COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Casualties
Pentagon: Wounded troops at Walter Reed can't talk to the media
Joshua Holland, Alternet.org
February 28, 2007
In the aftermath of the Washington Post's series detailing thehorrendous conditions faced by some of the soldiers recovering at
Walter Reed Medical Center, the Pentagon, in typical Pentagon
fashion, is trying to white-wash the whole mess, both literally and
figuratively.
Here's Dana Milbank last week:
It's not every day one gets to witness a whitewash in action, but
Walter Reed Army Medical Center provided just such an opportunity
yesterday.
... Dana Priest and Anne Hull described the woeful conditions of
Room 205 in Walter Reed's Building 18: "Behind the door of Army
Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in
the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat
engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub
on the floor above through a rotted hole."
The Army mobilized. Painters were deployed to cover the offending
wall with a fresh coat of white semigloss. And television crews were
invited in to inspect the result.
"Some of the paint is still wet against that wall, so be careful,"
Walter Reed public affairs officer Donald Vandrey, standing on the
bed in his socks, advised the film crews. "They just finished
repainting it about 10 minutes ago."
Mission accomplished?
Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley thought so. After the media tour of Building
18, the Army's surgeon general gave a news conference. "I do not
consider Building 18 to be substandard, " he said of a facility
Priest and Hull found full of "mouse droppings, belly-up
cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses" and other
delights. "We needed to do a better job on some of those rooms, and
those of you that got in today saw that we frankly have fixed all of
those problems. They weren't serious, and there weren't a lot of
them."
Kiley might have had a stronger case if men wearing Tyvek hazmat
suits and gas masks hadn't walked through the lobby while the camera
crews waited for the tour to start, or if he hadn't acknowledged,
moments later, that the entire building would have to be closed for
a complete renovation.
It gets worse. The Navy Times [via Nitpicker] reports that the Army
has ordered patients at WR not to speak to the media. In fact, some
wounded vets think they're being punished because a few did talk to
the WaPo.
Walter Reed patients told to keep quiet
Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Medical Hold Unit say
they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and
have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must
not speak to the media.
"Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble
soldiers caused by talking to the media," one Medical Hold Unit
soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic
Training.
Soldiers say their sergeant major gathered troops at 6 p.m. Monday
to tell them they must follow their chain of command when asking for
help with their medical evaluation paperwork, or when they spot
mold, mice or other problems in their quarters. [...]
The soldiers said they were also told their first sergeant has been
relieved of duty, and that all of their platoon sergeants have been
moved to other positions at Walter Reed. And 120 permanent-duty
soldiers are expected to arrive by mid-March to take control of the
Medical Hold Unit, the soldiers said. [...]
The Pentagon also clamped down on media coverage of any and all
Defense Department medical facilities, to include suspending planned
projects by CNN and the Discovery Channel, saying in an e-mail to
spokespeople: "It will be in most cases not appropriate to engage
the media while this review takes place," referring to an
investigation of the problems at Walter Reed.
Support the ... yeah.
PS: How crazy are the wing-nuts when called out on the hollowness of
their support-the- troops-but- only-as-symbols rhetoric? This crazy.
Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular
contributor to The Gadflyer.
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