Great injustices done to fallen veterans

Dover Air Force Base is where the remains of most of our fallen service members come home. We have all seen the flag-draped caskets at Dover. We have seen the president travel to Dover to pay his respects to the fallen on behalf of all Americans. We have seen the precision and solemnity of the ceremonies at Dover designed to honor those who have perished to defend our freedom.

But we have not seen what has happened to the remains of the fallen as they have been processed at the Dover Mortuary. Be grateful you have not seen it.

At the heart of this scandal are the revelations that body parts of the fallen have been lost, that body parts have been dumped in landfills, and that a fused arm bone of a Marine was sawed off so that he could fit in his dress uniform and his casket.

These practices came to light through the efforts of whistle-blowers. Their reward was that the Air Force fired them in 2010. Fortunately, the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that handles whistle-blower complaints, began its own investigation of this. What it found was that, rather than admitting and correcting the problems, the Air Force attempted to cover them up and retaliate against the whistle-blowers.

But wait, there's more. The final resting place for many of those processed at Dover is either a VA cemetery or Arlington National Cemetery. The VA has 131 cemeteries with 3.1 million graves. Thus far, incorrectly marked or unmarked graves have been discovered in California, Texas, Ohio, New Mexico, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It has become clear that this incompetence dates back decades.of 4

At Arlington National Cemetery, it's worse — much worse. More than 330,000 are buried at Arlington. The problems of unmarked graves, wrongly marked graves and burial urns dumped in dirt piles date back to 1997 inspection reports. The remains of as many as 6,600 are now believed to be erroneously marked. Upward of $10 million has been spent to automate Arlington's antiquated paper record-keeping system. The automated system doesn't work, and the money was wasted.

The FBI has now joined Army agents investigating criminal practices at Arlington. In testimony before Congress, Arlington's former deputy superintendent took the Fifth. His boss, the former superintendent, testified that Arlington's problems were because it did not have enough money and staff. It's the bureaucrat's autonomic defense!

How about putting a sign on Arlington's front gate reading, "Please feel free to pay your respects at any grave. Your guess is as good as ours whether it contains the remains of your loved one."

The Fort Hood massacre

Nidal Hasan is the sole suspect in the shooting rampage Nov. 5, 2009, at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. Hasan is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.

Hasan is a Muslim whose parents came to America from Palestine. He joined the Army in college and graduated from Virginia Tech University in 1995. In 2003, he received his medical degree from the federal government's Uniformed University of the Health Sciences. He was trained in psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

During residency training, he gave a lecture titled, "The Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the United States Military." The lecture was not related to health or medicine and was jarring for many who heard it.

Hasan was known to express extremist views, which were brought to the attention of his superiors and the FBI. There can be little doubt that his behavior, his views respecting Islamic extremism and his email exchanges with Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam and senior leader of al-Qaida, were more than enough to warrant his discharge. of 4

In the spring of 2008, he was given poor evaluations and warned that he was doing substandard work. Meetings to discuss what to do about Hasan included the Walter Reed chief of psychiatry, the chairman of the psychiatry department of the medical school, two assistant chairs of that psychiatry department, and the director of the Walter Reed Psychiatric Residency Program.

But instead of being discharged, Hasan was promoted from captain to major in 2009.

And in July of 2009, he was transferred to Fort Hood. Four months later, the massacre occurred.

Hasan's trial will settle part of this nightmare. But it may not settle or even illuminate why he was transferred rather than discharged. It's vital that the truth of that be discovered. Because it's possible that he was transferred principally to "get him out of town."

What if his superiors, not wanting to cope with the real possibility of being hung out to dry by the military in a protracted discrimination complaint from Hasan, simply chose the cowardly course of making him somebody else's problem? If that's what happened, then in my book they are not just cowards who acquiesced to political correctness, they are accomplices to murder.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee's report on this preventable tragedy calls it a ticking time bomb. It concludes, "The Fort Hood massacre could have been prevented. Our investigation found specific and systemic failures in the Government's (DOD and FBI) handling of the Hasan case and raises additional concerns about what may be broader issues."

Prostitution of Secret Service

A Secret Service agent, who clearly had no electrical activity above his collar bone, gets into a hotel corridor shouting match over money with a prostitute with whom he has spent the night. The screaming match brings Caribe Hotel security and the Colombian police. They alert the American Embassy. The net effect was that all of the 20 Secret Service agents and military personnel involved were outed with their pants down.

Now, given the ubiquity of situational ethics and morality, I suppose many will say, "What's the big deal? Boys will be boys." But that skirts entirely the matter of the president's security. What if some of the women had been spies or linked to the Colombian drug cartel?

In addition, while Washington may try to convince us that this escapade in Cartagena is a unique event, I doubt it because we have learned that the motto for married men in the Secret Service is, "Wheels up, Rings off."

One aspect of this breach of security that cries out for further inquiry is the extent to which the White House and Capitol Hill, including the Republicans, have so quickly rallied around Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan. Such unanimity of support strikes me as odd and raises the question: Why?

I don't know why, but I do know how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover maintained his power base for almost 50 years. He abused his authority by compiling dossiers on the personal lives of virtually every politician in Washington. They all knew it and wouldn't cross him.

Conclusion

These problems are pervasive and pernicious. Even worse is the fact that practically no one in Washington will give voice to them. Is it any wonder the federal government doesn't serve the American people?

I have a close friend who is a retired Air Force colonel. He once told me, "Lee, it's what people do when no one is watching that counts." That's a high standard and the right standard. Washington's nowhere close.

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GOVERNMENT GONE WILD, PART I

There is abundant and long-standing evidence that vital parts of the national security and military apparatus of the federal government are out of control. The combination of interagency rivalry, bureaucratic incompetence, the collapse of command and control procedures, an obsession with political correctness, inadequate congressional oversight, and a citizenry that is predisposed to turn a blind eye to security matters accounts for this nightmare scenario. Let's call it "Government Gone Wild," and secrecy is its enabler.

The 9/11 attacks

Since 9/11, enough has emerged to warn us that we've got a real problem. This is not a question of where there's smoke, there may be fire. Instead it's where there's fire, there's fire.

And this is a problem that has little, if anything, to do with partisan Republican/Democratic politics. It's systemic. It's in the DNA and the culture of bureaucracies so vast and so insulated that they've come to believe they can get away with anything. It's what happens when no one minds the store, including the president of the United States or the Joint Chiefs. And it makes no difference whether the president's name is Obama or Bush.

America has been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than a decade, longer than any other war in the nation's history. The cost of these two wars has been reliably estimated to be at least $1.3 trillion. It's closer to $4 trillion when you add medical care for returning veterans and increased interest payments on the national debt attributable to these wars.

Democratic partisans give Barack Obama a pass on the Afghan War, while excoriating George W. Bush on Iraq. GOP partisans do just the opposite. But that aside, what is indisputable is that both wars were a direct consequence of the 9/11 attacks.

But what if the United States had thwarted the 9/11 attacks? The evidence suggests that was possible. What went wrong? The answer is plenty. And was it isolated, an aberration? The answer is no.

In June 2002, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote, "Because now I know that when the pressure is on, when lives are on the line, the CIA and the FBI can dig up intelligence to annihilate the enemy. The only problem is, their enemy is each other.

"As Mark Riebling, the author of ‘Wedge: The Secret War between the F.B.I. and C.I.A.,' has written, the division of labor into foreign and domestic intelligence was never workable, since spies cross borders."

And, of course, that's just what happened. In April 2002, Newsweek magazine reported on the al-Qaida summit in Malaysia in January 2000 to plot terrorist activities. The CIA tracked two suspected terrorists to that meeting and then stood idly by as the terrorists returned to the United States to complete the planning for the 9/11 attack. Newsweek called that "the most puzzling and devastating intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11."

The CIA tracked one of the operatives, Nawaf Alhazmi, from Malaysia to Los Angeles. It also knew that another terrorist, Khalid Almihdhar, had a multiple-entry visa that permitted him to enter the United States at will. What did the CIA do with this information? Nothing. It did not even notify the State Department or the Immigration Service so that the terrorists could have been stopped at the border.

And in June 2002, Time magazine's cover story was "How The FBI Blew The Case." The story recounts the 13-page letter from FBI agent Coleen Rowley to FBI Director Bob Mueller that condemns the FBI for failing to act on requests from her office in Minneapolis to obtain a warrant to search the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, an al-Qaida agent subsequently convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the United States as a part of the 9/11 attack. The Time article also highlighted complaints from FBI special agents in Phoenix who were unsuccessful in getting their superiors in Washington to focus on suspected Islamic terrorists who were taking flight training lesson in Phoenix.

We know what happened on 9/11. When the dust settled, Congress ended up belatedly blaming the FBI and the CIA. Using their surrogates in the press, the CIA and the FBI blamed each other, while continuing to rub elbows with each other in the salons of Georgetown. Both ended up getting vastly more money and power. Each promised to work more cooperatively with the other. And because all of this is classified, we're left with having to take their word for it.

In his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm — My years at the CIA," former director George Tenet states, "The main problems were old-fashioned ones: too few people on both sides working on too many issues. We needed more people, better communications, and particularly on the FBI side, better information technology support."

Don't believe it.

Civilian control of military

Civilian control of the military is a prerequisite for the proper functioning of a democracy. That's why Article I of the Constitution vests the authority for the declaration of war in the Congress, and why Article II makes the president the commander in chief.

In April 1951, an immensely unpopular president, Harry Truman, made the necessary and courageous decision to relieve an immensely popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur from command of our forces in Korea.

MacArthur wanted to attack China and use nuclear weapons. An order to that effect had been approved by the Joint Chiefs, and MacArthur had written a letter to House GOP leader Joe Martin that was highly critical of President Truman's policy of limited war on the Korean Peninsula.

Truman had no choice. He fired MacArthur. And Mr. Hoskins, my seventh-grade social studies teacher, used the ensuing firestorm to teach us about civilian control of the military.

But Cadet Stanley McChrystal must have missed that lesson at West Point a quarter-century later. McChrystal became a Green Beret, a Ranger and a Special Operations commander. Like MacArthur, he was a soldier's soldier. Gen. McChrystal went on to command all special operations in Iraq, and was then made commander of American forces in Afghanistan.

But like MacArthur, Gen. McChrystal believed he knew best. Blinded by his "Chrystalized" view of his own brilliance, he sealed his fate by allowing a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine to cover him and his key staff for an extended period of time in theater.

And the lengthy article by Michael Hastings that appeared in Rolling Stone in June 2010 created a sensation. In it is the revelation that Gen. McChrystal is contemptuous of the president, the vice president, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and National Security Adviser James Jones, who McChrystal describes as a "clown."

Whether McChrystal's strategy of counterinsurgency would have seen us through to victory in Afghanistan, we will never know. A year after having been selected to implement it, Gen. McChrystal was forced to resign and retire.

To be continued next Sunday.

LeRoy Goldman

May 13, 2012

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My early line on Romney, Obama

It all began when I cut my fifth-grade classes on Oct. 25, 1948, to hear President Harry Truman speak in Gary, Ind., from the back of his Whistle-Stop Campaign train, the Ferdinand Magellan.

It was only a week before the election, and Truman trailed his rival, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey. The "experts" agreed: Truman was a loser.

When he finished, I walked to Gary's Memorial Auditorium and heard him speak again. I came away convinced that this honest, plain-spoken man was going to win. I even bet my fifth-grade girlfriend $5, a king's ransom for a 10-year-old boy back then, that Truman would win. And to the dismay of the experts, but not Harry or me, he won.

As a delivery boy for the Chicago Tribune, I could hardly contain myself the morning after the election as I delivered the Trib that carried the infamous headline that erroneously screamed, "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." My girlfriend paid up and never spoke to me again. I was hooked for life on predicting elections.

So here we go again. It's six months till the election. In politics, six months can be an eternity. But that said, let's handicap the coming battle between President Barack Obama and former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney.

For starters, let's remember something that won't change in the next six months. America is a deeply and closely divided nation politically. And that powerful reality contributes greatly to the fact that the government in Washington has been paralyzed for at least the past 15 years.

The red/blue divide is so deep that we know right now how 37 states and the District of Columbia will vote. For example, there is no chance, no chance at all, that Obama can carry states like Utah, Texas or South Carolina. And there is no chance, no chance at all, that Romney can carry states like Massachusetts, Maryland or California.

And so the winner will be determined by what happens in a baker's dozen of 13 "purple" states with their crucial 156 electoral votes. They are New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada.

Obama's victory in 2008 was a blowout. He won by 10 million votes and by a landslide in the Electoral College, 365-173.

But 2012 is going to be different. The popular vote is going to be close, very close. But what counts, literally, is the vote in the Electoral College. And that will depend on Romney's daring and courage.

Incumbents have built-in advantages when seeking re-election, and Obama is no exception. And, unlike Romney, he is likable, and that is an enormous advantage. He has a superb campaign organization, and it will have access to more than $1 billion.

Romney is stiff and uncharismatic as a campaigner, and he's prone to gaffes. In addition, the dynamics of the Republican primaries have forced Romney far to the right, out into right-wingnut land, and that has cost him dearly among independents, suburban women and Hispanics.

These three groups hold the keys to victory or defeat this November. The independent vote will be crucial in all 13 purple states. The suburban women's vote will be especially vital in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado. And the Hispanic vote will cast a large shadow across Virginia, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

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3We all know the central issue will be the economy and jobs. Obama will argue that he inherited a catastrophe from President George W. Bush and the GOP. He will say he has stopped the hemorrhaging and has begun to dig the nation out of this mess. He will say that with a second term America's future will again be bright.

To have a chance to win, and he does have a chance, Romney must counter with something much bolder and more substantive than simply attacking Obama, the Democrats and their policies. He must lay out a specific set of proposals that deal with economic growth, job creation, entitlement reform, tax reform, health care reform, energy independence, immigration reform and ending the war in Afghanistan.

If, instead, he just attacks Obama and then says "Rah-rah for the private sector," he's finished.

And he must do all of this before the Democrats have a chance to define him as a willing and compliant hostage of the right wingnuts and their satraps. Thus, he needs to do it now. Waiting until the convention is too late. The candidate who trails on Labor Day almost always loses in November.

If Romney sets forth such a bold and comprehensive agenda and hammers it relentlessly right up to Nov. 6, he can win. Sure, such a strategy will infuriate the right wingnuts. But so what? They loathe Obama so thoroughly that their votes are already in the bank.

Romney must be daring enough to go all-in, or he will come close, but lose.

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