Personality disorders

For the past five years American soldiers have been embroiled in the occupation of Iraq, and one of the ways our government has controlled the public dialog about its illegal action is to exhort us to “support the troops” by fully funding the mission until its completion. Those of us who opposed the war from its inception and thought supporting the troops meant ending the war/occupation were branded as unpatriotic. Yet nothing illustrates the shallowness and hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s rhetoric than the way injured soldiers are treated by the Defense Department bureaucracy.

A report in the Nation magazine last year uncovered the process. Faced with escalating costs which some estimates say may run into the trillions of dollars, our leaders are looking for ways to cut costs. Enter the convenient diagnosis of personality disorder, which us now being used to deny disability and medical benefits to injured war veterans. The Defense Department, borrowing from the worst of what medical underwriting has to offer, can now state that a soldier had a pre-existing mental disorder, discharge the soldier due to personality disorder, and deny coverage thus avoiding responsibility for the escalating cost of traumatic brain injuries, posttraumatic stress disorder, and other catastrophic injuries.

The reporting by Joshua Kors led to congressional hearings on the topic and the drafting of bills in both houses of Congress aimed at halting the process until specific acceptable guidelines are established. The bills were drafted in July 2007 and have languished in committee ever since. The House bill – The Fair Mental Health Evaluation for Returning Veterans Act (HR 3167) is now stuck in the Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, number 166 out of 221 bills listed as referred to that subcommittee. The Senate Bill – entitled A bill to ensure proper administration of the discharge of members of the Armed Forces for personality disorder, and for other purposes (S1817) – is now in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and listed 96th on a list of 142 bills and resolutions. It is easy to see how these items can get lost or ignored. The only way to move this through Congress is if enough people contact their representatives in the House and Senate and insist on passage of the legislation. You can find out who represents you here. Please contact them and urge them to move these bills through the committees they are stuck in to an ultimate vote in the full House and Senate. It is long past time to put an end to this atrocious treatment of injured vets.

Pain and justice

Two items in the news last week serve as reminders of how invested this country has become in the use and abuse of pain, so much so that our leaders are willing to use the Constitution to justify and legitimize abhorrent behavior.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is finally able to investigate whether government lawyers improperly advised the president that he was not bound by laws and treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war. At issue is John Yoo’s now invalidated March 2003 memo to the Defense Department General Counsel about military interrogation of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners overseas. It concludes that the 5th and 8th Amendments do not apply and neither do the Geneva Conventions or war crime statutes. The memo also notes that harsh techniques could be used as long as interrogators did not intend to torture their prisoners. The memo also stresses the President’s Article 2 powers as a shield against prosecution. Other memos and opinions have cataloged acceptable interrogation techniques, and one such document infamously describes torture as “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Short of this threshold, interrogators have plenty of leeway.

Also last week the Supreme Court ruled that lethal injection as it is practiced in at least 30 states does not violate the Constitution’s 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In order to arrive at the voluminous 97-page decision, which includes seven opinions, the justices focused on such issues as whether there is an “objectively intolerable risk” of pain, whether the pain, if it occurs, was deliberately inflicted, and whether cruel and unusual punishment includes the pain and terror of suffocation caused by an improper administration of anesthesia, or is limited to the live disembowelments, quarterings, beheadings and burning alive with which the founders were familiar. Justice Thomas’ opinion is particularly instructive on prior methods of execution.

Most justices concurred that the plaintiffs had not proved that the three-drug regimen administered in 30 states met the definition of cruel and unusual. After all, how can there be an “objectively intolerable risk of harm” when thirty states use the procedure. They also noted that plaintiffs had not proved that the single drug administration of barbiturates used now in veterinary practice would be more humane. The ruling notes that veterinary practice is not “an appropriate guide for humane practices for humans.” Some vets might dispute that contention, as they find the preferred method of executing humans too cruel to use on the animals in their charge. Justice Stevens renounces the death penalty as an acceptable method of punishment in his opinion, an apparent sacrilege for which he was roundly criticized by Justice Scalia, who sees the sole Constitutional mention of capital crimes – “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury…” as ample illustration of the acceptability of the death penalty. Yet Stevens too does not find that the plaintiffs have proved their case as to the cruel and unusual nature of execution by lethal injection.

Only Justices Ginsburg and Souter noted that the execution process lacked the safeguards necessary to minimize the risk of torturous pain, especially adequate checks to ensure that the condemned is actually unconscious prior to administration of the paralytic and the heart stopper. The Ginsburg opinion notes that a visual inspection by the prison warden for the appearance of unconsciousness is not enough, and that other states have instituted more elaborate checks out of concerns about the level of unconsciousness. As to the arbitrary nature of the imposition of the death penalty and the possibility of mistakes, this was mentioned by some of the justices, but either dismissed as improbable by the plurality or not considered germane to the proceedings.

As states now resume their schedules of executions a little perspective is in order. Whether the topic is use of torture in prisoner interrogations or the infliction of pain during state-sanctioned executions, our government has investigated pain and found ways to excuse it. I realize there is voluminous legal scholarship on the meaning and interpretation of constitutional clauses. Nonetheless, the term “capital” is mentioned once in the Constitution (5th amendment, in a statement that begins with a negative). The President’s “commander in chief” status is spelled out in the following sentence fragment in Article 2 Section 2: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”. Just for the sake of comparison, impeachment is stressed on at least three occasions as the proper method of removal from office – perhaps indicating an important yet all too often ignored tool of government functioning.

And the answer is …

… the issues are not nearly as important as the “gotcha” moments -the Wright/Ayers/flag pin/sniper fire and who knows what else these campaigns are digging up on each other’s candidates and tossing out to talk-show hosts and the 24-hour news cycle.

There was a time when news organizations, yes, even broadcast news organizations, respected the intelligence of the public. But today we have “The Debate”, as ABC termed its attempt to inform the public prior to the Pennsylvania primary. If anything good comes out of last night’s display of inanity, it will be that the American public will begin to demand more of the corporate media. The debate moderators saw fit to spend half of the alloted air time on the “bitter” controversy, Obama’s pastor, Clinton’s Bosnia memory flap, the Weather Underground and of course, flag pins. Those viewers who stuck around may have heard of the candidates’ plans to withdraw troops from Iraq, or their differences on capital gains and other tax issues. Their voting records were not scrutinized nor were their associations with lobbyists or their work on corporate boards – this information was ignored so that more time could be spent on why Senator Obama did not follow the lead of police officers and firefighters and show his patriotism by wearing a flag pin (made in China perhaps) on his lapel.

Today’s news coverage of the debate perpetuates the stupidity as dirt dug up by campaign operatives and trumpeted by talk-show hosts gains some type of legitimacy on a nationally-televised debate and then becomes acceptable material for front page coverage. In addition to insulting the electorate’s intelligence this focus on non-issues feeds the echo chamber that passes for news these days and continues the weakening of the press watchdog function