Veterans – Page 4 – Infinite Unknown

Occupy Movement Spins Off ‘OccupyMARINES’ and ‘Occupy Police’ (The Raw Story)

October 24, 2011 by Infinite

– ‘Occupy Wall Street’: The Marines Are Coming To PROTECT The Protesters

– Occupy movement spins off OccupyMARINES and Occupy Police (The Raw Story, Oct. 23, 2011):

The Occupy Wall Street movement has recently expanded beyond merely occupying parks and other physical territory and is staking out a new realm of metaphorical occupations that includes both OccupyMARINES and Occupy Police.

The inspiration for OccupyMARINES came when Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas confronted police officers who were threatening to arrest OWS protesters in Times Square on October 15, yelling, “Stop hurting these people, man! … How do you sleep at night? There is no honor in this!”

According to Business Insider, members of the new movement began by reaching out to other former marines but “have now called on veterans of other branches of the military to lend their support to help ‘talk sense’ to police and recruit them into supporting the Occupy movement.”

It remains to be seen how successful the group will be and how many veterans it will attract, but it appears to be growing rapidly and gaining support from other progressive organizations. Its webpage, which is credited as “proudly donated by The Pirate Party of New York,” announced on Sunday that the umbrella group Velvet Revolution will be acting as its fiscal sponsor to accept donations.

A second organization, Occupy Police, has already been spun off “for police in support of the 99%.” The first posting at its website, dated October 21, states, “We are in open Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and all Occupy movements across the nation. We’re starting off Day 1 with a mass e-mail to all police departments throughout the US. We want them to know that they ARE part of the 99% and to get involved with the movement. We openly support positive communication between Police/People and we encourage you to do the same.”

Both groups have Facebook pages, located at OccupyMARINES and Occupy Police.

SWAT Team Guns Down US Marine In His Home

May 28, 2011 by Infinite

– Dramatic footage shows moment Iraq war vet was shot 70 times in home… as report reveals he did NOT open fire on SWAT team (Daily Mail, May 27, 2011):

A U.S. Marine who was killed when he was gunned down in his home near Tucson, Arizona, never fired on the SWAT team that stormed his house firing 70 times in a hail of bullets, a report has revealed.

The revelation came as dramatic footage of the shooting was released, showing the armed team pounding down the door of Jose Guerena’s home and opening fire.

Read moreSWAT Team Guns Down US Marine In His Home

US Veterans Sue The Pentagon Over ‘Systemic Failure to Stop Rape And Sexual Assault.’

February 18, 2011 by Infinite

What can you expect from such a government?

– US Government Child Porn Probe Leads To FBI Headquarters

– 5200 Pentagon Employees PURCHASED Child Porn (CNN)

– Pentagon Declined To Investigate Hundreds Of Purchases Of Child Pornography

– Several Dozen Pentagon Workers Used Their High-Level Security Clearances To Purchase And Download Child Pornography

Kori Cioca, 25, of Wilmington, Ohio, speaks about how she was raped while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, during an interview in her attorney office in Washington

– Veterans say rape cases mishandled (AP):

WASHINGTON – A group of U.S. veterans who say they were raped and abused by their comrades want to force the Pentagon to change how it handles such cases.

More than a dozen female and two male current or former service members say servicemen get away with rape and other sexual abuse and victims are too often ordered to continue to serve alongside those they say attacked them.

In a federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday that names Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, they want an objective third party to handle such complaints because individual commanders have too much say in how allegations are handled.

The alleged attackers in the lawsuit include an Army criminal investigator and an Army National Guard commander. The abuse alleged ranges from obscene verbal abuse to gang rape.

– 17 Victims Sue Pentagon Over ‘Plague’ of Sexual Violence (AOL News):

WASHINGTON — It may become a landmark case to force the military to take rape and sexual assault seriously. Or it could be yet another failed attempt in a decades-long battle by women to be accepted in the armed forces.

Seventeen veterans and active-duty service members today took the first step to determining that, suing the Pentagon on charges of violating their constitutional rights to serve their country.

They accused two secretaries of defense of condoning, ignoring and implicitly encouraging sexual abuse in the ranks in a 42-page complaint filed in federal district court in Alexandria, Va., which contains phrases like “f—ing whore,” “bitch” and “troublemaker.”The plaintiffs, who include two men, come from every military branch. They charge they were victimized twice — once by their assailants and again by the institution they served.

Read moreUS Veterans Sue The Pentagon Over ‘Systemic Failure to Stop Rape And Sexual Assault.’

US Army Admits Gulf War Medical Records Destroyed

February 16, 2011 by Infinite

The real enemy is at home soldiers!

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – A letter from the Department of the Army telling units to destroy their records after the end of Operation Desert Storm has made it more difficult for injured veterans to get the medical benefits they need.

The letter, never made public before now, says units were told to destroy their records because officials had no room to ship the paperwork back to the United States. The letter goes on to say it was in direct contradiction to existing Army regulations.

“This could have been one, five, six, a couple of hundred or this could be thousands (of soldiers),” says Andrew Marshall, a Florida regional officer with the nonprofit Disabled American Veterans group. “You don’t know.”

One solider trying to get help from the Veterans Administration for combat-related injuries says he has been turned down because his records are missing. He did not want to be identified.

He says he has all the medical records for the time he was in the states, but the records for everything that happened outside of the country are gone.

Marshall says the Army should have backups to the records destroyed in the Persian Gulf.

US Military Veterans Sue The CIA For Implanting Remote Control Devices In Their Brains

December 5, 2010December 5, 2010 by Infinite

A group of military veterans are suing to get the CIA to come clean about allegedly implanting remote control devices in their brains.

It’s well known that the CIA began testing substances like LSD on soldiers beginning in the 1950s but less is known about allegations that the agency implanted electrodes in subjects.

A 2009 lawsuit (.pdf) claimed that the CIA intended to design and test septal electrodes that would enable them to control human behavior. The lawsuit said that because the government never disclosed the risks, the subjects were not able to give informed consent.

Bruce Price, one plaintiff in the lawsuit, believes that MRI scans confirm that the CIA placed a device in his brain in 1966.

At one point, Bruce was ordered to visit a building with a chain link fence that housed test animals, including dogs, cats, guinea pigs and monkeys. After reporting, Bruce was strapped across his chest, his wrists, and his ankles to a gurney. Bruce occasionally would regain consciousness for brief moments. On one such instance, he remembers being covered with a great deal of blood, and assumed it was his own, but did not really know the source. Also portions of his arms and the backs of his hand were blue. His wrist and ankles were bruised and sore at the points where he had been strapped to the gurney. Bruce believes that this is the time period during which a septal implant was placed in his brain.

DEFENDANTS placed some sort of an implant in Bruce’s right ethmoid sinus near the frontal lobe of his brain. The implant appears on CT scans as a “foreign body” of undetermined composition (perhaps plastic or some composite material) in Bruce’s right ethmoid, as confirmed in a radiology report dated June 30, 2004.

According to a 1979 book by former State Department intelligence officer John Marks, The CIA and the Search for the Manchurian Candidate, an internal 1961 memo by a top agency scientist reported that “the feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals has been demonstrated… Special investigations and evaluations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man.”

“The CIA pursued such experiments because it was convinced the Soviets were doing the same,” The Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein noted.

Dr. Gary Null Speaking Out at the NYS Assembly Hearing on Vaccinations, Fraud, Junk Science, Crimes Against Humanity and Profit

October 28, 2009 by Infinite

Must-see! (ALL of them.)

“There is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza. The producers of these vaccines know that they are worthless, but they go on selling them, anyway.”
– Dr. J. Anthony Morris (Former Chief Vaccine Control Officer at the FDA)

1 of 3:

Added: October 19, 2009

US Marine Breast Cancer Patients Blame Water At Marine Base

September 26, 2009 by Infinite

– Benzene causes cancer:

Long-term health effects of exposure to benzene

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has determined that benzene causes cancer in humans. Long-term exposure to high levels of benzene in the air can cause leukemia, cancer of the blood-forming organs.
Source: CDC

– Trichloroethylene causes cancer:

Research from Cancer bioassays performed by the National Cancer Institute (later the National Toxicology Program) showed that exposure to trichloroethylene is carcinogenic in animals, producing liver cancer in mice, and kidney cancer in rats.[6][7] Research published in 1994 examined the incidence of leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in populations exposed to TCE in their drinking water.[8]
Source: Wikipedia

– Perchloroethylene causes cancer:

Perchloroethylene-contaminated drinking water and the risk of breast cancer: additional results from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA.
(Department of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA)
Source: EHP (Take also a close look at the “Selected References”.)

But:

“Two independent studies have found no link between water contamination and later illnesses, according to the Marine Corps.”
…
The Marine Corps sends them to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which says it can’t treat the men for a condition that hasn’t been shown to have been “service-related.”

“How could they do this to me after I served the country faithfully?” retired Marine Rick Kelly told CNN. “How could they do this to my fellow Marines?”

Get a lawyer and fight.

And if you want to heal cancer learn about alternative medicine and avoid chemotherapy and radiation.

Cancer is not at all the dangerous enemy that western medicine wants you to believe.

Jim Fontella was based at Camp Lejeune in 1966 and 1967. He was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998.

TAMPA, Florida (CNN) — The sick men are Marines, or sons of Marines. All 20 of them were based at or lived at Camp Lejeune, the U.S. Marine Corps’ training base in North Carolina, between the 1960s and the 1980s.

They all have had breast cancer, a disease that strikes fewer than 2,000 men in the United States a year, compared with about 200,000 women. Each has had part of his chest removed as part of his treatment, along with chemotherapy, radiation or both.

And they blame their time at Camp Lejeune, where government records show drinking water was contaminated with high levels of toxic chemicals for three decades, for their illnesses.

“We come from all walks of life,” said Mike Partain, the son and grandson of Marines, who was born on the base 40 years ago. “And some of us have college degrees, some of us have blue-collar jobs. We are all over the country. And what is our commonality? Our commonality is that we all at some point in our lives drank the water at Camp Lejeune. Go figure.”

Starting in 1980, tests showed drinking water at Camp Lejeune had been “highly contaminated” with solvents. Several wells that supplied water to the base were found to have been contaminated in 1984 and 1985, and were promptly taken out of service after the pollutants were found, the Marine Corps told CNN.

Among the chemicals later identified in the drinking water were trichloroethylene, a degreaser; benzene; and the dry cleaning solvent perchloroethylene. Two “independent studies” have found no link between water contamination and later illnesses, according to the Marine Corps. But the men facing a debilitating and possibly lethal disease don’t buy it.

Veterans Affairs Department: A Total Mess

March 5, 2009 by Infinite

Unopened claims letters hidden at VA offices

A new report about Veterans Affairs Department employees squirreling away tens of thousands of unopened letters related to benefits claims is sparking fresh concerns that veterans and their survivors are being cheated out of money.

VA officials acknowledge further credibility problems based on a new report of a previously undisclosed 2007 incident in which workers at a Detroit regional office turned in 16,000 pieces of unprocessed mail and 717 documents turned up in New York in December during amnesty periods in which workers were promised no one would be penalized.

“Veterans have lost trust in VA,” Michael Walcoff, VA’s under secretary for benefits, said at a hearing Tuesday. “That loss of trust is understandable, and winning back that trust will not be easy.”

Unprocessed and unopened mail was just one problem in VA claims processing mentioned by Belinda Finn, VA’s assistant inspector general for auditing, in testimony before the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Auditors also found that the dates recorded for receiving claims, which in many cases determine the effective date for benefits payments, are wrong in many cases because of intentional and unintentional errors, Finn said.

The worst case uncovered by auditors involved the New York regional office, where employees testified that managers told staff to put later dates on claims to make it appear claims were being processed faster. A review found that 56 percent of claims had incorrect dates, although no evidence was found of incorrect or delayed benefits payments. Finn said workers reported that this practice had been used for years.

Nuclear veterans told: No case for compensation

January 11, 2009 by Infinite

Ministers tell servicemen who witnessed 1950s test explosions they should have claimed years ago

Barry Hands was on Christmas Island in the 1950’s and witnessed Britain’s first H-bomb (above)

Ministers have been accused of blocking compensation claims brought by hundreds of nuclear test veterans who believe they developed cancers and other illnesses after being forced to witness atomic bomb experiments in the 1950s and ’60s.

Despite pay-outs to former servicemen in the US, France and China, Britain has told its veterans there is no case for offering compensation, and that there is no scientific justification for a full investigation into birth defects suffered by the veterans’ children and grandchildren.

Instead, the Government is relying on studies carried out on the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which failed to establish a link to illnesses found among survivors and their families.

This refusal fully to investigate the human legacy of Britain’s nuclear weapons test programme has come as a blow to the airmen, soldiers and sailors who stood on Pacific island beaches in the late 1950s watching nuclear explosions while wearing little more than shorts and sandals.

Ministers are also defending a legal claim brought by 1,000 British and overseas nuclear veterans and their families on the grounds that the case is time-barred. Ministry of Defence lawyers will go to the High Court next week to argue that the men, who could be entitled to hundreds of millions of pounds, should have brought the case as soon as they knew they had a claim, rather than waiting more than 40 years to start litigation. The Government will also say that the medical evidence does not support the veterans’ claims of cancers linked to their time in the South Pacific.

Veterans Hospital Told to Stop Diagnosing Iraq War Soldiers with PTSD

August 25, 2008 by Infinite

(NaturalNews) The post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) coordinator for a Texas veterans hospital sent an email to facility staff suggesting that they stop diagnosing returning Afghanistan and Iraq veterans with PTSD.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” wrote psychologist Norma J. Perez in an email to the staff of the Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Texas.

Saying that Veterans Affairs (VA) staffers “really don’t … have the time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” Perez suggested that they should instead “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

Veterans diagnosed with Adjustment Disorder receive significantly less in the way of disability and health care benefits than those diagnosed with PTSD. An estimated 300,000 Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans are currently suffering from either PTSD or severe depression, according to a recent report by the Rand Corp.

Suicide hot line got calls from 22,000 veterans

July 28, 2008 by Infinite

“…the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their own lives, but that number includes vets from all wars.” Source: Military suicide rate increased again

“Nearly 40% of Army suicide victims in 2006 and 2007 took psychotropic drugs — overwhelmingly, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac and Zoloft.”
Source: America’s Medicated Army

Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, 26, from Mt. Sinai, N.Y., carries a young Iraqi boy who was injured during a heavy battle between the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment and Iraqi forces in this March 25, 2003 file photo near Al Faysaliyah, Iraq. Dwyer died of an accidental overdose after struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder for almost five years.

WASHINGTON – More than 22,000 veterans have sought help from a special suicide hot line in its first year, and 1,221 suicides have been averted, the government says.

According to a recent RAND Corp. study, roughly one in five soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan displays symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, putting them at a higher risk for suicide. Researchers at Portland State University found that male veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide than men who are not veterans.

This month, a former Army medic, Joseph Dwyer, who was shown in a Military Times photograph running through a battle zone carrying an Iraqi boy, died of an accidental overdose after struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder for almost five years.

PTSD leaves physical footprints on the brain

July 27, 2008 by Infinite

At a recent conference for some of the area’s leading neurologists, San Francisco physicist Norbert Schuff captured his colleagues’ attention when he presented colorful brain images of U.S. soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The yellow areas, Schuff explained during his presentation at the city’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, showed where the hippocampus, which plays major roles in short-term memory and emotions, had atrophied. The red swatches marked hyperfusion – increased blood flow – in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for conflict resolution and decision-making. Compared with a soldier without the affliction, the PTSD brain had lost 5 to 10 percent of its gray matter volume, indicating yet more neuron damage.

Welcome Home, Soldier: Now Shut Up

June 28, 2008June 28, 2008 by Infinite

There are two kinds of courage in war – physical courage and moral courage. Physical courage is very common on the battlefield. Men and women on both sides risk their lives, place their own bodies in harm’s way. Moral courage, however, is quite rare.

According to Chris Hedges, the brilliant New York Times war correspondent who survived wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, “I rarely saw moral courage. Moral courage is harder. It requires the bearer to walk away from the warm embrace of comradeship and denounce the myth of war as a fraud, to name it as an enterprise of death and immorality, to condemn himself, and those around him, as killers. It requires the bearer to become an outcast. There are times when taking a moral stance, perhaps the highest form of patriotism, means facing down the community, even the nation.”

More and more U.S. soldiers and Marines, at great cost to their own careers and reputations, are speaking publicly about U.S. atrocities in Iraq, even about the cowardice of their own commanders, who send youth into atrocity-producing situations only to hide from the consequences of their own orders.

In 2007, two brilliant war memoirs – ROAD FROM AR RAMADI by Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, and THE SUTRAS OF ABU GHRAIB by Army Reservist Aidan Delgado – appeared in print. In March 2008, at the Winter Soldier investigation just outside Washington D.C., hard-core U.S. Iraqi veterans, some shaking at the podium, some in tears, unburdened their souls.

Jon Michael Turner described the horrific incident in which, on April 28, 2008, he shot an Iraqi boy in front of his father. His commanding officer congratulated him for “the kill.” To a stunned audience, Turner presented a photo of the boy’s skull, and said: “I am sorry for the hate and destruction I have inflicted on innocent people.”

The Winter Soldier investigation was followed by the publication of COLLATERAL DAMAGE: AMERICA’S WAR AGAINST IRAQI CIVILIANS, by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian. Based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with Iraqi combat veterans, this pioneering work on the catastrophe in Iraq includes the largest number of eyewitness accounts from U.S. military personnel on record.

The Courage to Resist

We cannot understand the psychological and moral significance of military resistance unless we recognize the social forces that stifle conscience and human individuality in military life. Gwen Dyer, historian of war, writes that ordinarily, “Men will kill under compulsion. Men will do almost anything if they know it is expected of them and they are under strong social pressure to comply.” “Only exceptional people resist atrocity,” writes psychiatrist Robert Lifton.

How much easier it is to surrender to the will of superiors, to merge into the anonymity of the group. It takes uncommon courage to resist military powers of intimidation, peer pressure, and the atmosphere of racism and hate that drives all imperial wars.

Silencing the Witnesses to War

VA testing drugs on war veterans

June 17, 2008 by Infinite

Experiments raise ethical questions

The government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.

In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.

James Elliott, a decorated Army sharpshooter who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving 15 months in Iraq, was confused and psychotic when he was Tasered by police in February as he reached for a concealed handgun when officers responded to a 911 call at his Maryland home.

For photos, video of James Elliott, official FDA documents and more, visit the interactive site for the Disposable Heroes report.

Mr. Elliott, a chain smoker, began taking Chantix last fall as part of a VA experiment that specifically targeted veterans with PTSD, opting to collect $30 a month for enrolling in the clinical trial because he needed cash as he returned to school. He soon began suffering hallucinations and suicidal thoughts, unaware that the new drug he was taking could have caused them.

Just two weeks after Mr. Elliott began taking Chantix in November, the VA learned from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the drug was linked to a large number of hallucinations, suicide attempts and psychotic behavior. But the VA did not alert Mr. Elliott before his own episode in February.

In failing to do so, Mr. Elliott said, the VA treated him like a “disposable hero.”

“You’re a lab rat for $30 a month,” Mr. Elliott said.

Brightcove Video

Play Disposable Heroes – Part 1

Brightcove Video

Play Disposable Heroes – Part 2

One of the nation’s premier medical ethicists said the VA’s behavior in the anti-smoking study violated basic protections for humans in medical experiments.

“When you’re taking advantage of a very vulnerable population, people who have served the country, and the agency that’s responsible for their welfare isn’t putting their welfare first, that’s a pretty serious breach of ethics,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read Full Article Here

Audrey Hudson
Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Source: The Washington Times

Over 70,000 deaths, and over 1 million disabilities among American soldiers attributed to Iraq Wars says U.S. government data

August 15, 2008March 25, 2008 by Infinite

(“More than 1,820 tons (3-million, 640 thousand pounds) of radioactive nuclear waste uranium were exploded into Iraq alone in the form of armour piercing rounds and bunker busters, representing the worlds worst man made ecological disaster ever. “)

Iraq War veterans protest

Iraq War veterans protest as U.S. Republican Presidential campaign seeks to help support corporate media spin about the Iraq War.

According to U.S. media reports, there are well below 5,000 U.S. soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. However, this data appears to be very misleading. Why? Because many tens of thousands of American soldiers have apparently been killed to-date, as a result of being exposed to radiation poisoning from the indiscriminate killing machines of U.S. military weaponry. Ironically, the only Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that Americans soldiers have found in Iraq are “Made in America”.

U.S. investigative researchers have discovered an official U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs official, but not well publicized count, of 73,846 U.S. soldiers who have perished as an apparent result of Depleted Uranium based bio-chemical warfare exposure. This exceeds an estimate of 58,000 U.S. soldiers who had been killed in relation to the Vietnam War.

Well over 200,000 American soldiers could be killed by 2010, as a result of the after effects of exposure to U.S. dirty bombs.

Over One million U.S. soldiers have apparently been disabled from Depleted Uranium based biochemical exposure. Over one million Iraqis have also been documented to have been killed.