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Now on to our next guest on the show today.
It's Joshua Kors.
He's an investigative reporter for The Nation.
He's been on the show a couple of times before to talk about his series on, well, how the officers treat the enlisted men, specifically their diagnosis with personality disorder, which disqualifies them from treatment for their battle wounds.
And there's Thanks for Nothing, How Specialist Town Won a Purple Heart and Lost His Benefits, How the VA Abandons Our Vets, Disposable Soldiers, How the Pentagon is Cheating Wounded Vets.
And Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington.
Those are out of order, I'm sorry, but pretty close.
And all of those are available at Joshua's site, joshuakors.com.
Kors is spelled K-O-R-S, joshuakors.com.
And you can find all of that there, all of these articles for The Nation Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Now, the big deal is that you went before Congress again, right?
This was the second time Congress held a hearing on fraudulent personality disorder discharges in 2007.
And again, now in September of 2010.
You know, I forgot, but I was going to go ahead and let Representative Bob Filner introduce you here.
Let's hear, let's listen to this clip.
More soldiers are dying by their own hand than in combat.
The committee continues to hear of accounts of wrongful personality disorder discharges.
This begs the question of how many soldiers have to commit suicide, go bankrupt, and end up homeless before real action is taken to remedy this problem.
I mentioned Joshua Kors, who is an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine, and who has done some real pioneering research in this.
And we thank you, Mr. Kors, for your service to The Nation in this regard.
Mr. Kors, you have time before the committee.
That is from September the 15th, correct?
That's right.
Okay.
And now we have assorted clips here.
I think really, I want to go ahead and play this one here.
This is Sergeant Luther talking about what happened to him.
And I believe, well, correct me if I'm wrong, but this includes the actual wounds, or you got to set this up by telling us what really happened to this guy before he describes then how the military treated him as a result of his battle.
Absolutely.
Well, the hearing was to look at personality disorder discharges.
These are fraudulent discharges that the military is pressing upon physically wounded soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq.
And by accepting and signing on to those documents, the soldiers are not allowed to collect disability pay, and they can't get long-term medical care like other wounded soldiers.
That's because personality disorder is a pre-existing condition.
And I'm sure all your listeners know that phrase, pre-existing condition, from the healthcare wars.
Well, the healthcare bill is going to be eliminating that trouble for the rest of the country, but it'll create a bubble in which the only people that can be stung by that accusation are our wounded soldiers.
And that's exactly the case with these wounded soldiers.
With Sergeant Luther, it just takes it to the extreme.
He was pressed into signing those documents.
After he was wounded by mortar fire in Iraq, he was at a guard tower.
A mortar blast threw him to the ground.
He slammed his head against the concrete.
And after that blow to his head, he developed headaches so severe that vision would black out in one eye.
His left eye, he said it was like someone stabbing him in the eye with a knife.
He went to Camp Taji's aid station for care, and they tried to tell him that his blindness was caused by pre-existing personality disorder.
And when he said, what?
That doesn't make any sense.
How could a problem with my personality cause blindness?
They tortured him until he signed the documents.
They put him in a closet and held him there for over a month under enforced sleep deprivation with armed guards keeping the lights on all night, blasting heavy metal music at him all through the night.
He tried to escape the closet.
At one point, they pinned him down, injected him with sleeping medication, dragged him back to the closet.
And after a month of this, he was willing to sign anything.
And their excuse for doing that, right, was that he was mentally ill.
And the proof of that was that he'd made an offhand comment about he felt suicidal because of how intense the pain was.
And so they're saying this guy's suicidal.
So then they locked him in a little room and tortured him.
Yeah, he didn't even phrase it that way.
He said the pain was so bad, sometimes he wished he were dead.
And he explained immediately that was just a rhetorical flurry.
So they gave him the Branch Davidian treatment.
We say you're crazy.
So here's loud rock music all night long to keep you from sleep and to keep you off balance.
Bright lights in your eyes.
As he said in his testimony before Congress, this was the technique that the army would use on enemy combatants to drive them crazy.
And after several weeks of sleep deprivation, he said he did start to feel crazy.
But this was a soldier who up until that mortar fire wound and the long term enforced sleep deprivation was perfectly healthy.
He had served a dozen years, won 22 honors for his performance and had passed eight health screenings with without a single scratch on him.
All right, now let's listen to this short clip.
It's just less than a minute here.
Sergeant Luther testifying before the U.S. Congress under oath.
Held down and had my pants ripped from my left thigh and given an injection of something that put me to sleep.
When I woke, I was strapped down and had a black eye and cuts on my wrist.
And from that point forward for five weeks, I was held in a room that was six feet by eight feet that had bedpans, old blankets and other old supplies.
I was under guard 24-7.
I was constantly called a piece of crap, a faker and other derogatory things.
They kept the lights on and played all sorts of music from rap to heavy metal very loud all night.
These are some of the tactics that we would use on insurgents that we captured to break them to get information or confessions.
I went through this for four weeks and the commander told me to sign this discharge and if I didn't, they would keep me there for six more months.
I said I didn't have a personality disorder and he told me that if I signed the paperwork that I would get back home and get help and I would have all my benefits.
After the endless nights of sleep deprivation, harassment and abuse, I finally signed just to get out of there.
I was broken.
All right.
And in fact, let me go ahead and play one more clip here.
A little more than half a minute.
Joshua, this is you testifying to the Congress about Sergeant Luther's wounds.
Sergeant Chuck Luther is a disturbing example of how the Army applies a personality disorder discharge.
Luther was manning a guard tower in the Sunni triangle north of Baghdad when a mortar blast tossed him to the ground, slamming his head against the concrete, leaving him with migraine headaches so severe that vision would shut down in one eye.
The other, he said, felt like someone was stabbing him in the eye with a knife.
When Luther sought medical care, doctors at Camp Taji told him that his blindness was caused by pre-existing personality disorder.
One more.
Sergeant Luther, what you described in the month or so after when they asked you to sign these papers can only be described as torture.
Did you take any legal action against the Army for torturing you?
No, sir.
At the time, my TDS attorney told me just go ahead and sign it or I would stay there six months.
All right.
Now, so I'm a bit confused by that question answer there.
It's a short clip, Joshua, but first of all, please explain who that is questioning.
Now we're going out to break.
Okay.
When we come back, I want to know who that is questioning.
And I know he signed a thing saying he gets no benefits.
He's crazy.
Fine.
Let him out of the room.
But he signed a thing saying he can't sue them for torturing him into doing so.
Where's that on in there?
We'll be back with Joshua Korshaw right after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott and I'm on the phone with Joshua Korshaw.
He's been sticking up for the soldiers betrayed by their officers, betrayed by the Pentagon and by the Congress, the presidency.
They take, you know, as Thomas saws about this, they they make up these terms.
Oh, personality disorder means what?
That you're a jerk.
And then they make you sign.
They torture you into signing a thing that says that you have a personality disorder.
And then that means that that's the cause of any physical symptoms that you have.
And therefore, they don't have to treat you in any other hospitals.
Why?
The money's free to them anyway.
And give all the money in the world to their pals over at Northrop Grumman.
But they don't have enough.
I mean, what is this even about, Joshua?
What the hell?
It seems like it's really bad PR for these people wants to believe that, you know, going to war is like dressing up in a shiny suit and standing around with a sword looking handsome and all this all day and, you know, having fun riding around in the back of a C-130.
Well, I think there are a few steps to it.
First of all, the money is not free.
These are tax dollars that should be going to wounded soldiers.
Since 2001, over 25,600 soldiers have been pressed into signing these phony documents declaring that wounded soldiers have pre-existing conditions.
It's saving the military $14.2 billion in disability.
Yeah, I think I buy one lousy submarine with that.
Well, I'm sure to, you know, in the scope of a larger budget, it's not a massive amount.
But I'm sure to any family, $14.2 billion seems like a lot of money.
And it's really just part of the culture of making the soldiers prove their wounds.
It's just like the opposite of the courts where the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
In this case, the burden of proof to prove that your wounds come from war has for so long been on the soldiers' shoulders.
But in these cases, you know, you asked, well, so I think that's one significant reason for it.
All right.
Now, yeah, before the break, we heard this clip of, I guess it's the chairman of the, is it the House Armed Services Committee?
House Veterans Affairs Committee.
That was Chairman Bob Filner, a Democrat from San Diego, who was quite moved by Sergeant Luther's story of being tortured.
And now Luther seemed to be saying, no, I haven't sued them for torturing me because my military lawyer said, man, you better just sign so you can get out of here.
But I thought that that just said, yes, you're right.
I'm guilty of being a jerk, and therefore that's why I'm going blind.
But not that they have immunity for torturing him for from now on.
Well, the legal aspects of this are quite complicated.
The Ferris Doctrine, based on the 1950 Supreme Court case, Ferris v.
U.S., provides an immunity bubble for military doctors.
Soldiers are not allowed to sue their military doctors, regardless of incompetence or any other, you know, wrongful doing.
That leaves this area in which the doctors are free to practice as they wish, even if they're under pressure to falsely diagnose.
And as you know, in part two of my series, I spoke with military doctors who talked about the pressure on them to purposely misdiagnose wounded soldiers.
Oh, one told the story of a soldier that came back with a chunk missing from his leg.
His superior pressured him to diagnose that as personality disorder.
It's sort of like the book Catch-22, right, where it's all about having the right numbers for the ones level higher up, and the truth is completely lost.
Well, that's certainly an understandable point of view.
For so many of these soldiers, they call me and they say, this is ridiculous.
How could my blindness, my deafness, my shrapnel wounds be caused by personality disorder?
I've been covering this issue for four years now, and at this point, I just say to them, look, it's not supposed to make sense.
It's just simply a practice they have going to save these funds and get the soldiers out the side door quickly so they can replace them with healthy bodies.
All right.
Now, let's play one more clip from this hearing of the Veterans Affairs Committee on September the 15th, where you and Sergeant Luther both testified here.
This is Filner and Herbert.
This is, I guess, the chairman of the committee cross-examining an army officer?
An army officer.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes.
This is a bear who was a top official at the Pentagon, and in this clip, he's trying to say that they are reaching out to all of the soldiers who've been fraudulently diagnosed.
All right.
Leave it there.
Leave it there.
Let's hear it.
What we are doing is reaching out to our veterans who have separated since 9-11, who have been characterized with separation of personality disorder, who had previously deployed as part of their service, and we're reaching out to them to inform them of what options are available to them if they consider their discharge mischaracterized.
You've notified or tried to notify all 22,600 plus 900, 1426, and 650.
We are notifying every veteran who's separated since 9-11, who had a separation characterized as personality disorder, who had previously deployed, to make sure that they have access.
We're just in initial stages of it.
Now you're in initial stages.
He said you're notifying everybody, but so how many have you notified?
We will notify everybody.
But how many have you notified now?
We have notified no one.
No one?
Sir, the report came in.
I mean, look, look, look, look.
You led me to believe, and if I could ask the recorder to rewrite your words, that you already notified everybody.
Anybody who has that sense?
I mean, that's what I heard, that you have notified everybody.
Now you're saying you haven't even started the notification process.
So you haven't started it?
No, sir.
When will you do this?
We're in the process of...
How long does that process take, since you're making me ask these stupid questions?
Because I don't know whether you go to school to learn this, or it's part of your personality disorder, but I have to ask what your words mean.
We're supposed to be talking English to each other, and you're not helping me very much, and it sounds to me you don't want to help.
All right, Joshua, go ahead.
I'm sure you have something to say.
Well, you know, Hebert from the Pentagon trying to say they're reaching out to all these soldiers, but with just a touch more pressing from Chairman Filner, he divulges that they actually haven't reached out to a single soldier.
Filner was enraged, and I have to say, in addition to his rage, the audience at that committee was befuddled, too.
They started to laugh at the Army officers and their explanation of not just the cheating of these soldiers, but the refusals to even allow the soldiers to know that they can appeal their cases to the VA and still get benefits.
So many of these soldiers, when booted out the side door, are told, sorry, pre-existing condition, you can't get disability pay, you can't get long-term medical care.
And the soldiers, having been told that, they leave it at that.
Well, I don't know if there's a David Hackworth award out there or something, but there should be, and you ought to be the first recipient of it.
You and Aaron Glantz, too.
Yeah, so there you have it, folks.
Joshua Kors in the nation.
There's four articles now.
Thanks for doing this work.
It's very important work, Joshua.
Thank you, Scott.
And thanks for your time again on the show today.
