Without minimizing in any way the criminal neglect of the Army and the BushCo contractors who have allowed Veterans' facilities to degenerate into slums, I'd like to offer a different and more systemic explanation for what's happened in the past year to the Veteran's Administration.
It's not the mold, Americans, it's the numbers. This tragic situation is a direct effect of what appears to be a deliberate attempt to stall disability claims, to minimize the numbers of disabled veterans so that the American people won't realize the ballooning tragedy of Iraq.
Officially, the Department of Defense claim there are about 26,000 vets disabled from the Iraq war. That figure is patently ridiculous!
Here is an estimate from Alternet:
"Casualties" in the military sense is the total number made unavailable for duty from all causes, including deaths and wounds suffered in combat as well as injuries, accidents and illness in a war "theater" such as "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (the official Pentagon name for the invasion and occupation). So whether caused by "hostile" (24,965 as of Dec.27) or "non-hostile" (25,406 as of Dec. 2) causes, the Pentagon's own web sites record a toll of more than 50,000 so far in "OIF."
And from Inter Press, a higher estimate:
SAN FRANCISCO, California, Jan 3 (IPS) - On New Year's Eve, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 3,000. By Tuesday, the death toll had reached 3,004 -- 31 more than died in the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
But the number of injured has far outstripped the dead, with the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits.
And here's a number closer to the truth:
The Department of VA predicts it will need to treat 5.8 million patients next year, including 263,000 Iraq and Afghanistan vets returning with serious injuries requiring expensive care.
So what does all this have to do with mold? No one is suggesting that there are excuses for the abyssmal conditions in the barracks. It's a direct effect of subcontracting to private firms who just plain don't care.
But the real reason those slums are being used is that there is a deliberate attempt to slow down disability determinations, creating an impossible backlog of injured servicepersons. Because the administration doesn't want the true number available, the determination process is bogged down, and the numbers of injured returnees "in limbo" grows and grows.
It's all part of the lie, and part of the miserable legacy of this war that our children and grandchildren will have to face.