07/02/09 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show Kelly B. Blejos, a Washington, D.C.
-based freelance writer.
She's a long-time political reporter for FoxNews.com and a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
She's a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine and writes for us as a regular contributor at Antiwar.com.
You can find her archives at original.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm glad to have you here.
Very important article, looks like you have here, as always.
But I just can't interview about everything.
Tell me, who's Edward Adams?
Edward Adams is a U.S. Army veteran, now he's a veteran, who is suffering from symptoms that his military doctors say are connected, directly connected, to his exposure in Iraq to these massive burn pits that exist on Army installations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They're massive, massive burn pits.
The biggest one, at its peak at Balad Air Base in Afghanistan, breached 270 tons of waste a day that they were burning, open-air pits.
Everything from batteries and rubber and hardware to medical waste, some say even amputated limbs, went into these burn pits.
He is one of the many soldiers who are coming home with really terrible health problems.
And his got worse, he got home, he was having a hard time just by running, climbing the stairs, his breathing just got worse and worse.
The local military doctors or the base doctors were not very helpful.
He went to Tripler Medical Army Hospital in Hawaii, and they scratched their heads, they didn't know what was going on.
They took an MRI.
Turns out he had hundreds of little cysts or holes in the tissue around his lungs.
They had never seen anything like this before, which was just a whole team of them.
Then they all got together, and after many interviews and consultations, they came to the conclusion that it could only be from his exposure, his constant exposure on base to these burn pits.
And then they find out shortly after through a CAT scan that his aorta, which is the main blood vessel going to his heart, his abdominal aorta, is actually shrinking.
It shrunk 50% in three months during the time they were seeing him.
Wait, wait, wait, his abdominal aorta?
Yes.
I guess I don't know what that is.
I only know if aorta is just part of a heart.
I don't really know either.
No, there's five major blood vessels going to the heart.
So they're all going in different directions.
This is the one that goes from, I guess, below the diaphragm going up to the heart.
I see.
And it's shrinking.
And they don't know if it stopped shrinking.
They're obviously monitoring this, but it shrank 50% from the MRI that I just told you about and then three months later.
So they basically told this guy, we don't know whether you have a year to live or 50 years to live.
We've never seen this before.
Yeah, but Kelly, here's the thing.
In America, we allow people to burn anything they want wherever they want because we all know that fire is the great purifier and that it's perfectly harmless when you take body parts or medical waste or batteries or whatever and burn them, right?
Yeah.
Well, this, I mean, studies that they had done, an earlier study that an Air Force-led study taken, you know, samples of this, they'd gone out on the site at the LOD in 2006, basically said this was the worst environmental site they had ever seen.
This would never, I mean, there were no standards here.
I mean, this would never occur here in the United States, even under the most lax conditions that you see probably from the 70s.
This was like, this was ten times worse.
I mean, it's just, it is an expedient way to burn waste on the battlefield or on these bases, and it's always been done.
But because we have been in theater, you know, the long war has taken us to seven years in the case of Afghanistan, that these burn pits are just going on and on and on with no environmental control.
You have, you know, tens of thousands of troops living day by day right by these huge plumes of smoke, and they're being told by, you know, in many cases, and I've read all the testimonies online that are growing and growing, they go to the doctors on base and the doctors go, oh, we've checked this out, you know, don't worry, it's nothing.
You know, your breathing will get better when you get home.
You know, and it's poo-pooed.
And I guess what my story was trying to indicate that, you know, because they've sort of, you know, the anecdotal evidence suggests that they put this off and deferred and deferred and deferred, they're deferring a huge health care problem that's coming home to root now.
And as typical of the U.S. military, you know, it's probably to their own detriment because at some point they're going to be, I mean, we're going to be paying, all of us, for these veterans coming home with these chronic health problems.
And if they had put incinerators in, they're starting to put them in now, but I'm hearing from people that they have not put them in fast enough, that perhaps that, you know, if the contract held by KBR to put these incinerators in, they've been dilly-dallying to put them in and continue to operate these burn pits.
You know, this is just, it's going to come back on tenfold, you know, in the years to come as these health problems get worse.
They're not getting better.
You know, these kids are coming back and they're not getting better.
They figure, oh, well, I'm not going to be next to the burn pit every day anymore.
Everything will be fine once I get home.
You know, and they get home and they realize it's deterioration.
It's not something that's just clearing up because the air is getting better.
And that's the scary thing.
I talked to one guy in my story.
He doesn't have use of his legs anymore.
I mean, if that's not creepy, I mean, besides the cancer, I mean, the incidence of cancer, I mean, imagine coming home and all of a sudden you go from being, you know, an athlete guy who goes out and runs and kick boxes every day to, you know, basically the guy is wearing braces on his legs like he's, you know, a polio patient.
Wow.
Do you know how many people are said to be sick like this?
I mean, I guess if the VA is saying that this isn't the cause of it, then the numbers are going to be pretty sketchy, huh?
Right.
Exactly.
There's no firm handle on this, so I can't tell you that it's tens of thousands.
All we can say is that tens of thousands, and we know this, of troops have been stationed on bases where these burn pits are burning daily.
And all we have is anecdotal information now.
So you have, you know, the Burn Pit Action Center, which was put up by, you know, Tim Bishop puts it up, and he's asking people to come in.
And, you know, they got like, you know, close to 60 testimonials on there.
Then you have the DAV that says it has close to 500, you know, testimonials, people, you know, inquiring and laying down their stories.
They say at least 80 of them have cancer, and 16 have died since they started collecting, you know, these testimonials.
I think it was a year ago.
You said the Disabled American Veterans.
Right.
And so it's all a matter, and you can go online, the Military Times, the reporter there, Kelly Kennedy, has been doing stories, you know, much longer than I have on this.
And, you know, they have a lot of soldiers, active duty, and veterans who have been writing in with their stories.
So I think the Internet has allowed for a lot of this stuff to air publicly.
It's just that other than that, you have the VA says it's doing its own studies.
It's basically pulling data where it can get it in terms of like when the troops come, they have post-deployment screening.
They're pulling data from that.
They're pulling data that they're seeing at the VA hospitals.
But all that is sort of like, oh, we're on it, you know.
So there's no numbers to emerge yet.
And like Gulf War Syndrome, you know, all these symptoms aren't completely uniform.
So you have this one guy, you know, Edward Adams in Hawaii, you know, with his shrinking aorta and, you know, hole-ridden lung tissue.
And then you have the other guy in my story, Michael Maynard, who lost the use of his legs.
You have a lot of these troops and veterans who are complaining of like they have sleep apnea or they have to have breathing machines when they go to bed, you know, skin problems, rashes.
You know, it's so varied, heart problems, the cancer.
So it's like Gulf War Illness in a way where it's all across the board.
Well, and it makes it easy to deny that way.
I mean, if you think back to the 1990s, oh, yeah, sure, Gulf War Illness causes every sickness that any Gulf War veteran ever had.
Yeah, sure.
You could read all about how bogus that whole thing was in Reason Magazine.
Oh, yeah.
And the one thing in this case that makes it completely different or at least, you know, unique, is that the burn pits, it's hard to deny that that's not what's causing.
I mean, I guess it will be denied.
But now that we have it in black and white from, you know, Edward Adams' story, that, you know, the burn pits is a good key to what is happening to all of these people.
With Gulf War Illness, they never were able, I mean, only until recently they were able to narrow down the causes, and they weren't, you know, the causes being the pesticides that the military used to coat the tents and the uniforms from the bromide pills they gave to the troops and, you know, the inoculations, the blowing up of the ammunition dump.
You know, so there was sort of like.
Stop right there for a second because I think that's an extremely important story.
Most people probably are not too familiar, but it's got a really catchy name, Camasea.
Yes.
Camasea, they have this giant underground warehouse, and there at least was a video that was circulating around years ago that had at least what supposedly were chemical munitions there with French and British seals and color-coded ribbons on them and writing and whatever, not ribbons, but bands around them, color-coded to indicate what kind of chemical and perhaps biological weapons were there, of course all bought with American money before the war.
And then they just blew it up with TNT.
They didn't use any fancy napalm.
They didn't use any fancy implosion vacuum air thing or whatever fanciness.
They just set it off with TNT.
It was, my understanding, the biggest non-nuclear man-made explosion in human history, and all they did was just dump a bunch of sarin and who knows what into the air, got all over the soldiers, and then they just lied about it.
They just lied.
They would rather soldiers lay down and die than continue complaining to them about what's happened to them.
Right.
And it was several years later, and I'm sorry, I don't know the year, where they finally said, yeah, up to 100,000 U.S. troops could have been exposed in that explosion and that destruction of that ammunition dump.
So it went from, well, we don't know how many, to sort of like, yeah, there could have been some exposure, and then it comes out several years later, 100,000.
That's like one-fifth of the force that was in country at the time.
Right, because downwind, I remember even from back before they admitted any of this, it was known that downwind at that point was to the southeast, toward Kuwait, where everybody was.
I mean, the Gulf War illness, it's just a sad situation, because I think just the causes that I briefly mentioned, I think that there's so much more going on there that we still haven't gotten a grasp of, and a lot of it's because of pushback from the military to really, I mean, you look at all the studies that have been done, the task forces, the advisory boards, the congressional hearings, and after all that time, there's not one uniform explanation or statement of accountability or, you know, it's just terrible.
And I think that these veterans coming home now see that, and the advocates see that, and they're saying, we're not going to let that happen this time.
We're going to get on this right away.
And it's not only the burn pits.
I mean, I think the burn pits is going to be a big, huge, has a big role to play in the sickness that is coming home here.
But I think there's other things.
I mean, the KBR is also being sued by several soldiers.
And I realize this is on a smaller scale, but for having them work on this water treatment plan, I don't know if you've heard about this, but, you know, these guys were working on this water treatment plan, and it turns out it is just like there was like a hexium chromide.
It just littered all over.
That's the stuff that Aaron Brockovich, remember that movie, that people were all getting sick.
What the people were getting sick of in that movie and, you know, in that story was just a fraction of this powder that these soldiers were being exposed to.
And, you know, KBR says, hey, we had this place, you know, cleaned up before these guys came to work on this water treatment plan.
And it's like, I don't think so.
You know, from what I hear, they were shuffling around in this stuff.
And now they're sick?
They are really sick, and they are suing KBR.
And it's one of like 14 lawsuits that have emerged so far against KBR, not just for that case but for the burn pits, because there's class action suits involved here over the burn pits.
Well, you know, one of the heroes of the Gulf War illness story was David Hackworth from Soldiers for the Truth, who also tried to stop this war before it happened.
And, of course, he died from poisoning, bladder cancer.
He got from what was called Agent Blue, which was something different than Agent Orange, but for basically the same purpose, that they sprayed on him and his guys in Vietnam and told them, oh, don't worry about it, this is only bad for plants, not you.
Yeah, and we see this all through history.
I mean, this isn't anything new.
It's just that, you know, when you look at, you know, it's 2009.
You know, this was a war of choice.
We know better.
We should know now how to treat our troops when they come home, and it's just history repeating itself over and over and over.
It's just...
Well, and I think it's really important for young people in the audience to understand this, too, that if you're an enlisted soldier, your officers would just as soon throw you in a burn pit.
They don't care about you at all.
Have you stand next to some cancer-causing agents all day?
They don't care about you.
Just as soon send you, you know, walking unarmed into, you know, machine gun fire, you know, like the trenches of World War I.
I don't know why anyone would buy into the propaganda that going and following orders of these psychopaths somehow is the way for a boy to become a man, a way to achieve honor and glory and discipline and leadership skills and all this propaganda they shove down our throat on TV.
And from the time we're little kids, and, you know, I don't know if it's...
It must be a little bit different for you, Kelly, because you're a woman, but for me, growing up my entire life, I got nothing but war propaganda my entire life.
Why I ought to join.
And yet the truth is that to the average colonel, I guess, or the average general, these specialists and privates are basically, you know, animals to be slaughtered.
They're basically, you know, garbage to be used up and thrown out just like the stuff they're burning in the pit.
Well, you know, and I think it's much more insidious than that because if it was that straightforward, you know, nobody...
People would, you know, join up and then they'd get the hell out of there.
I hesitate to say that every general or every colonel is a guy who just sees these kids as, you know, cannon fodder, but I think institutionally, you know, these kids go in, they have this tight unit, this tight family, people that they perceive as caring for them, and I'm sure many cases they do, they look out for each other, but then they hit that brick wall, they get sick, they come back to Walter Reed, and they realize that they're just a number and that they are a problem.
You know, I'm hearing from these guys and women that come back and they go to get their medical boards.
That's what they, you know, that's the examination.
If they're injured, this tells them how much of a disability or health care access they're going to get when they get out of the military, and they're running into all this funny stuff and shell gaming by the military who are trying to cheat them out of their disability rating so that they don't have to pay and that they don't have to give them health care or for their families, even if they're hobbling out of there on crutches or in a wheelchair or riddled with cancer, you know.
And so they realize, oh, okay, you know, they want to get rid of me.
They want to shuffle me under a rug.
They want to pretend I don't even exist.
And so you have a lot of these guys who come back and they have medical problems, but they're still active duty, and they realize, you know what, I just got to follow the rules because if I start looking for a psychiatrist or I start talking to the doctors about my breathing problems or I can't sleep well at night, you know, they're afraid that, you know, it's going to go on their record, that somehow they'll be making noise and this is going to get them shuffled off somewhere.
So I think it's an institutional problem that I think doesn't really hit home until you actually turn to the institution for help and then you realize, yeah, no.
And that's the sad story is just that they would rather them just disappear.
Like this guy I was talking to, the one that lost the use of his legs, he said, he goes, they just sat on my medical board records until I was ready to get dismissed.
They didn't have to tell me what could have possibly caused this problem.
They didn't want to take any responsibility.
They didn't want to put it in black and white that this might have been toxic contamination.
And they literally told him, you're the VA's problem now.
I mean, you've sacrificed your life and the last words you hear are you're the VA's problem now?
And I think it really stuns these guys because they're like, wait a minute.
You know, I was under some illusion I was part of some big family and it's not like that at all.
No, it's clearly not.
It's just like gang members.
When the trouble really comes down, they all snitch on each other.
They don't really take care of each other.
It's the same kind of thing.
It's a pseudo family.
And then they've got to go to the VA and then they've got to do the whole battle over there.
I'm not going to sit here and say that every VA facility is rot into the core or doctors don't care or whatever.
Well, no, it's the structure of the thing.
It's not the individuals necessarily.
It's the incentives.
It's just like the story last week about the VA doctor who I guess one of the ways they treat colon cancer is implanting these little radioactive beads to radiate the cancer.
Well, this guy was doing a really sloppy job and all these people were getting cancer elsewhere in their body from the radiation pellets breaking loose and getting all over the place.
And this guy just went on and on doing it and nobody stopped him, or at least that's the New York Times version of the truth.
Who knows?
Yeah, exactly.
And you'll find the VA benefits analysts who are just throwing the claims out in the garbage until they get through their stack fast.
You're going to find these stories all over the place.
Or the big story earlier this year where this guy, one of his counselors at the VA, admitted that they weren't supposed to be diagnosing patients with PTSD, that they were being actively discouraged from doing that because it meant broader treatment plans, more costs.
So that was a big, I don't know if you remember that at all.
Yeah, sure.
Well, Joshua Kors at The Nation magazine did a big piece about these guys who were having traumatic brain injuries.
This one guy, Specialist Town, how Specialist Town lost his benefits.
And he got bombs going off that gave him such concussions.
He's got major brain damage, permanent.
And they say, no, you have a personality disorder.
And that means that you go on to this part of the flow chart, which means we don't have to take care of you anymore.
And they do the same thing to people with the nightmares.
I know I interviewed a kid at Camp Casey back in 2005 up there when Cindy Sheehan was trying to get George Bush to explain what the noble cause was, which he couldn't.
So he went bicycle riding with Lance Armstrong instead.
But I interviewed this kid, and he said that the way it works is that when you're still in Iraq, if you fill out the questionnaire and you say, oh, I'm fine, and I'm not having nightmares and whatever, they send you back and then say, and this is what happens, I guess, with a lot of these guys is they're back in America for a while and trying to readjust, and then it kicks in.
And now all of a sudden they can't sleep.
And every time they close their eyes, they picture their dead buddy and all the terrible traumatic things from the war.
And then the VA says to them, oh, hey, tough.
We already have it here in writing that you're fine.
Now you're faking it because you just want a bunch of free stuff.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
So all those guys, the traumatic brain injury, PTSD, the toxic contamination, I mean, we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the health impact coming home to us as taxpayers, as communities, families.
I mean, it is beyond even the worst case scenarios that were set out back in 2000, 2003.
It's just a symphony of hurt coming back, and I don't think we're ready.
I don't think the government's ready, and we're never ready.
And how long do these wars continue to go on?
Well, and the American people aren't ready either.
They would rather just ignore it.
Support the troops means send them off to war and betray them when it's over.
Nobody wants to care about these guys.
That's why if you stop at a red light, there's a Vietnam veteran asking for a quarter.
Right.
Right.
Because you have less than one half of a percent of the population serving in these wars.
So you can put it in a box.
You can just put it over there.
But these guys are coming back, and they are in our communities.
They're our friends, they're families, they're schoolmates of our children, they're children.
They're our cops that pull us over.
Yeah, exactly.
And with the economy today, this is just like, I hate to use the phrase perfect storm, but I don't know.
And I just think it's important that we keep writing about this and keep talking about it, because the mainstream would just rather this burn pit story just doesn't exist.
So the AP will do a story, and it's just like a tree falling in a forest.
I do a story.
I'm glad we're talking about it, and there's people talking about it, but it's so hard.
I mean, with the Gulf War illness, nobody cares about that.
But these guys are still suffering from this rare Lou Gehrig disease and cancer, and people could care less.
Well, you know, I grew up, you know, I was born just really a couple years after the end of the Vietnam War.
And, you know, all of my parents or all of my friends' parents, certainly, and many of my parents' friends, you know, died in it.
And all of my friends' parents knew people that died in it.
And a lot of, you know, even the older kids in the neighborhood weren't there because they had died in it.
And it seemed like, you know, they had that whole Vietnam syndrome and all that.
And this was, you know, the American people learned their lesson.
We don't want any more Vietnams.
And George Bush, Sr., actually, when he got us into the Iraq War, the same one we're still fighting now, back in 1991, he said, This will not be another Vietnam.
And he had to promise the people this will be short and clean and easy.
And yet, somehow, these very same people, I mean, the very same generation of, like, baby boom people whose their friends were the ones who died in Vietnam, they all, or so many of them, supported this thing and basically were willing, I guess, this whole society, basically, just willing to pretend that they hadn't gone through this before.
This time it's going to be great.
It'll be like the 91 Gulf War again.
You know, 80 guys will die because Iraqis don't count.
And we'll, you know, wipe our hands clean and that'll be the end of that.
Right.
And now here we are.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
It was like amnesia around, you know, in 2002 and 2003 and the run-up to this war.
I mean, nobody, I mean, you'd say Vietnam and people's eyes would glaze over or they would think you're talking hyperbolically, you know.
And it's like, okay, shock and awe.
And here we are in 2009 over 443, 4400 troops dead.
You know, how many injured?
We don't even have a handle on that really.
I mean, let's be serious.
And then you have all the sickness.
But like I'll go back to say, Vietnam, there was, you know, there was a draft.
In this case, you have a small percentage.
And so people are able to distance themselves emotionally from it.
And I think that's sickening personally.
But, you know, just like George Bush said, go shopping, you know, continue your lives.
And people have.
But, you know, I think it's blood on our hands.
You know, I know that Antiwar.com and others have been trying so hard, you know, to call attention to the war and to stop it during the run-off.
But it just, it didn't work.
The protests and it just, you know, we have 130,000 troops still in Iraq.
And we're celebrating the withdrawal.
Well, you know, Patrick Coburn, who's probably the best, at least white guy reporter in Iraq, and other experts I trust like Gareth Porter, they say, you know, this war really is over.
The Iraqi people are forcing us out.
And it'll be by probably not until the end of 2011, like in the Status of Forces Agreement.
But basically, the Dawa Party is strong enough in power now that they can basically stand on their own without us.
And they're going to go ahead and force us out.
But, of course, you know, the subtext there is that you and I haven't done a damn thing to stop this war at all.
This war is being stopped because America lost it.
Because George Bush doesn't know how to be a colonialist.
And he installed a majority in power that doesn't need him.
And so for all my interviews and all your writing and all of Justin's behind-the-headlines columns and every peacenik in this country and all the blood, sweat, and tears over all these years, hasn't done a thing to end the war.
In fact, if anything, all of our pressure only backed Bush into a corner and made him double down and do the surge, when instead it would have been the Baker Report and we'd have been out of there a year ago.
Right.
So congratulations to us, huh?
And then you wonder, when it ends like that, you wonder, are any of the real lessons learned?
You know, because you still have people who, you know, on Wednesday were talking about how, you know, President Obama should thank George Bush, you know, for pursuing the surge against all odds.
You know, I mean, so there's still all of this, you know, all of this fantasy going on that we've done something over there that will create some sort of prolonged, you know, utopia, utopian vision of, you know, of, you know, what Project for New America and Century was promoting, you know, seven, eight years ago.
I mean, there's still this fantasy out there.
So you think, well, what lessons will we really learn from this?
I guess that the war party and their narrative always win.
Yeah.
The Iraq War, something to be really proud of, according to the neocons, still to this day.
Yeah.
Well, good for them, I guess.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Kelly.
I really appreciate it.
Well, I appreciate you having me on and talking about this issue.
Well, it's very important, so I look forward to talking with you again.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's Kelly B. Vallejos, freelance writer, foxnews.com, the American Conservative Magazine, Homeland Security Today, and antiwar.com.
We'll be right back after this.