Transcript: Rebuilding the U.S. Armed Forces with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
Remarks by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) at the Center for American Progress, March 8, 2007
Welcoming Remarks by Melody Barnes, Executive Vice President for Policy, Center for American Progress Action Fund
Introduction by Lawrence J. Korb, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund
MS. MELODY BARNES: Thank you so much. My name is Melody Barnes. I’m the executive vice president for policy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and I want to welcome you to this afternoon’s remarks by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. We’re thrilled to have her here. John Podesta is attending to a family matter and he extends his regards.
It’s always an honor to have Senator Clinton speak with us here at the Center and in particular on the subject of military readiness. Senator Clinton is a tremendous voice for our soldiers and their families from her position on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, and we look forward to hearing her ideas about how to best reduce the strains and burdens on our military today.
We are all familiar with the stories of how our veterans have been treated at Walter Reed and other medical facilities, but the Walter Reed scandal is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how badly the Bush administration has handled our soldiers' lives. Four years ago this month, President Bush led our country into a war of choice against Iraq. Today there are 140,000 American troops in Iraq, and the president is now trying to escalate the war with up to an additional 30,000 combat and support troops.
At its height in 2004, the Guard and Reserves constituted nearly 40 percent of active duty members in Iraq. Although this proportion has declined steadily to 25 percent today, it still exceeds the number of Guard and Reserves mobilized after the 9/11 attack on our own soil. This is unsustainable and counterproductive in terms of our nation’s defenses, and it is entirely disruptive in terms of what we expect from our soldiers and their families.
There is no better person in my mind to discuss these and other related issues than my friend and colleague, Lawrence Korb. Larry is a senior fellow here at the Center and one of the most respected national experts on defense issues. He’s a true champion of military families. He served on active duty for four years as a naval flight officer and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of captain. Larry was an assistant secretary of defense for manpower in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1985, and was awarded the Department of Defense’s Medal for Distinguished Pubic Service during that time.
Larry has spoken frequently about the strains the war in Iraq is placing on the Army and is the co-author of the Center’s strategic redeployment plan for Iraq. Having served in Vietnam and the Pentagon, and having conducted numerous research projects and studies on the armed forces, Larry is uniquely positioned to discuss military issues and to advocate for better conditions for our men and women serving around the world.
Help me welcome Lawrence Korb.
(Applause.)
MR. LAWRENCE KORB: Thank you very much, Melody.
Since the founding of the Center back in 2003, we have emphasized that people, not hardware, have to be our highest priority when it comes to our military forces. And over the last almost four years now, we have done studies and spoken out on issues like combat pay and family separation pay for those brave young men and women who are serving us around the world. We’ve spoken out about the fact that as the wars were building up, people tried to lower the veterans’ benefits. We have argued since 2003 that we need a larger Army. We have been concerned about the mix of active and reserve people so that we will not be as dependent as we should be on the reserves – that we can move more specialties into the active force. We’ve done our own Quadrennial Defense Review to show how we could pay for increasing the pay, benefits, and size of our armed forces.
As Melody mentioned, we put forward first in September, 2005, a strategic redeployment plan to deal with the situation in Iraq. And just recently, on Tuesday of this week, we put out a policy paper called “Beyond the Call of Duty,” which is a comprehensive review of the overuse of the Army in this war of choice in Iraq. And some of the statistics in there are astounding: 12 of the Army’s 44 brigades have served three or more tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, including one National Guard brigade. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, 14 of the brigades have less than two years home before they redeploy, and Army doctrine says you should spend a minimum of two years at home before you go back. Four of them have spent less than one year at home before being redeployed. Previously, units that have served – 11 have gone back with less than two years and another five with even less than one year. We found out that 10 brigades have actually served there more than a year.
So with that the background, it is my privilege and pleasure to introduce a leading member of the Armed Services Committee, the senator from New York, Senator Hillary Clinton, who from her first days in the Congress has been very concerned about these issues.
So, Senator Clinton, thank you very much for coming.
(Applause.)
SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON
(D-NY):
It is a great personal pleasure for me to be here at CAP and to commend all of you who are working every day to make CAP such a reliable and leading voice on the important issues that face our country and the world. And I thank Melody for her introduction and for her leadership here. And particularly because of these issues I want to express my gratitude to Larry Korb and his team here at CAP because he has been extremely helpful in setting the priorities that we should be following and giving some real guidance based on his experience and expertise to those of us who are in the Congress. I certainly miss seeing my dear and longtime friend John Podesta who is, as Melody says, out on a family matter but I want publicly to really applaud his leadership here at CAP. I don’t think CAP would have made the mark that it has in such a short period of time without John Podesta showing the way. So thank you all for everything that you are doing.
I've joined you here at CAP at a time in which the readiness of our armed services and the support structure for our service members are at the forefront of our minds and our national debate.
Four years after the Iraq war began, our troops are stretched to the breaking point with many soldiers – as Larry said – on second, third, or even fourth deployments. Readiness levels are down. According to the recent Center for American Progress report by Larry Korb and others, “public statements by high ranking officials about overall readiness indicate that two-thirds of the Army – virtually all of the active Army’s combat brigades not currently deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan – are rated not combat ready,” and the authors conclude, “Not since the aftermath of the Vietnam War has the U.S. Army been so depleted.” Well, unfortunately, Larry, I agree.
This widespread lack of readiness extends also to the National Guard and Reserves. On March 1st, a congressionally appointed Commission on the National Guard and Reserves released its second report to Congress. The years of repeated and prolonged deployments and inadequate budgets have left the Guard and Reserves so short of equipment, training, and personnel that 88 percent of the Army National Guard units and 44 percent of the Air National Guard units are not ready to be deployed. They are not prepared for overseas deployments and in some cases cannot even adequately respond to homeland security threats or emergencies. The chairman of this commission reported, “We can’t sustain the [National Guard and Reserves] on the course we’re on.” Again, unfortunately, I agree.
Once deployed, our soldiers continue to carry the burden of these strains. We are still hearing reports from the frontlines of inadequate training and equipment. In January, after visiting Iraq and Afghanistan, I stopped back by Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany to meet with recovering soldiers. A young soldier lying in his hospital bed told me that his armored Humvee saved his life, but that too many of his comrades would not have been so fortunate because they do not have properly armored vehicles. We have all heard story after story of mothers and fathers or husbands and wives buying body armor and shipping it to their loved ones. I even heard, Larry, a story recently about a family that shipped welding equipment to their son so that he could help try to weld on additional armor onto the vehicle that they had been issued.
While the Pentagon has publicly expressed its commitment to equipping every soldier with the proper body armor, our experience over the past four years has demonstrated that strong congressional oversight when it comes to personal equipment or vehicles is necessary to ensure that our troops have the protection they deserve. And mission after mission, we find that our soldiers are facing some very difficult challenges. They face these challenges before deployment, they face these challenges during deployment, and now we know they face these challenges after deployment.
We’ve all been following with great distress the story about Walter Reed’s outpatient facility and news reports of other hospitals and facilities where soldiers are struggling to receive appropriate care. When I visited Walter Reed again on Friday to meet with soldiers from New York, I found their tales of being caught up in the bureaucratic nightmares that surround them heartbreaking.
A soldier I visited with – a major from New York – has been at Walter Reed for more than two years in part because after he was injured in Afghanistan, he did not want to be removed from the battlefield and from the troops that he commanded. He stayed longer than he should have, and by the time he was finally evacuated his condition had deteriorated. Because of inattention and ill-treatment at Walter Reed, he had to seek care at Bethesda Naval Medical Center – not an easy decision for a soldier. He appealed his diagnosis and he was finally given the surgery he required. Now he faces yet another battle, with the medical evaluation board, to determine his level of disability. His case officer canceled the first four appointments because of overwork and being overly burdened. The major asked for legal assistance but his requests have gone unanswered.
I want to make clear that in my experience, and based on what I’m hearing from our young men and women in uniform, the doctors and nurses and staff, when it comes to acute care, are performing admirably. But everyone is falling into the same trap laid by a broken bureaucracy, a strained military, and presidential leadership that is missing in action. It turns out there are only three lawyers and one paralegal assigned to Walter Reed’s entire evaluation process. Compare that to 4,000 Army JAG lawyers assigned to active duty, the National Guard, and the Reserves. A perfect if heartrending example of what are the real priorities for our administration.
The reports out of Walter Reed represent the latest pointed example in a constellation of disgraceful episodes, a pattern that has to go right to the top – a failure of planning, a failure of priorities, and a failure to achieve results. Too often our young men and women who give their all for us lack proper healthcare and preparedness before deployment, then the equipment and training is missing during deployment, and then they come home and once again lack proper treatment and care.
In the leadership vacuum that has been left by the Bush administration, too many members of the military and their families have been left literally holding their breath about what will happen next. Our soldiers are often finding themselves in impossible conflicts abroad where they’re not sure who the enemy is, who’s shooting at them, who’s side they’re on. And then back here they feel, in a metaphorical way, just about the same: who’s on their side? Who’s standing up for them? Who’s speaking out for them? Where do they go to get the help that they and their families deserve?
I’m here to say that the buck does stop with this president. And if he doesn’t take responsibility, I can assure you that the next president will – because our soldiers, our Marines, our airmen, our sailors, our Guard and Reserve, they don’t have the luxury of passing the buck to somebody else. They step forward and they step up and they do the best they can, often under incredibly difficult and dangerous circumstances.
When did we stop seeing every young man and woman who wears the uniform as our sons and daughters? Because we would certainly would not stand for this treatment for our own sons and daughters. And so today I’m proposing a series of steps to remedy some of these problems that have come to our attention: to enact a new G.I. Bill of Rights and a series of reforms aimed at keeping our promise to those who serve our nation. But we’ve got to do more, and we’ve got to make sure that we are reordering our priorities from wasting billions of dollars in overpayments to contractors overseas that cannot be accounted for, and instead spending what it takes to give the benefits that truly are needed by our soldiers, our veterans, and their families.
I believe if you serve your country your country should serve you. And that means we send that promise out to those who we ask to enlist, those who we ask to fight, those who we ask to do their best no matter what the orders they receive might be.
During my parents’ generation, the original beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill – signed into law by President Roosevelt – believed in that basic bargain, that their country would give them something in return for what they gave their country. And they understood that if that basic bargain wasn’t honored for our soldiers and our veterans, you couldn’t count on it being honored for anybody. And the bargain helped a generation return from war to build families and businesses, highways and schools, expand higher education, forge the great middle class, and unleash the creative and hardworking spirit of America.
Now, we have been blessed in our history with leaders who understood that in the face of a “long, twilight struggle” we simply cannot close our eyes and wait for morning to come. We have to have control over our own destiny. We have to make smart decisions that protect America’s interests and we have to honor those who are willing to serve.
Now, since joining the Armed Services Committee, I’ve worked hard to uphold that bargain with more than words – indeed, with actions. And improving and expanding access to health care for members of the Guard and Reserve was one of my first priorities. Tracking the health of members of the military is something that I took very seriously because during the Clinton administration some of you may recall we had people coming back from the first Gulf War with all these unexplained illnesses. You know, perfectly healthy young men in the prime of life who went over and served their country came back from the desert with chronic fatigue, with gastrointestinal problems, with very serious skin conditions and other problems that nobody could figure out where they came from, what had caused them. And we didn’t have a good tracking system so that we hadn’t tracked them before they were deployed, and it was very difficult to make a proper diagnosis when they got back. It became known as the Gulf War Syndrome or the Gulf War Illness. And I headed up a commission during the Clinton administration to bring more attention to what was happening to these brave veterans who had served our country so well.
So one of the first pieces of legislation that I worked on and got passed was to set up a pre-deployment and post-deployment tracking system. I’ve worked to make sure that we gave financial literacy education to military families, not only the deploying member but the family that would be left behind often not knowing how to pay mortgages or how to keep up with car payments. We’re talking about very young people. The 20-year-old soldier who deploys may be leaving an 18-year-old wife and a one-year-old baby and they needed that help to get in charge of their financial situation.
We demanded oversight, and frankly until recently we haven’t gotten what we demanded. There was an unwillingness in the Congress to hold the administration accountable and a disdain toward Congress from the highest levels of the Pentagon and White House.
So when we think about what we should be doing, let’s look at the situation that describes most of our active duty Guard and Reserve members now. You know, gone are the days when Guard and Reserve duty meant one weekend a month and two weeks a year. We are using our Guard and Reserve on an op tempo that hasn’t been seen since World War II, and with these new demands come these new responsibilities. And when you look at what was clearly a disparity between active-duty and Guard and Reserve, it became clear that we were sending off young Guard and Reserve members who had health problems. About 20 percent of them couldn’t even deploy because of health problems. You might ask, “Why did they have health problems?” Because a lot of them didn’t have health insurance. They were employed by employers who didn’t provide health insurance or often they were self-employed and could not afford health insurance.
In September 2002, the GAO reported that the Department of Defense had found more than 20 percent of Guard and Reserve members did not have health insurance, a higher percentage than that for the general population. I worked with my colleague, Senator Lindsey Graham, to expand TRICARE, the military’s healthcare program, so that now for the first time every member of the select Reserve and Guard can buy into TRICARE, and so can the small businesses who employ our citizen soldiers. I also succeeded in creating a health tracking program to monitor the health of our service members before deployment and to improve treatment after.
But what I’m finding is that oftentimes it’s not implemented. It’s not being actually applied. And we could not – when I did this legislation with former Senator Talent, we couldn’t persuade the Pentagon to approve it if it included mental health screening, so we now have a big problem with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder and we don’t have the baseline, and we’re going to try to fix that.
When I heard coming from Fort Drum and other bases in my state about unscrupulous lenders fleecing members of the military and their families, I went to work with Senator Enzi to try to make better financial education and training available so that people wouldn’t be taken advantage of. And when I started hearing about equipment shortages and inadequate supplies of body armor and armored Humvees, I called for a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing to investigate these reports. I requested a Government Accountability Office investigation to focus on how the Pentagon’s procurement decisions were made for this equipment. And I demanded that the Army make every effort to provide that additional body armor as quickly as possible to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I have also proposed a plan that I call the Iraq Troop Protection and Reduction Act that will prohibit funds from being spent to send troops to Iraq unless the secretary of defense certifies to Congress that the troops are being deployed with adequate equipment and training for their mission. Promises simply are not enough anymore.
And finally, we have a duty to our young men and women when they return home and they are now veterans and they will be veterans for life. And some come back with debilitating injuries and some of course we know never come back. And because of what has now come to light, we can finally focus attention of the Congress and the country about what we need to do to try to fix the problems that have been identified.
Today I’m proposing new efforts to fix the disability benefits system; to help returning service members adapt to civilian life, especially while recovering from their wounds and their psychological challenges, their traumatic brain injuries and their post-traumatic stress disorder; and I also want to help the children of single parents who have lost their mom or dad in service to our country.
In response to the reports of the disgraceful conditions and treatment that we have been receiving, I’ve asked the Army Inspector General to investigate what senior Army officials knew about the conditions and treatment of patients at Walter Reed and when they knew it. It’s important that we hold people up the chain of command accountable, and we haven’t done enough of that in these wars since 2001.
One common thread of the complaints that I’ve heard from the soldiers from New York with whom I met on Friday is the disjointed and unfair process for evaluating disabilities: the untrained and overworked staff; the inaccurate documentation by a revolving door of medical providers; the missing documents, the lack of legal counsel; the failures to address new conditions, namely, traumatic brain injury, which is becoming the signature injury of the war in Iraq; and the endless time that our soldiers are made to wait to get any decisions at all.
We also know that 45 percent of the Traumatic Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance claims have been denied. This is an unacceptable rate for insurance that is meant to provide immediate financial relief for wounded service members and their families. There’s a perception from these soldiers that the Army is only concerned with releasing them with greatly reduced disability benefits in order to avoid costs. So today I’m announcing a proposal to fix the process that determines medical compensation for injured troops. The Department of Defense should review previously-denied cases and failed appeals. If warranted, we should provide these service members a new hearing.
We also have a duty to reform and ready the military for the increased number of veterans that are suffering from complex injuries. Many have recently learned about the traumatic brain injury after hearing the incredible story of journalist Bob Woodruff. But there are literally thousands of these stories, and lots of them don’t have such a positive ending. They’re being told in small towns and cities across our country.
Hundreds of thousands of the troops that have rotated through Afghanistan and Iraq have not been given the support they need. According to a March, 2006, study, 19 percent of Iraq veterans and 11 percent of Afghanistan veterans reported mental health problems, and many of them will not report those problems. It is estimated that traumatic brain injury affects more than 25 percent of bomb blast survivors.
When I was in the lobby at Walter Reed, I met a young Army officer who had lost one arm and lost three of his fingers. And I stopped to talk with him and ask him how he was doing, and he said, ‘You know, I’m working hard at my rehabilitation and they’re taking great care of me with my prosthetics,’ he said, ‘but what really bothers me is my memory. I don’t have the focus that I used to have. I can’t really set out tasks and know that I can accomplish them.’ And he said, ‘That’s the thing that really bothers me.’ He said, ‘I’ll be able to cope without my arm and my couple of fingers, but I’ve got to have my brain back.’ And that’s what I’m hearing from so many of these young men and women. A lot of them have no memory of what happened when the explosion occurred. They’re trying to sort that out. They lose their short-term memory. And the diffuse and debilitating symptoms that they suffer leave them with cognitive and emotional problems, including the inability to adapt to civilian life.
And lots of times traumatic brain injury goes undiagnosed because a lot of returning soldiers don’t even know they suffered the concussion. It happened in a split second. They regained consciousness. They’re in a battle zone with all kinds of chaos going on. It’s not until later when they try to begin to re-enter that they realize that there’s something not quite right.
Now, last year I introduced legislation called Heroes at Home. It was an initiative aimed at helping U.S. troops transition after deployment. The Congress passed that into law because it is a first step in recognizing these practical problems that our returning vets experience. And it requires that we do a better job not only by beefing up our response in our military hospitals and our VA hospitals, but starting to use more networks of care even in the civilian community so that people are not waiting for six weeks or six months until they can get in to talk to somebody to try to figure out whether what’s happening to them is something that unfortunately is a result of their experience and the dangers they faced, or maybe there’s something else that is wrong with them.
So today I’m announcing a new initiative to expand my previous initiative that was enacted into law, the Heroes at Home, and I’ve developed this with the Wounded Warrior Project and the National Military Family Association. One, we should do what I tried to get done back in 2002: screen our troops for physical and mental conditions before they are deployed. Two, help families that take care of a loved one. Give them the education and the training they need for dealing with brain injuries and psychological challenges. When a roadside bomb explodes halfway around the world, it touches the lives of so many others who are waiting here at home.
And when the injured soldiers return home, they should be greeted with open arms, not a wall of bureaucratic red tape. Shortly after I joined the Armed Services Committee I heard reports about injured soldiers being in the hospital receiving bills for damaged or missing equipment. Now, imagine how you would feel, as one young man whom I met from New York, Robert Loria, felt. Here he was having lost his arm and being dunned because he didn’t pick up his equipment and gather it while he was being evacuated on a stretcher. I mean, this was just out of some kind of Catch-22 world that just made absolutely no sense. It was embarrassing to hear these stories. And I have been pushing the Pentagon ever since. I’ve called for hearings. I’ve written the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army to call for investigations. I got every one of them to admit to me that they would begin to try to fix these problems.
And I demanded an audit. And just last month I received the results of that audit. The Department of the Army found that almost a quarter of the 1,216 wounded soldiers that they examined in the audit had not been paid what was owed them on time, so clearly we have a lot of work to do to straighten out so many of these unconscionable delays, difficulties, and barriers that our soldiers and their families face.
And finally, there’s an issue that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s one that I think every one of us ought to be just determined we’re going to fix. We’re deploying a lot of single parents overseas. They leave their children maybe with their parents or their siblings or a trusted other relative or friend. And when that single parent is killed in the line of duty, that child – now an orphan – is often cared for by a loving, but financially ill-prepared grandparent, relative, or guardian. In too many cases, single parents killed in combat were not given sufficient understanding of the options they faced to designate a guardian as a beneficiary for survivor benefits. So today I am proposing a simple but important step: to provide service members the option to select a guardian as a beneficiary to provide care for designated dependents. That is an option that we currently do not offer.
Now, everything that I’ve talked about today I wish we didn’t have to talk about. I wish that this was not the subject that anybody could give a speech on, but it’s important that we face up to our shortcomings. And no matter how anyone feels about the war in Iraq or any other issue concerning the use of our military, I think we all agree that we owe these young men and women the very best care and treatment that we can offer them. A new G.I. Bill of Rights will honor the basic bargain at the heart of America’s promise: our troops deserve all the healthcare and support that they are entitled to.
I want to end with just two quick stories. Another one of the New Yorkers I met on Friday – a staff sergeant – is in outpatient facilities. He, too, was physically injured and suffered from traumatic brain effects as well. He’s appealing a disability benefit of 10 percent. His wife is also in the service: an active duty soldier who recently returned from a hardship tour halfway around the world. This couple is doing everything they can to support our country and to fulfill their duty, but they’re not being given the best that they deserve. The staff sergeant requested that his wife be reassigned or made temporarily available so that she can assist him in making this transition he’s going through. He’s in tremendous pain. He suffers memory problems.
And the morning that I met with him, he heard I was coming and he wanted to feel like he was in total control of his faculties, so he denied himself his medication so that he could tell me his story. And his story really is about how he feels: that he’s been left behind by our country. It was clear that despite the low disability rating he’d been given he is terribly afflicted.
The second story comes from an earlier time in our history. On December 9th, 1941, when President Roosevelt addressed the American people in one of his fireside chats, the nation was in shock. Pearl Harbor had taken place just two days before.
At that moment, the president said, “We are now in this war. We are all in it – all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories.”
That was presidential leadership that understood when American soldiers are in harm’s way, we are all at risk. When any one of them is injured, we are all diminished. And when they give the ultimate sacrifice, it is all of our loss.
Two and a half years after the attack on Pearl Harbor and that fireside chat, President Roosevelt signed into law the original G.I. Bill of Rights.
Well, we have a choice to make: are we all in it? Are we all going to stand behind those who are giving everything they have? I think we will, but I think we need to be summoned to do that. So let us work not just to respond to the outrage and the problems of the moment, but to chart a new course for the military and the VA to take care of those who are taking care of us. I have no doubt in my mind that we are guided by the best of American values, not by politics, and if we are steered by the truth, not by wishing it were different, we will produce real results and not just rhetoric. And that is what our troops deserve from us.
Thank you all very much.
(Applause.)
MS. BARNES: Senator Clinton has graciously agreed to take a few questions. Before I ask you to raise your hands and identify yourselves and ask a question, I want to mention that we’ll only be taking questions on today’s topic, so questions not on today’s topic won’t be entertained. And we’d like to start with members of our audience, friends of the Center. And as I said, please wait for the microphone and identify yourselves.
Q: Thanks. I heard a –
MS. BARNES: Could you tell us who you are?
Q: Oh. Julie Freisan (ph). I heard a veterans benefits administrator in a hearing before Congress saying that they’re now going to prioritize soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. And I’m from Illinois where the crisis for veterans benefits is – there’s been a lot of (wariness?) around it because of our senators. So I’m just wondering what is going to happen to our veterans from other wars who are still suffering if this administration now focuses its resources – because there’s other people waiting in line and facing the red tape.
SENATOR CLINTON: Well, we ought to be putting all the resources necessary to get the backlog taken care of. There is a backlog. Veterans who deserve to have their claims heard, who need treatment – it is a disgrace and it doesn’t just affect our immediately returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. And I would hope that whatever it takes financially the Congress will provide, and that we can work with the administration to put into place a system to get everybody to the front of the line.
I don’t want to be choosing between veterans, but I think it is fair to say that for the young returning veterans for whom transition into civilian life is so imperative – if we have to make a choice, then we are going to focus on the returning veterans for Iraq and Afghanistan. We should not have to make that choice. That is a wrong choice and it is only – it’s a false choice that we are being asked to make because this administration is frankly unable to run a two-car parade, let alone a big government – (laughter) – and so I think that they have to figure out how to get out of the way so that we can try to put in place the resources and personnel to deal with these problems across the board.
MS. BARNES: The gentleman back there.
Q: Maury Amache (ph) with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. I was pleased to hear you quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first president I campaigned for as an eight-year-old – (laughter) – in which he said, “We are all in this war.” From this do I take it that you also believe that we should win this war?
SENATOR CLINTON: Well, I believe that, number one, we’ve not been asked to sacrifice anything as a nation. To the best I can remember, and I’m sure the people here at CAP may correct me if I’m wrong, the only thing that we’ve been asked to do as a nation since 9/11 is go shopping, and I think that is a disgrace. I think that is absolutely a message of indifference and insensitivity to the young men and women who are wearing the uniform of our country. We have had a mismanaged and poorly conceived and executed war policy from the very beginning.
So my focus today is on what we do to make sure we take care of those who are trying to fight and be successful, because clearly we are failing on all counts because of the current leadership that we have in our government.
Q: Thank you, Senator Clinton. My name is Annabelle Fischer (sp). I’m a licensed clinical social worker and I have worked as a civilian contractor with the military in outpatient mental health clinics housed in Fairfax and have some knowledge of the mental health concerns that they present – PTSD, other issues they face – folks who are not in the military, whether it’s substance abuse, domestic violence, et cetera.
My question is two parts before you. I heard – was it General Kiley? Isn’t he a general? In a hearing he testified that – two concerns I’m going to raise to look into that PTSD was relatively new and he hadn’t – didn’t know too much about it as a physician. I found that rather astounding since PTSD has been in the DSM-IV for at least 10 to 12 years and to hear the medical director – I think that’s his title – at Walter Reed say that he was not familiar with PTSD I found disturbing.
The second part is, for many of the military who I saw and spoke with, as well as their families, there was a concern of the stigma and label being assessed to them and for their children. And these were some families that I’ve seen, captains at the Pentagon, who wanted to join the military and were concerned that they would be labeled. And I had to reassure them professionally, because I’m very professional, that my records were separate from any other military record.
And I would like to see you guarantee, one, yeah, mental health treatment is okay. It doesn’t make you less of a military person, whether you’re a man or a woman. And two, that these records really do have to remain separate, unless there’s some severe diagnosis, and the ability to communicate technologically with the records even with confidentially in HIPAA. I’m not quite sure how you do it, but it has to be done so that folks can serve in the military when they have mental health problems. Thank you.
SENATOR CLINTON: Well, I think that’s a really important point and you’re absolutely right that many of the soldiers and the physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists, others who treat them all tell me the same thing: that it’s very difficult for a soldier – active duty, Guard or Reserve – to come forward and admit that they’re having nightmares, that they are depressed, that they are flying off the handle, that they are feeling enraged, that they have memory lapses – all of the symptoms that sort of fit into this complex, whether it’s TBI or PTSD. And that the failure to come forward makes it very difficult to know, number one, how many people are actually suffering from these conditions and, number two, to really create a good protocol for treatment so that we know how to treat people and give them the best help they can get.
And so I think we do have to take a hard look at the confidentiality about how we ensure – how people are given the reassurance that they will be protected if they come forward. In fact, a number of the chaplains tell me that one of their primary purposes is to try to absorb and counsel people who are really suffering from these kinds of conditions because the chaplain counseling is private, whereas a lot of the medical treatment or if a soldier goes and tries to speak to, you know, a commanding officer or to seek help, that could be reflected in their records.
So we do have to take a look at this because this 360-degree battlefield that we are putting our young men and women into in both Afghanistan and Iraq and with the lethality of these explosive devices that are being used, we are suffering – we’re seeing a level of suffering from the psychological conditions that we haven’t recognized. Maybe they occurred previously, but we certainly haven’t recognized them to the extent we are today. And we have to remove the stigma in order to figure out how to help people and how to treat them, and if someone wants to get help and still remain in the military to make good judgments about whether that’s disqualifying or not.
Q: Senator Clinton, thank you so much for your concern – heartfelt concern for the young people that we put in harm’s way.
I’m wondering what your position is with regard to landmines and the use of them worldwide and what we should do about all of the hundreds of thousands of landmines that are currently there.
SENATOR CLINTON: Well, you know, I have been in favor of trying to deploy more technology and for the United States to take a leading role in trying to remove and prevent further deployment of landmines; and if that is not possible in every circumstance, to try to create landmines that are not so easily triggered and don’t have as great a human impact as they do, because clearly this is a problem in former war zones, just as it is in war zones. I mean, we’re still clearing up landmines in Vietnam. We have landmines all over Africa, all over the Balkans. We have landmines all over this world and the level of injury and death that is caused today by landmines that were placed 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago is just horrific, so there clearly has to be more of a push.
Now, I just want to add a small caveat: if you talk to our military, they will tell you there are certain circumstances where they still want to be able to deploy landmines and I’m not going to adopt a totally prohibitive view toward them, but I would like to make their use as rare as possible and to make the technology as foolproof as possible so that we don’t have all of this ongoing terrible consequences that we see on a daily basis around the world.
Q: Good afternoon, Senator Clinton. I wanted to ask you since you – yes, my name is Todd Wiggins. Good afternoon. I wanted to ask you your impressions of the Walter Reed facility. There has been an initiative to potentially close down the facility, which obviously will affect the upper Georgia Avenue community, and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you feel that perhaps we should reconsider that.
SENATOR CLINTON: It’s a really good question and that was one of the conclusions that I reached after going back out again on Friday – actually called Secretary Gates because part of what I perceived was that there had been a diversion of energy and resources away from the day-to-day work of Walter Reed because of the BRAC process, that once the BRAC process, which stands for the Base Realignment and Closing Commission, determined that Walter Reed would be closed and that it would –that its services would be integrated in new facilities as well as existing facilities at Bethesda, two things happened. I mean, morale dropped. A lot of people are very devoted who worked there a long time to Walter Reed, to its identity, to its incredible legacy of service. And a lot of people are being pulled off of their day-to-day work to participate in planning for the eventual shutting down of the facility.
So it is a huge complex and I am not convinced now, given the increase in numbers of people who are being treated and will be treated for a long time, that it makes sense to just shut it down completely. So I am asking that we take a look at that and that at least the commission that Secretary Gates has appointed consider the future of Walter Reed as they are trying to determine what are our shortcomings, what do we need to do to be prepared to take care of people, and I hope they will take that into account.
MS. BARNES: Another question right here.
Q: Thank you for coming today, Senator Clinton. I’m Vincent Tersi (ph) on behalf of – I’m a former United States Marine, and I’d like to thank you very much for your comments today with respect to making a bill of rights for our troops because I firmly believe that’s very important.
Obviously, we need to strengthen the strength of our VA and our institutions because these troops are 20 years old. They’re going to be here, God willing, 50 years after they’ve come home, so they’re going to need support. But it seems to me that the best way to protect them ultimately is to avoid putting them in the middle of a sectarian civil war. Do you support legislation that seems like it will be introduced on the Democratic side of the aisle for a phased withdrawal?
SENATOR CLINTON: Yes. In fact, I have my own legislation. And I think we really owe Larry Korb a big debt of gratitude because he created the framework that is being used by Democrats to try to rein in the president, lay down some markers. And my legislation does several things. It caps the number of troops to try to prevent this escalation that the president is determined, unfortunately, to pursue. It does require, as I said, that the president cannot send anybody into harm’s way unless they are fully trained and equipped, which would be a real limitation on numbers and possibility that he could send people into the midst of that sectarian, multi-sided civil war. Thirdly, that it requires that the Iraqi army and police force begin to perform to a level of effectiveness that they have not heretofore shown on a broad basis or that we will not continue to fund them. Why should we be funding them if they are not performing to defend themselves and their country?
It also requires that we force a much harder line on the political work that needs to be done inside Iraq. Everybody says, and General Petraeus said in an interview in the last 24 hours, there is no military solution; there has to be a political solution. But we’re not in my view putting enough pressure on the Iraqis to force them to some kind of a bargaining table with all of the different factions.
The international piece of this, which desperately needs to be done – we’re going to be having a meeting and I’m pleased that the United States will participate and that the meeting will include Iran and Syria, who are part of trying to figure out what we’re going to do going forward, and that we would begin the phased redeployment of our troops, certainly out of urban warfare in the sectarian civil war in Baghdad, and that we would look to see what continuing missions are in the security interests of the United States and that are necessary for us to continue, such as a counterterrorism mission, for example.
So I think that there is a growing consensus on the Democratic side about what we need to do. Just let me add, however, that I don’t think any of us are hopeful that the president will change course and that we will get the Republican support we need to pass some of these restrictions and these requirements to try to force the president’s hand anytime soon. So it’s a very frustrating time right now because we do have agreement about what we would like to see done. And now that we’re in the Democratic majority, we’re certainly going to try to push that forward, but in the Senate particularly we still don’t have the votes to withstand a filibuster by the Republicans.
So the political pressure really needs to be focused on the Republicans and on the White House because they’re the ones who have to be willing to work with us to chart a path out of the sectarian civil war in Iraq.
MS. BARNES: Well, I’d like to thank Senator Clinton for being here with us today and I’d like you to thank you for joining us.
(Applause.)
(END)
