Front & Center: Military Talk Radio w/Rick Rogers
Show No. 82, Oct. 7, 2012
?Listen to show here.?
* Jamie Reno, San Diego-based journalist who follows military news for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
* Jeremy Schwartz, reporter for the Austin American Statesman who worked on the series ?Uncounted Casualties.?
Segment 1, Opening
Hello and welcome to Front & Center: Military Talk Radio. Or appointment radio as I like to think of it.
I?m your host Rick Rogers. So glad to have you along.
On today?s show, a summary of stories making military and defense news this week, including?sobering news on the prevalence of breast cancer among women in the military.
And as a special treat joining me discuss those issues is Jamie Reno.
Jamie Reno is a columnist and investigative reporter based in San Diego. He?s worked for several magazines and publications including Newsweek and The Daily Beast for the last 20 years.
And now he has a wonderful blog that I know you will enjoy at: therenodispatch.blogspot.com
Jamie, welcome to the show.
Then a little later in show, an exclusive and extended interview with Jeremy Schwartz, one of 5 reporters from the Austin American Statesman who wrote the series ?Uncounted Casualties.?
The series documents the scores of young Texas war veterans who survived their deployments only to die of overdoses, suicides and vehicle crashes here at home.
It should be mandatory reading for all VA and Pentagon officials as well as those living military communities across the United States.
So as always a jammed, packed show for you today. Hope you can stay for the fastest hour in radio.
But if you can?t, Front & Center shows are ready when you are at: www.defensetracker.com.
For your reference, today?s show is episode No. 82. Front & Center: Military Talk Radio shows are ?available on iTunes and DAR.FM. Subscription to both are free.
And as an added bonus I am posting video segments up on JustinTV and YouTube. Very excited about unveiling my impressive new studio.
Pause
Before getting to my guests today, let?s peruse some stories on Front & Center: Military Headline News.
Front & Center: Military Headline News is sponsored by MiraCosta College with locations in Oceanside and Cardiff.
Real teachers, real classrooms real degrees, which together equal real success for student vets.
That?s MiraCosta College.
Music Bumper
* Who is shodding and clothing our troops? Apparently the Chinese and two congressmen aren?t happy about it.
San Diego Rep. Duncan Hunter and a congressman from Maine are urging the Defense Department to only buy American, as in American-made boots and uniforms.
This after the Air Force Times revealed that airmen were given Chinese-made boots.
Rep. Duncan Hunter wants fellow lawmakers to sign a letter that asks the Defense Department to comply with the ?letter and the spirit of the Berry Amendment,? which requires the food, clothing, fabrics and other textiles the Pentagon buys to be grown or made in the U.S.
* U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon have begun making a list of potential targets in response to the killing of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya on Sept. 11.
This one list you don?t want to be on this holiday season. Might be interesting if this is used ? or is seen to be used ? as a November surprise for the presidential election.
* A multibillion-dollar bust that?s conclusion of a two-year bipartisan investigation by the U. S. Senate on Department of Homeland Security efforts to engage state and local intelligence ?fusion centers.?
The bipartisan Senate report concludes that the effort has not yielded significant useful information to support federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts.
It wasn?t a total bust, though. The government report says that information-sharing created in the aftermath of 9/11 improperly collected information about innocent Americans.
It portrays an effort that ballooned far beyond anyone?s ability to control.
This is a mournful evaluation of what the Department of Homeland Security has held up as a crown jewel of its security efforts.
Homeland Security officials countered that the report is outdated, inaccurate and ignores the benefits to local governments from their involvement with federal intelligence officials.
Sounds like the Department of Homeland Security has taken a page from the Pentagon in that officials there have no idea of how much they have spent in their decade-long effort to set up so-called fusion centers in every state.
Government estimates range from less than $300 million to $1.4 billion in federal money, plus much more invested by state and local governments.
A Senate Homeland Security subcommittee reviewed more than 600 unclassified reports over a one-year period and concluded that most had nothing to do with terrorism.
?The subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot,? the report said.
One fusion center cited in the Senate investigation wrote a report about a Muslim community group?s list of book recommendations. Others discussed American citizens speaking at mosques or talking to Muslim groups about parenting.
* San Francisco is getting a big military gun.
A massive gun that was on the battleship Missouri when the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II will soon be installed on a cliff at the entrance to San Francisco Bay.
The 68-foot-long, 236,000-pound gun will be painted and displayed at the Battery Townsley fortification in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the coming months, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Sunday.
* Here is a very troubling story.
Women in the military are 20 to 40 percent more likely to get breast cancer than other women in the same age group.
Yet despite this data being knows since at least 2009, very little of the $2 billion in funds from Congress for cancer research has been used to investigate this specific demographic hike, according to a story in Army Times.
The story talks to a researcher with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention who say multiple factors could explain the higher rates for women in the military, including the higher potential rates of chemical exposure.
* Here?s a story that you could not make up. A prison guard from the Seattle area is accused of faking military deployment to receive leave payments.
Prosecutors say that Jose Abarca ? described in court documents as a jailer and Washington National Guard member ? forged military orders to obtain leave from his county?job.
Abarca is then alleged to have claimed he was deployed to Germany for 13 months. In fact, prosecutors contend he spent less than a month in training, then failed to show up to work while collecting paychecks all the?while.
Abarca is alleged to have bilked King County out of $110,000 during the fraud. He is now facing felony charges.
* American generals have written off any chance of beating the Taliban into a peace deal.
Less than a year ago, it looked like the Taliban was on the ropes. No more.
Now Washington hopes the Afghans can hammer out a power-sharing agreement that Pakistan can bless.
* A man suspected of running a $100 million donations scam is apparently a Harvard-trained attorney.
The man known as Bobby Thompson had refused to give police his real name. Now authorities say Army records show he is John Donald Cody.
A former intelligence officer, Cody is accused of pocketing $100 million in donations collected for Navy veterans.
* The American Legion rated 25 VA medical centers as ?excellent.?
American Legion officials said the VA?s quality-of-care initiatives in the past decade have resulted in ?drastic improvements? in patient satisfaction.
* A Pentagon study found that troops traveling in Mine Resistant Ambush Protected trucks were 14 times more likely to survive a bomb attack than those riding in Humvees.
* The Veterans Affairs Department wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on two conferences in 2011, according to government investigators.
Investigators discovered the VA spent $480,000 on catering and contractor travel and nearly $100,000 on promotional items.
* After Navy SEALS killed Osama Bin Laden, teams of U.S. special operations forces were sent to bolster security at American embassies across North Africa.
But the teams were too new on the ground to stop the attack that killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya, according to government sources.
* A Minneapolis man funneled Somali expatriates back home to fight for a terrorist group, according to a government prosecutor.
Mahamud Said Omar, 46, faces five terror-related counts for allegedly sending men and money from Minnesota to al-Shabab, a terrorist group linked to al-Qaida.
And finally, huge kudos to Sgt. Ronny Pool and Staff Sgt. Javier Acosta who likely saved the life of a motorcyclist who cashed Sept. 27 in Riverside County.
The two saved Anthony Vaughn, 38, of Hemet, who hit vehicle stopped at a traffic signal.
Acosta and Pool rendered aid and probably saved Vaughn for bleeding to death.
Vaughn was taken to the hospital for massive injuries. A North County Times story said that CHP are recommending that the Riverside County district charge Vaughn with DUI.
* Marine Corps officials are investigating the death of a female sergeant who was deployed to Afghanistan, according to the Defense Department
Sgt. Camella M. Steedley, 31, of San Diego, died Wednesday in Helmand province, officials said in a news release. She was assigned to Combat Logistics Regiment 17, out of Camp Pendleton, Calif.
Steedley, who enlisted on Dec. 11, 2001, was an air operations clerk with CLR-17, 2nd Lt. Savannah Moyer, a 1st Marine Logistics Group spokeswoman, said Thursday. Steedley was on her first deployment.
* Marines attending a Navy school in San Diego were forced to await non-judicial punishment while loaded down with 45-pound sea bags, a violation of the service?s rules prohibiting hazing, Navy officials said.
The commanding officer of Training Support Center San Diego, Capt. Antonio Cardoso, was relieved of command in late September following a hazing investigation, according to a Navy news release.
* A film dramatizing the death of Osama bin Laden is set to debut next month on the National Geographic Channel, two days before the presidential election.
?Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden,? from The Weinstein Co. and Voltage Pictures, will air Sunday, Nov. 4, the channel said Thursday. President Barack Obama faces Republican challenger Mitt Romney at the polls two days later.
Jamie Reno, you?ve posted several military or vet stories to your blog, the therenodispatch.blogspot.com
Among them veteran disability claims, a mysterious Senate hold on veteran COLA and the case of Veterans for Common Sense v. Eric K. Shinseki.
That was the lawsuit filed by veterans? rights groups in 2007 against the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) demanding the department fix its mental-health-care system.
What ever became of that?
Jamie Reno, thanks for being on the show. Front & Center: Military Headline News was sponsored by MiraCosta College with locations in Oceanside and Cardiff.
Real teachers, real classrooms real degrees, which all equal real success for student vets.
That?s MiraCosta College.
Coming up an extended interview with Jeremy Schwartz, of the authors of the series ?Uncounted Casualties? done by the Austin American Statesman.
The series looked at the deaths of 266 Texas veterans and found that scores who survived their deployments went on to die of overdoses, suicides and vehicle crashes here at home.
You are listening to the one only Front & Center: Military Talk Radio.
Segment II
Welcome back to Front & Center: Military Talk Radio. Heard Sundays 11 to noon on KCBQ AM 1170.
And Mondays on Palomar College?s KKSM AM 1320.
Podcasts of the show at www.DefenseTracker.com.
Pause
It?s a regrettable truth that cutbacks in newsrooms nationwide have drastically reduced the quantity and quality of in-depth reporting being produced.
But every once in a while, a piece of journalism hits the news stands that really needs the widest dissemination possible.
The Austin American Statesman recently published a series on entitled ?Uncounted Casualties? that examined the affects of combat on troops once they leave the service in Texas.
The series focused on role that prescription drugs might be playing in the death of hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
As many of you know, San Diego County is home to the most Afghanistan and Iraq combat veterans in the nation at roughly 38,000.
Here to discuss this hugely important topic is Austin American Statesman investigative reporter Jeremy Schwartz.
By the way: http://www.statesman.com/s/special-report/uncounted-casualties/
Jeremy Schwartz, welcome to Front & Center: Military Talk Radio
Awash in powerful drugs: Between 2002 and 2011, total prescriptions written by VA physicians rose 37 percent.
Over that same period, the number of prescriptions VA doctors wrote for oxycodone rose 150 percent.
Prescriptions for methadone, once used mainly to help wean addicts off heroin but more recently prescribed as an inexpensive painkiller, nearly tripled from 2002 to 2009 before dropping back slightly over the past two years.
** We are a nation of pill poppers, but increasingly so is the military:
Data from a health care information company shows the number of powerful pain killers rose 68 percent from 2002 to 2011. Prescriptions of the drug written by VA doctors climbed 360 percent during the same period.
Two-thirds of the Texas Iraq and Afghanistan veterans the American-Statesman identified as dying of overdoses had powerful prescription painkillers in their systems, according to autopsies and medical examiner reports.
It wasn?t clear if the pills directly responsible for the overdoses were prescribed by U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs physicians.
But in many instances, family members said, the veterans first used the narcotics as active-duty service members.
Among the Texas veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan identified by the American-Statesman as dying of drug overdoses, Veterans Affairs records show that 21 ? over 40 percent ? had post-traumatic stress disorder as their primary disability diagnosis.
A growing body of research shows that PTSD and powerful prescription drugs can be a deadly mix.
Six months ago, a study of 141,000 veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts concluded that combining prescription opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone with PTSD was like pouring kerosene on a fire: Those with the mental health diagnosis were nearly three times more likely to be prescribed opiates than veterans without PTSD. Worse, they were also much more likely to have poor outcomes, including overdoses.
?The use of opiate pain medications in those patients is, frankly, risky,? said author Karen Seal of the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
Next to illness and disease,?motor vehicle accidents were the leading cause of death among the 266? Texas veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan whose histories were tracked by the American-Statesman.
The American-Statesman?s investigative team looked into the deaths of 266 Texans who served during the Iraq or Afghanistan wars who survived combat but died at home. Of the 266, 45 committed suicide, making it the fourth-leading cause of death behind illness, accidents and drug-related deaths.
The 2006 deployment was the second go-around in combat for Rivas, an engineer who loved being a soldier, according to his wife, Colleen. As a soldier he had been called to active duty frequently over the years. Besides combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had been posted to Bosnia, Egypt and Korea.
His story, along with others, was recounted in a three-part series ?Uncounted Casualties.? The series, which concluded Tuesday, was the product of six months of digging by American-Statesman investigative team of reporters Brenda Bell, Eric Dexheimer, Dave Harmon, Tony Plohetski and Jeremy Schwartz; database editor Christian McDonald; and visual reporters Jay Janner and Kelly West.
The information was difficult to obtain, and the results were brutal. The team discovered that soldiers like Rivas survived combat only to die once they were home and supposedly safe.
The team found:
? More than 1 in 3 died from a drug overdose, a fatal combination of drugs or suicide. The median age at death was 28.
? Nearly 1 in 5 died in a motor vehicle crash.
? Among those with a primary diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, 80 percent died of overdose, suicide or single-vehicle crashes. Only two of the 46 Texas veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts with a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis died of natural causes.
? The 345 Texas veterans identified by the VA as having died since coming home is equal to nearly two-thirds of the state?s casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total number of deaths could be higher because the tally only includes veterans who have sought VA benefits.
Need to come back to get a commercial in and close.
Close:
Well, that does it for another episode of Front & Center: Military Talk Radio.
Like to thank my guests journalist Jamie Reno, and Jeremy Schwartz from the Austin American Statesman.
Also like to thank my sponsors, MiraCosta College, TruckCustomzers and military defense attorney Haytham Faraj.
Podcasts of this show will be up shortly at Defensetracker.com. Please make plans to join me next week for appointment radio as we explore more issues important to our troops, veterans and defense industry on Front & Center: Military Talk Radio.
So long everybody. See you on the beach. Go Steelers.
?
jeff garcia jeff garcia big east jesse james pearl harbor day discovery channel lea michele
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.