BAUAW NEWSLETTER, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2004

VOTE YES ON PROP. 'N'! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!

Come to the
BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW COMMITTEE MEETING
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 7:00 p.m.
AFSC - First Floor
65 NINTH STREET
(1/2 block from Market St., SF)

Help get the word out about Prop. 'N'. Bring your ideas for
community outreach, media, action, and more to make sure
we win by a landslide!

No matter who wins the elections this year, the war will not
be over. This ballot initiative will set the example for cities across
the country to do the same in future elections.

Pick up material to distribute!*

PROPOSITION 'N' ON THE NOVEMBER 3
SAN FRANCISCO BALLOT DECLARES:

"It is the policy of the people of the City and County of
San Francisco that: The Federal government should take
immediate steps to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq and
bring our troops safely home now."

Visit: www.yesonn.net

* Material costs money. Already thousands of brochures have
been printed and we need more! We need posters and buttons--
we need to cover the city with YES on 'N' campaign material!

Please send a contribution to help with these costs!
Make your check payable to:

Bring Our Troops Home Now

and mail to :

David Looman, Treasurer
325 Highland Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94110

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1) The spoils of another war
Five years after Nato's attack on Yugoslavia,
its administration in Kosovo is pushing through
mass privatisation
Neil Clark
Tuesday September 21, 2004
The Guardian - Comment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1309037,00.html

2) Forgotten Casualties
By Lynn Harris
Salon.com
Wednesday 22 September 2004
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/09/22/ptsd/index_np.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092304A.shtml
Mentally scarred by the horrors they've endured in Iraq,
many returning U.S. soldiers say the military isn't giving
them the help they deserve.

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) The spoils of another war
Five years after Nato's attack on Yugoslavia,
its administration in Kosovo is pushing through
mass privatisation
Neil Clark
Tuesday September 21, 2004
The Guardian - Comment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1309037,00.html

'Wars, conflict - it's all business," sighs Monsieur Verdoux in Charlie
Chaplin's 1947 film of the same name. Many will not need to be
convinced of the link between US corporations now busily helping
themselves to Iraqi state assets and the military machine that prised
Iraq open for global business. But what is less widely known is that a
similar process is already well under way in a part of the world where
B52s were not so long ago dropping bombs in another "liberation"
mission.

The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was,
according to the standard western version of history, the failure
of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace
agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has
Iraq responsible for last year's invasion by not cooperating with
weapons inspectors.

The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet accord - which provided
for the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia - was, as
the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the
defence select committee, deliberately inserted to provoke
rejection by Belgrade.

But equally revealing about the west's wider motives is chapter
four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan economy. Article I
(1) called for a "free-market economy", and article II (1) for
privatisation of all government-owned assets. At the time, the
rump Yugoslavia - then not a member of the IMF, the World Bank,
the WTO or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development -
was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised
by western capital. "Socially owned enterprises", the form of worker
self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated.

Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and
tobacco industries, and 75% of industry was state or socially
owned. In 1997, a privatisation law had stipulated that in sell-offs,
at least 60% of shares had to be allocated to a company's workers.

The high priests of neo-liberalism were not happy. At the Davos
summit early in 1999, Tony Blair berated Belgrade, not for its
handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to embark on a programme
of "economic reform" - new-world-order speak for selling state
assets and running the economy in the interests of multinationals.

In the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, it was state-owned companies -
rather than military sites - that were specifically targeted by the
world's richest nations. Nato only destroyed 14 tanks, but
372 industrial facilities were hit - including the Zastava car
plant at Kragujevac, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless.
Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.

After the removal of Slobodan Milosevic, the west got the "fast-track"
reforming government in Belgrade it had long desired. One of the
first steps of the new administration was to repeal the 1997
privatisation law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign
investors - with just 15% reserved for workers. The government then
signed up to the World Bank's programmes - effectively ending the
country's financial independence.

Meanwhile, as the New York Times had crowed, "a war's glittering
prize" awaited the conquerors. Kosovo has the second largest coal
reserves in Europe, and enormous deposits of lignite, lead, zinc,
gold, silver and petroleum.

The jewel is the enormous Trepca mine complex, whose 1997 value
was estimated at $5bn. In an extraordinary smash and grab raid
soon after the war, the complex was seized from its workers and
managers by more than 2,900 Nato troops, who used teargas and
rubber bullets.

Five years on from the Nato attack, the Kosovo Trust Agency (KTA),
the body that operates under the jurisdiction of the UN Mission in
Kosovo (Unmik) - is "pleased to announce" the programme to
privatise the first 500 or so socially owned enterprises (SOEs)
under its control. The closing date for bids passed last week:
10 businesses went under the hammer, including printing houses,
a shopping mall, an agrobusiness and a soft-drinks factory. The
Ferronikeli mining and metal-processing complex, with an annual
capacity of 12,000 tonnes of nickel production, is being sold
separately, with bids due by November 17.

To make the SOEs more attractive to foreign investors, Unmik
has altered the way land is owned in Kosovo, allowing the KTA to
sell 99-year leases with the businesses, which can be transferred
or used as loans or security. Even Belgrade's pro-western
government has called this a "robbery of state-owned land".
For western companies waiting to swoop, there will be rich
pickings indeed in what the KTA assures us is a "very investor-
friendly" environment. But there is little talk of the rights of the
moral owners of the enterprises - the workers, managers and
citizens of the former Yugoslavia, whose property was effectively
seized in the name of the "international community" and
"economic reform".

As the corporate takeover of the ruins of Baghdad and Pristina
proceeds apace, neither the "liberation" of Iraq nor the
"humanitarian" bombing of Yugoslavia has proved Chaplin's
cynical anti-hero to be wrong.

·Neil Clark is a writer and broadcaster specialising in Balkan
affairs

ngc66798@hotmail.com

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2) Forgotten Casualties
By Lynn Harris
Salon.com
Wednesday 22 September 2004
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/09/22/ptsd/index_np.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092304A.shtml
Mentally scarred by the horrors they've endured in Iraq, many
returning U.S. soldiers say the military isn't giving them the
help they deserve.

Mike Lemke, a 45-year-old Army National Guard police sergeant
from Grand Junction, Colo., volunteered for active duty after seeing
the twin towers fall on TV. "I wanted to, you know, kick some tail," he
says. He was sent home from Iraq in August 2003 because of
orthopedic and cardiovascular problems - and with memories and
feelings he couldn't shake. He'd seen what was left of one of Saddam's
prisons, prowled by feral dogs with rotting limbs in their mouths;
he'd mingled constantly with civilians, never knowing if one was
armed. "You never feel completely safe," he says. "That stays with you."

Lemke could not sleep for his first 22 days in the medical barracks
in Colorado's Fort Carson, where he remained for more than a year on
"medical holdover" - a period during which wounded soldiers await
treatment and subsequently either return to duty or get a medical exit
from the Army. He experienced flashbacks and temper surges and
would hit the dirt at the sound of a jackhammer.

No one approached Lemke to inquire about his mental health.
Only when a nurse practitioner happened to ask him how he was
sleeping did the story come out - and even then it took him two
weeks to accept her suggestion that he seek counseling.

Why didn't Lemke ask for help? "There's a culture here of unless
your legs have been torpedoed off or your arm's shot off, then it's
not a combat injury," he says. "I did the same thing that everyone
does in the military: You suck it up. You don't whine."

Lemke is still on medication and in therapy, and is not employed.
He is angry at the Army for many reasons, including his treatment
during the medical holdover. But the issue that will most directly
affect his future is his dispute with the Army over his disability rating.

The Army Medical Evaluation Board (MEB) - the body that works in
concert with the Physical Evaluation Board (PEB) to determine wounded
soldiers' medical retirement and disability status according to the
detailed specifications in Army Regulation 635-40 - gave Lemke a
10 percent disability rating for PTSD, which classifies it as "mild"
and as allowing for "adequate" job and social functioning.

Whether a soldier is given a 30 percent rating or a rating less than
that has major financial implications. A 30 percent rating grants a
soldier lifetime disability benefits, along with the military's regular
retirement benefits. Anything less than 30 percent results only in a
one-time severance payment: two times the soldier's base pay times
total years of active duty (up to a maximum of 12 years). Had Lemke
received medical retirement, he estimates that he'd have gotten
$1,200 to $1,600 every month for the rest of his life. His severance
payment is far less. His 12 years of part-time duty convert to six years
of active duty. Result, in his case: "For someone who was available to
the government for 12 years, it's $26K and adios," he says.

The Army, citing privacy regulations, declined to discuss the
particulars of Lemke's or any other soldier's case.

Lemke is one of a number of returning soldiers, mostly Army
National Guard and Reserve, who say they are struggling not only
to heal from physical and psychological wounds, but also to get
proper mental health treatment while in the Army's care - and
adequate financial compensation when their medical condition
forces them to leave the Army.

What was once poorly understood in WWI as "shell shock" (and,
in the Civil War, as "soldier's heart") is now a much discussed,
highly researched condition The Army is now acknowledging -
and devoting a great deal of resources to - the ever growing
incidence of PTSD and other mental health issues within its ranks.

According to a study performed at the Walter Reed Army
Medical Center and published in the July New England Journal
of Medicine, conservative estimates are that 17 percent of soldiers
are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from PTSD,
along with anxiety and depression. For these soldiers (as opposed
to Gulf War vets, whose PTSD rates hover at 9 percent), the strain
and trauma of prolonged urban combat with a hard-to-identify
enemy, and of constant exposure to violent death - including that
of fellow soldiers - have left them with nightmares, flashbacks,
and bouts of numbness and rage.

The study concludes that reducing "barriers to care among
military personnel" - barriers such as the stigma of seeking mental
health care in the first place - must be "a priority for research and
a priority for the policymakers, clinicians, and leaders who are
involved in providing care to those who have served in the armed
forces."

However, numerous veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom who
have come home injured say that such "awareness" has yet to
change a deeply engrained military culture in which the only "real"
wounds are physical. Result: Soldiers - especially National Guard
and Army Reserve soldiers in " medical holdover" - say they run
into roadblocks to needed mental health care, severance
arrangements that appear to downplay invisible injuries in
particular, and even attempts to send mentally unfit soldiers
back to Iraq.

"The DOD [Department of Defense] is taking great care of
the acutely injured, the injuries you can see, the burns, the lost
arms and legs that they're treating with state-of-the-art
prosthetics," says Stephen Robinson, executive director of
the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans' advocacy
organization in Silver Spring, Md. "But they're doing a horrible
job with the other injuries that aren't quite so evident." Robinson,
who served in the Army Special Forces in the Gulf, testified in
January before the House Armed Services Total Force Subcommittee
that soldiers in medical holdover receive insufficient mental health
screening and care. The Center for American Progress recently
published his 11-page report criticizing the military's handling
of mental health issues. "There are unseen costs of war that
have dramatic national implications in terms of benefits and
care and reintegration into society," he says. "It is a national
disgrace that front-line and combat soldiers need to fight for
medical care and benefits when they return home from war."

Robinson, who has spoken with thousands of Iraq war
veterans, describes the typical cycle: "When soldiers come
back they have to go through complicated workman's-comp-
type paperwork to prove that something they did in the war
is the reason they're sick," he says. "That can take from four to
16 months. So they come home injured, and rather than being
integrated into society, they're stuck in medical limbo waiting
for their disability rating and then being diagnosed with a
preexisting condition" - which, he adds, implies that they
shouldn't have been sent over in the first place.

He claims, anecdotally, that the MEB is underevaluating
soldiers by a fairly consistent 10 to 20 percent - a key percentage
if it leaves a disability rating under 30 percent. Robinson's hypothesis:
The DOD simply does not want to foot these potentially substantial
bills. That, or given the number of soldiers who will yet come home
injured, it simply can't.

Lemke and many of his colleagues say such problems are particularly
acute among National Guard and Reserve soldiers, who make up about
40 percent of deployed troops. (Of nearly 5,000 soldiers on medical
hold, all but about 860 are Reserve component troops.) "I don't think
they budgeted for the Reserve and Guard component," Lemke says.
"And now they want to make the soldier eat it."

"Soldiers are soldiers," counters Jaime Cavazos, media relations
officer for the U.S. Army Medical Command. "I doubt very seriously
that an injured soldier would be thought less of because he was a
guardsman or member of the Reserve."

The Army also disputes the charges of deliberately stingy severance.
"There is no truth to any such opinions," says Col. Fred Schumaker,
executive officer of the Army Physical Disability Agency at the Walter
Reed Army Medical Center. "The Physical Evaluation Boards fully
review the facts provided [by] the Medical Evaluation Board and then
carefully match, as closely as possible, the compensation to the
impairment in accordance with regulatory guidance. The PEBs don't
just make up disability percentage rates or reduce them arbitrarily.
They give each soldier exactly what he is supposed to be given."
adds: "It would be unusual if soldiers who are not compensated
by the military disability system were happy about results."

Still, Guard and Reserve soldiers say that their low ratings are
the final blow in a series of actions that lead them to question the
Army's true commitment to caring for them, especially when their
injuries are invisible.

"A lot of the people I've had contact with are not doing very
well," says Kaye Baron, a clinical psychologist in private practice
in Colorado Springs. Baron estimates that 60 to 70 percent of
people she sees are in the military, and of that, roughly half have
served in or been affected by the Iraq war. "For one thing, they're
injured psychologically or physically, and on top of that they feel
they're getting disposed of by the military - like no one really cares."

Baron has also been puzzled by military diagnoses of, for
example, personality disorder (which would be a preexisting
condition, not qualifying a soldier for benefits) in soldiers whose
symptoms are, in her estimation, fully explicable by PTSD. "I don't
understand why military mental health is not doing more given that
we know combat takes a toll on soldiers and PTSD is a widely recognized
phenomenon. I don't know why they're not being more thoroughly
examined and diagnosed."

Theoretically, based on the unprecedented efforts the Army has
made recently to acknowledge, find and treat combat stress,
soldiers should be getting more thorough examinations and
diagnoses. Teams have traveled to Iraq to assess the mental
health needs of the soldiers there. Partially in response to the
2002 murder-suicides at Fort Bragg by soldiers returning from
Afghanistan, the Army has initiated a Deployment Cycle Support
Program, designed to facilitate soldiers' transition to home life by
addressing their health and personal needs. There's a 24-hour
hotline called Military One Source for service members and their
families. There are new PTSD guides for clinicians. Detailed protocols
and procedures designed to screen for, track and treat soldiers
arriving in medical holdover with mental health needs are in place.
"Before a soldier is considered for retirement, we have ensured that
we have given him the optimum healthcare possible," says Cavazos
of the Army Medical Command.

But individual soldiers in medical holdover suggest that such
improvements to the system have yet to trickle down to them.

One 47-year-old high-ranking military policeman - who,
fearing reprisal, requested anonymity - was medevac'd out of
Iraq late last September for a back injury, but came home with
a host of other problems. He had been on active duty before,
but this was different - and not just because of the scorching
heat and rampant dysentery in his unit's ill-equipped camp.
"You're out in public all the time with people coming up to you
and not knowing if they're armed until they fire at you," he says.
This constant sense of threat meant sky-high stress levels and
hyper-alertness. He only narrowly avoided shooting a kid who
marched up to him saying "Fuck Americans," rock in hand. "I had
a weapon on him and in my state of mind, sad to say, I really
would have put that kid down," he recalls. (The kid, seeming to
realize this, took off.)

When this soldier came back to the States, he figured that his
flashbacks and nightmares were "the normal stress you go through
when you come out of a war zone." But while his back was being
treated, his wife informed him that he "was no longer the man she
married" - uncharacteristically withdrawn, prone to rage, hardly
sleeping or eating - and if he didn't get help she'd leave him.

Eventually, a physician at Kentucky's Fort Knox, where he was
on medical holdover until being allowed to go home for temporary
convalescent leave last week, diagnosed him with severe post-
traumatic stress disorder. The medical report cited, among other
symptoms: insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks, disassociation, easy
startling, quick temper, and keeping to his room for fear of hurting
others, all of which were said to cause significant impairment in his
"occupational and social functioning." He has been able to manage
his symptoms somewhat with quite a bit of therapy and medication,
but he still can't tolerate groups of people, or much food.

Just two weeks ago the soldier received word that his PTSD had
received a 10 percent disability rating from the MEB/PEB. (He counters
that his remaining symptoms and resulting disability, as described in
a second medical report, match those described for a 30 percent rating.)
He was also informed that both the PTSD and his slipped disks (rated at
20 percent) were considered chronic, not directly related to combat in
Iraq - where he wore and carried 75 pounds of equipment every day.

"I lived in Iraq, and before I left I was mentally and physically
healthy,"
he says. "I come back and my back's broken and my mind's broken. They
say it's not combat related. The processes that are supposed to be in place
to help us aren't working. They're just not taking care of us."

The Army notes that soldiers have ample opportunity to review their
files both before they go to the board and after initial findings are
returned; should they find anything amiss, they may request a
reconsideration. Still, soldiers who have attempted this describe
a maddeningly muddled, even misleading, bureaucratic process.
Others say they accept insufficient ratings as a means of escaping
the limbo - and often unpleasant environment - of medical holdover.

It has already been documented that the physical conditions in
medical holdover can - due in part to sheer overload by wounded
soldiers returning from Iraq - be less than conducive to healing. A
story by United Press International last fall revealed that soldiers at
Georgia's Fort Stewart were housed in concrete barracks with
insufficient water and no air conditioning and that soldiers at
Fort Knox waited months for medical attention. Sens. Kit Bond,
R-Mo., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were prompted to investigate
and demand improvements. Many physical problems have since
been addressed, and standards have been implemented to speed
up soldiers' care.

Soldiers still say, however, that despite the Army's efforts,
languishing in medical holdover only compounds one's
psychological issues. "Everything is uncertain, you're denied
care, and you know they don't give a damn whether you get
well or not. It's getting to the point where soldiers will do
anything to get out of here," says a 45-year-old non-
commissioned officer in medical holdover at Fort Knox
who was afraid to give his name. "The stress here is higher
than in Iraq, and I was there."

Some soldiers say they spend as much time as possible
in their rooms, as they fear both crowds and their own temper.
The main picture they paint is one of heavy medication -
"You've got soldiers on so much meds all they do is sleep;
they can't even make formation," says a 37-year-old reserve
soldier in medical hold at Fort Knox - and of maddening red
tape, administrative runarounds, and, at best, indifference.

Also, Fort Knox, for one, is a training post. "They're firing
all the time," says the military policeman now on convalescent
leave, who, like many of his comrades, is startled by a mere
footstep. "That's a trigger for me." (He has addressed this
concern to the inspector general's office on post, who
acknowledged the complaint, but so far no action has
been taken.)

Soldiers do report positive individual experiences with
physicians - the 37-year-old reserve soldier, who didn't
trust his own violent temper, says his psychiatrist saved
not only his life, but likely someone else's as well. While
each soldier in medical holdover is assigned a case manager
to help him work with the medical system, some complain
that not all case managers are as caring or as knowledgeable
as they need to be. In fact, several of the more experienced
soldiers in Fort Knox medical holdover have seen fit to become
de facto experts on the Army's byzantine medical and benefits
systems. The military policeman on convalescent leave is himself
at work on designing a series of flow charts and writing a lengthy
booklet about the disability evaluation system to serve as a guide
for other soldiers.

Beneath the bureaucracy, the matter of military culture runs
even deeper - and is harder to transform. In his report to the
Armed Services subcommittee, Stephen Robinson said extensive
research and tours of medical posts by his organization showed
that soldiers in medical holdover receive "little to no counseling
regarding traumatic events experienced during war." Why not?
More often than not, he says, they're not asking for it - and
they shouldn't have to in the first place.

According to the Army Medical Command, screening for
mental health issues in medical holdover is done via self-
reporting in questionnaires, or ad hoc by physicians treating
soldiers for physical issues. "I'm sure that during the course
of treatment a soldier will give off signs that will suggest that
the individual needs some mental health counseling of some
kind," says Cavazos of the Army Medical Command.

Robinson counters that it's essential for Army medical
personnel to initiate intervention for mental health issues,
even among soldiers coming home for physical injuries.
"Questionnaires are not sufficient to establish physical and
mental fitness," he says, especially given the stigma against
seeking psychological help or admitting "weakness." Indeed,
the Walter Reed study found that the fear of stigma was
"disproportionately greatest among those most in need of
help from mental health services." Says Robinson: "Fear of
stigmatization will remain a problem until the military changes
its culture."

By some soldiers' accounts, their commanding officers will
not be at the vanguard of that change. Their job, after all, is
to get soldiers back to duty.

"I was told [by higher-ups] to 'not worry about it,'" says
the 45-year-old NCO in medical holdover at Fort Knox, of
the insomnia, anxiety and panic attacks that eventually got
him on Zoloft, BuSpar, Ambien, and trazodone. "These
soldiers come here all wired," he said, referring to the
hypervigilance that's typical of PTSD, "and they immediately
start telling them that they're going to try to return them to
Iraq." According to him, they're told by their chain of command:
"Don't settle down because you're going to need that high
intensity when you go back."

Spc. Laurence Kiefer, 30, a crane operator with the
quartermaster combat support unit of the Montana National
Guard, was brought home from Iraq to Fort Carson in May for
reasons both medical and legal: injuries relating to a truck
accident, and charges that he'd stolen grenades. (The judge
advocate general, the prosecuting body of the military, has
since found no evidence to support the charges. Kiefer claims
the accusation came as retaliation for a dispute with his
commander.)

He was suffering from combat trauma - at one point he'd
had to drive a 22-ton crane at its maximum speed of 10 to
20 mph, for a 17-hour, 350-mile trip, often under fire -
compounded by stress over the charges, the shock of his
wife's announcement that she was leaving him, and the
fear that he'd be sent back to serve in the same unit with
hostile command. However, he didn't get summoned for his
official "outprocessing" exam for nearly three months. In the
meantime, after first "self-medicating" with alcohol, he
eventually sought medication and psychological treatment.

Soon thereafter, he was told to pack up and re-deploy. He
appealed to his psychologist, Jacqueline E. Delano, who felt that
he wasn't ready, and who later asserted in writing that in a
subsequent phone conversation, Kiefer's commanding officer
"made statements indicating that he felt Spc. Kiefer was over-
exaggerating his symptoms to get out of going back to Iraq"
and "was not interested in this psychologist's professional opinion."
Delano was able to delay Kiefer's departure by insisting on further
evaluation; she then diagnosed him with a personality disorder,
a preexisting condition that renders him both unfit to serve and
ineligible for benefits. A civilian psychologist later asserted that
Kiefer's condition was PTSD; Kiefer is currently fighting the
"personality disorder" designation.

What recourse do these solders have? Says the 45-year-old NCO
at Fort Knox: "The attitude here is: I don't trust these people. I'll
wait till I get home and go to the V.A." Vets may apply for benefits
through the V.A., which has a more generous ratings system. Five
thousand veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have gone to the V.A.
with mental health diagnoses already. For those reasons and others,
the V.A. is an appealing resource for soldiers in, and just out of,
medical holdover. "The V.A. has no legal authority. They can't take
what we say and turn it against us," says the NCO. "They can't hurt
you like the Army can."

Now back at home and a civilian, Lemke is still doing his best,
via word of mouth, to help soldiers who are confused or feeling
mistreated by the system, or who are simply struggling with PTSD
themselves. He even gets contacted by soldiers' wives who are
desperate to find out "what's wrong" with their husbands. No
matter what, he knows what his fellow soldiers have been through.
"First I fought the war," Lemke says. "Then I had to fight a war for
my treatment."


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