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July 21st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
A Cost Never Figured into the Budget
By Rick Rogers
Host of Front Center: Military Talk Radio
With numbing regularity the Defense Department rolls out report after report on heartbreakingly high troop suicides.
Lately the numbers grow worse just when you think they should be turning better. The military counted 154 suicides in the first 155 days of the year.
News from the Department of Veterans Affairs is no better. Eighteen veterans a day kill themselves. That is one every 80 minutes, almost 6,600 a year.
Veterans and service members make up about 9 percent of the population, yet astonishingly account for nearly 25 percent of the country’s suicides.
Like clockwork after these reports are published, panels of military leaders with more stars on their collars than twinkle in the night sky mournfully assemble before Congress.
And as predictably as Saturday morning cartoons, they gnash their teeth over the carnage that despite their best efforts goes unchecked.
If only they knew the reasons. If only they knew the causes.
By now these snivel sessions are as ritualized as Kabuki Theater and just as staged.
The Pentagon knows perfectly well why the suicide are so high.
The reason, as incredible as it sounds, is no one ever bothered to ask the single most basic question while throwing untold millions at the problem: Do any of these programs actually work?
The Defense Department loathes to admit it – and I doubt Congress cares to push the point since it failed to provide oversight – but it’s been perpetrating a kind of medical fraud for a decade.
Not until the spring of 2011 did the Pentagon finally disclose it has no idea whether any of its estimated 900 anti-suicide programs works.
And that information only came to light when a Rand Corp. study titled, “The War Within, Preventing Suicide in the U.S. Military,” ferreted out the extreme negligence. And don’t forget that this report was delayed months by the Pentagon. Who knows what was clipped from the report to spare even further embarrassment.
It’s no stretch to say that if the Pentagon didn’t know than neither did the VA.
So, after a decade of horrifying suicide numbers, the Defense Department is now one year into a three-study to finally learn what it should all ready known about its suicide prevention programs.
In roughly two years – that’s about 12,000 suicides from now — the Pentagon and the VA might actually have data supporting what they are doing.
But suicide isn’t the only crucial medical issue where the VA and Pentagon are informationally challenged.
The first thorough assessment on Post Traumatic Stress came out last week.
Guess what?
The VA and Pentagon are again as lost on Post Traumatic Stress as they are on suicide prevention.
No data exists showing whether any of their Post Traumatic Stress programs work.
The report by the Institute of Medicine also found that just 40 percent of troops and veterans testing positive for PTS were referred for care.
I don’t know the legal definitions of medical fraud or criminal negligence, but these festering omissions must violate some ethical canons or surely the unwritten obligation that one man owes another.
Rick Rogers has covered defense and veterans issues for nearly 30 years. He hosts Front Center: Military Talk Radio Sundays, 11 to noon, Pacific Time, on KCBQ AM 1170 (www.kcbq.com). Podcasts at www.DefenseTracker.com. Contact him at (760) 445-3882 or Rick.Rogers@defensetracker.com
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=216235
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