WOW...Phoenix Scandals About the Phoenix Scandals?

(from the New York Times, December 23, 2014)

I guess this is why VA doesn't have $$ to replace my lost hearing aids...too much paid to Ms. Helman during her administrative leave, and too many favors extended by her to contractors out to turn a buck on no-bid sole-source overpriced contracts with VA.

Will this ever end?

A federal administrative judge has upheld the dismissal of the director of the Veterans Affairs health care system in Phoenix for accepting more than $13,000 in airline tickets and other gifts from a consultant for the health care industry, for failing to disclose some of the gifts and for placing a high-ranking doctor on administrative leave for providing Senator John McCain with information about patient suicides.

The former director, Sharon Helman, had also been implicated in the falsification of the hospital’s waiting lists for care, a problem at Phoenix and other veterans’ hospitals that roiled the Department of Veterans Affairs this year and led to the resignation of the department’s secretary, Eric K. Shinseki. But the administrative judge, Stephen C. Mish, concluded that the department had not provided sufficient evidence to justify firing Ms. Helman for the manipulation of waiting lists, which concealed delays in providing care to veterans.

Judge Mish also concluded that the department had not proved that Ms. Helman failed to address the bureaucratic problems and personnel shortages that contributed to the large backlog of veterans waiting for primary-care appointments at the facility.

“The press and congressional attention has been on the charges the agency failed to prove,” Judge Mish, chief administrative judge of the Denver field office of the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, said in his 61-page ruling, which was released late Monday. Nevertheless, the judge said he was upholding Ms. Helman’s firing because of “serious financial improprieties” that included accepting airline tickets and an eight-night stay at Disneyland, apparently for her and six family members, from a consultant with clients seeking business with the department.

Revelations about the Phoenix health care system shook the confidence of millions of veterans who use the department’s hospitals and clinics. An investigation by the department’s inspector general found that 1,700 patients in Phoenix had not been placed on proper waiting lists and may never have received medical care, and that the falsification of waiting lists may have led to better performance reviews for the Phoenix hospital’s employees. A top official in the inspector general’s office also testified that delays for care had contributed to some patient deaths.

Ms. Helman appealed her firing last month and in a proceeding before the judge argued that the department had been wrong to base her dismissal partly on a failure to take action or notify her bosses about a backlog of 2,500 primary-care appointments.

After reviewing sworn statements from senior department officials, the judge found that it was “more likely than not (nice shift to VA lingo here!) that at least some senior agency leaders were aware, or should have been, of nationwide problems getting veterans scheduled for timely appointments” and that the Phoenix hospital, “as a part of the nationwide system, also had those problems.”

Judge Mish found that the department had not proved that Ms. Helman failed to take action or notify bosses, and he said it had failed to describe “any particular actions or inactions” constituting misconduct by Ms. Helman related to off-the-books waiting lists.

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The department issued a statement on Tuesday that said officials were “pleased” because the judge’s decision “helps us begin to put the leadership failures at Phoenix behind us.” The department removed Ms. Helman “based on the available evidence,” it added.

But a lawyer for Ms. Helman, Julie Perkins, said the ruling had upset much of the narrative about what happened in Phoenix and raised questions about who was at fault.

“Sharon was not fired for what Congress and the inspector general alleged that she had done with respect to veterans’ care, and if she’s not at fault, I hope people will question where the blame really lies,” Ms. Perkins said. “The decision says, and the evidence shows, that people in V.A.’s central office knew about these problems and did nothing for years.”

The chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Representative Jeff Miller, Republican of Florida, said on Tuesday that he favored “a detailed investigation into whether V.A. officials in Washington knew about widespread wait time fraud and when they knew it.”

He also suggested that he was concerned by the ruling’s revelation that the department’s inspector general had never interviewed Ms. Helman. (A spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office declined to comment.) Mr. Miller added, “The fact that the ruling did not connect the central figure of V.A.’s wait time scandal to any wait time schemes demonstrates a huge problem with the way this case was handled.”

The ruling suggested that Ms. Helman had at some points been handicapped in the proceeding because she exercised her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Yet the judge was caustic in describing the most serious findings against her, including the appearance of a conflict of interest created by the trip to Disneyland and other gifts.

“Sincerely forgetting about one of the plane rides purchased for her might be understandable in some circumstances, but the notion she actually forgot them all strains credulity,” Judge Mish wrote, adding that Ms. Helman “has little rehabilitative potential.”

The Atlantic Magazine Reports on Iraq Chemical Weapons

The New York Times recently uncovered a vast cover-up by DOD officials  Hundreds of troops were exposed to mustard gas, sarin and other agents, all while working under military assurances that none of Iraq's old chemical warfare munitions were a threat.

But threat they were! Atlantic Monthly did a thorough review of the New York Times investigation and the responses by DOD and VA. Click to read their report.

NEW YORK TIMES: US Military Hid Iraqi Chem Weapons Info!

New York Times publishes dramatic front page story!

 ISIS capture of some chemical weapons "likely!"

US military officials, both in the field and back in CONUS, hid evidence of troops' exposures, denied medical care to troops exposed to nerve agents and mustard gas. US military medical facilities provided inadequate post-service care.

All was hidden from Congress as well as serving EOD experts needing this vital information for their own safety and mission accomplishment! A few troops ended up handling shells dripping mustard gas –without their chemwarfare gear on–  because information about aged Iraqi munition stocks was suppressed and the shells were rusted, pitted or otherwise unidentifiable.

At least one bunker of 1991-era chemical weapons may have been allowed to fall to ISIS, and smaller quantities are known to have been gathered up by them from burial sites and old armouries around the country. Such munitions have already been used as IEDs by ISIS as well as other insurgents.
http://www.nytimes.com/

The Secret Victims of Iraq’s Chemical Arms
By C.J. CHIVERS, The New York Times

"The Pentagon kept silent as munitions left over from Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran found new targets from 2004 to 2011: American and Iraqi troops."

NY Times Publishes Outstanding Agent Orange Update

Agent Orange’s Long Legacy, for Vietnam and Veterans  
reporter: Clyde Haberman

From 1962 to 1971, American C-123 transport planes sprayed roughly 20 million gallons of herbicides on an area of South Vietnam about the size of Massachusetts. Code-named Ranch Hand, this operation reached its peak from 1967 to 1969. (Some members of the Ranch Hand team adopted Smokey Bear of forest-fire awareness fame as a mascot. “Only you can prevent a forest” was their twist on Smokey’s slogan.) To the political and military strategists in Washington, using vegetation-killing chemicals was a legally sound and necessary way to save American and South Vietnamese lives. They cited the British precedent.

This week’s video documentary from Retro Report, a series that re-examines major stories from the past, returns us to Vietnam and to the chemical most commonly and most notoriously used there: Agent Orange. Named for the color of a stripe girdling the barrels in which it was shipped, it combined two herbicides, one of which turned out to be contaminated with a highly toxic strain of dioxin. No need for alarm, Washington officialdom and chemical company executives insisted at the time. Agent Orange did not harm humans, they said. As the 1960s wore on, those assurances increasingly rang hollow. Researchers found evidence of birth defects in lab animals. American scientists and others began to speak out against the spraying. Opposition to the herbicide campaign mounted, arm in arm with spreading protests against the war itself. In 1970, the Agent Orange spraying stopped. Other chemicals continued to be used until Jan. 7, 1971, when the entire herbicide program was scrapped after a final Ranch Hand run.

But Agent Orange’s legacy was only beginning. More than 40 years later, it still casts a long shadow.

Vietnamese accept almost as an article of faith that America’s aerial and ground spraying poisoned their environment, perhaps for decades to come, and is to blame for severe birth defects that afflict hundreds of thousands of their children. Whether that is indeed a reality has not been definitively established. Nonetheless, the United States in recent years belatedly accepted responsibility for helping to clean up dioxin “hot spots,” like former American military bases where herbicides were stored. Last month, a United States-built plant went into operation at the old Da Nang air base. There, soil contaminated with dioxin will be heated to temperatures above 600 degrees Fahrenheit, a level said to render the toxin harmless. This process is supposed to be extended over time to other hot spots.

Here at home, the war has not ended for many of the 2.8 million servicemen and women who went to Vietnam. These ailing veterans are convinced that their cancers and nervous disorders and skin diseases — not to mention congenital maladies afflicting some of their children — are a result of their contact with Agent Orange. Often enough, that linkage has not been established incontrovertibly. Studies on Agent Orange’s effects tend to use language that is less than absolute. Certain illnesses, for instance, are said to be “associated” with dioxin exposure. Or there is a “presumptive” connection.

That said, the American government’s resistance to connecting the dots in any manner has melted away over the years. The Agent Orange Act of 1991 accepted a presumed link to illnesses like non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft-tissue sarcoma and chloracne. Veterans with those ailments were declared eligible for medical treatment and financial compensation without having to prove they had been exposed to herbicides. Over time, more than a dozen other maladies, including Hodgkin’s disease and prostate cancer, were steadily added to this list.

And the story is far from over. Some veterans who never set boots on the ground in Vietnam are seeking compensation for their medical woes, among them sailors who served on ships off the Vietnamese coast and airmen who worked on possibly contaminated C-123s that were put to other uses after the war.

Perhaps no two people embodied the moral complexities and the agony of Agent Orange more graphically than Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. and his son Elmo R. Zumwalt III. Admiral Zumwalt led American naval forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970, before he became chief of naval operations. He ordered the spraying of Agent Orange. The son was in Vietnam at about the same time as the father, commanding a Navy patrol boat. Years later, doctors found that he had lymphoma and Hodgkin’s disease. He died in 1988 at 42. His son, Elmo IV, was born with congenital disorders.

The older Zumwalts wrote about their experiences in a book, “My Father, My Son,” published in 1986 and later made into a television movie. Also in 1986, they collaborated on an article for The New York Times Magazine. The son could not scientifically prove that Agent Orange was responsible for his suffering and that of other veterans, he wrote in The Times. “But,” Elmo III added, “I am convinced that it is.” In no way did he blame his father. “I do not doubt for a minute that the saving of American lives was always his first priority,” he said. “Certainly thousands, perhaps even myself, are alive today because of his decision to use Agent Orange.”

For his part, Admiral Zumwalt, who died in 2000 at 79, wrote that even knowing what he had come to learn about the chemical’s effects, he “still would have ordered the defoliation to achieve the objectives it did, of reducing casualties.” All the same, he became a strong advocate for ailing veterans and the national obligation to compensate them. In 1990, he wrote a report on Agent Orange for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He also testified before a House subcommittee, strongly denouncing previous studies that described the chemical spray as harmless. “That was, of course, the conventional propaganda of the time,” he said.

There is no shortage of programs initially deemed essential, and safe, only to produce unwelcome consequences. To cite but one, American-hired pilots sprayed herbicides over coca-growing zones in Colombia, part of the so-called war on drugs. People in those regions later reported significant medical problems.

Who knows what will be discovered someday about the health of Americans who served multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. But first, there is older business to tend to. The ‘60s, it seems, aren’t over yet.

The video with this article is part of a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra Darnton, a former “60 Minutes” producer. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle.