Posted on 03/01/2007 5:32:24 AM PST by FLOutdoorsman
Complaints about medical center were voiced for years
Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's surgeon general, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups and members of Congress for more than three years.
A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.
Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, said he ran into Kiley in the foyer of the command headquarters at Walter Reed shortly after the Iraq war began and told him that "there are people in the barracks who are drinking themselves to death and people who are sharing drugs and people not getting the care they need."
"I met guys who weren't going to appointments because the hospital didn't even know they were there," Robinson said. Kiley told him to speak to a sergeant major, a top enlisted officer.
A recent Washington Post series detailed conditions at Walter Reed, including those at Building 18, a dingy former hotel on Georgia Avenue where the wounded were housed among mice, mold, rot and cockroaches.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Is it a secret that there are problems with the VA system?
That whore - Dana Priest!
:-)
The "posties" knew about this for many months and neglected to report it in a timely fashion. No one knows how many soldiers suffered as a consequence of the Post's lack of responsible citizenship.
No kidding, did she put CIA flights somewhere in the article. I didn't see any.
Walter Reed is NOT part of the VA system. This is a regular Department of Defense facility.
Do our soldiers deserve better? Absolutely. But does it make sense to pour money now into a facility about to be closed, simply because someone's agenda is showing? (Do you think the MSM really gives a rat's arse about the soldiers or are they in it for the gotcha?) If WRAMC is indeed going to close, then let's get on with the replacement and get our brave servicemen and servicewomen into first-class facilities. And give them first-class care in the interim.
I agree.
That appeared almost one year after the 2005 BRAC announcement. Now, almost a year later, the WaPo reports the problems as if they discovered them for the first time. Yes, the conditions in some facilities are bad and the Army needs to get on with executing their replacement plan. But this smacks more of media opportunism than care. Obviously officials knew of the problem. They have been speaking about it for at least two years. Let's see if Murtha will boost the funding and draw in the 2011 completion date for the transfer. Waiting ... waiting ...
Exactly!
Whatever plan the military may have to renovate a BOQ, or whatever plan they may have to move facilities due to BRAC, the fact remains that some of our wounded troops were housed in quarters I wouldn't put my dog in, and the Army should be ashamed. Just because we don't like the messenger, nor the political agenda behind the story getting out now, doesn't change the essential fact that wounded service men and women shouldn't have been housed in that building for 5 minutes, much less years. They deserve much, much better than that.
You are absoultely correct.
Sadly, more and more, I find this to be the case. We don't "like" who says what, so we dismiss what they say. Some days, some of us here (and I include myself in that list) are awfully blind. I find the narrowing of my mind a painful process, and strive to avoid it.
And hey, if there's one soldier there who missed a med, an appointment, or a therapy session, that is UNACCEPTABLE, I don't care which party one supports. This isn't about politics, it's about people who had the courage to do what 75% of us don't. We owe them much better.
WASHINGTON POST
ANNE HULL
DANA PRIEST
That is as far as I read.
The other one's no better... long line of commie-aiding credentials on Anne Hull.
This IS about politics, more precisely the leftist commie agenda. Do the media ever investigate and expose charlatans like Jesse Jackson? They never expose their own.
If you want to know what is going on in the VA system or at Walter Reed, then do your own investigation. To let the WaPo do the investigation for you and to accept their spin is to accept leftist propaganda. It seems that is what you want to hear and believe.
Neither author of this article is in the least objective. They both have lenghty resumes of writing to make America, especially our military, look bad. They want to point the finger at the military? I point it right back at them.
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