public one more time and, they hope, seize a November victory from the ashes of a well-deserved defeat. They were ready to thank God, the devil or Osama bin Laden for the chance to paint the Democrats as weak on national security and hang onto absolute control of the public trough for two more years.

If they get away with it again, there's proof that you can fool all the people most of the time.

The happy members of Congress weren't even around when the news arrived. They had left a lot of important business -- including the new defense budget to continue financing the unnecessary war in Iraq and the forgotten war in Afghanistan -- undone while they went home to campaign for a month or so.

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/15319125.htm