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Veterans Benefits Jeopardized by Rising Iraq War Costs, Hawkins Says
Long Term Costs of Vets Benefits at least $1 Trillion
Weekly Bill in Iraq Now Tops $2 Billion as US Builds Permanent Military Bases
Outsourcing Military Work to Corrupt Corporate Contractors Adds to Costs |
Howie Hawkins for US Senate
www.hawkinsforsenate.net
Media Release
For immediate release: October 30, 2006
For more information: Howie Hawkins, (315)425-1019
Sally Kim, (518) 364-2968
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for US Senate, has been focusing his antiwar campaign recently on his concern that Iraq war veterans benefits are in jeopardy because the federal government is not planning for the over $1 trillion long-term costs of those benefits.
Hawkins, a Marine veteran of the Vietnam era, raised these concerns on Friday at a news conference for the opening of the first GI Coffeehouse of the Iraq War era near Fort Drum in Watertown. He emphasized them again speaking to antiwar meetings in New Paltz and Brooklyn on Saturday and Cooperstown on Sunday.
“The US military’s official number of wounded is now around 20,000. But the reality is that hundreds of thousands of troops have already been disabled during their deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. One-fourth of the returning veterans have already applied for disability benefits. We can expect that to rise to the over one-third of veterans, as we’ve seen with the veterans of the first Gulf War who are now on disability. With over 1 million troops having already served in Iraq and Afghanistan, the real number of wounded and disabled is in the hundreds of thousands and certainly at least ten times what the military is reporting,” Hawkins said.
“Due to today’s body armor, many more troops survive serious wounds with amputations, spinal injuries, and brain damage. Exposure to depleted uranium on the battlefields is causing many long-term disabilities related to radiation exposure, from nervous and sleep disorders to high rates of cancer and Lou Gehrig’s disease, as we’ve seen with the Gulf War veterans. The military itself has acknowledged that one-fourth of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer mental disorders from the trauma of war. Conservative estimates put the cost of taking care of our veterans at one to two trillion dollars over their lifetimes. But the Administration and the majority in Congress continue to deficit-finance these wars, plan for long-term occupations, and leave it to coming generations to pay most of the bills,” Hawkins said.
“How are we going to pay for taking care of our veterans? We heard nothing about that in the Clinton/Spencer US Senate debates from which I was
excluded. They argued over who had the best approach for continuing the war. But they had nothing to say about how the war is bankrupting our country,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins noted the federal discretionary budget for fiscal year 2007 devotes $633 billion to military expenditures and only $350 billion to non-military
expenditures, which includes $36 billion for the Veterans Administration (see http://thebudgetgraph.com).
“The one to two trillion dollar cost of Iraq war veterans benefits is equal to the entire non-military discretionary budget for three to six years and the current Veterans Administration budget for 30 to 60 years,” Hawkins said.
A paper by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, Linda Bilmes, released last January estimated that the long-term costs of the Iraq war would amount to one to trillion dollars, an estimate Stiglitz told the London Guardian was “very conservative” (see http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/cost_of_war_in_iraq.pdf).
“US taxpayers are being fleeced, and American soldiers and Iraqi civilians are being killed, in order to support war profiteers and oil companies. We need to bring our soldiers and tax dollars home now. Instead of occupying other countries' oil fields, we should invest our military budget in
developing renewable energy and providing jobs and services for Americans, including taking care of our veterans,” stated Hawkins.
Weekly Bill in Iraq Now Tops $2 Billion as US Builds Permanent Military Bases
Hawkins said the immediate costs of the war are being underestimated as well, citing a congressional analysis released last month showing that the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week.
“The congressional report documents that once again the US government is misleading both the American and Iraqi about its intention to build
permanent military bases in the country,” noted Hawkins. “Whether you consult the Republican neo-con’s Project for a New American Century
documents or Democratic geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard, it is clear that the real mission of military-industrial elite’s so-called bipartisan consensus on foreign policy is to seize Iarq’s oil supplies and to build permanent bases there to serve as a staging ground for military operations throughout the oil-rich countries of the Middle East and Central Asia.”
The Congressional report shows that the war spending is rising despite relatively constant levels of troop deployment due to a dramatic increase in the “investment costs” needed for military bases to sustain a long-term deployment of American troops in the two countries.
Outsourcing Military Work to Corrupt Corporate Contractors Adds to Costs
Other reports indicate that war profiteering is also a major contributor to the escalating costs.
“From criminal mismanagement of Iraq's oil revenues to armed private security contractors operating with impunity, this war has fueled an appalling amount of corruption. Iraq has become a free fraud zone as well as a free fire zone. It is time to stop the stealing and start the prosecutions. The guilty should not be protected by their campaign contributions,” added Hawkins.
The Center for Corporate Policy reports that the Pentagon's effort to keep a lid on military force requirements (thereby avoiding the need for a draft) has dramatically increased the hiring of "corporate warriors" (i.e., mercenaries). The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates 48,000 private security and military contractors (PMCs) are stationed in Iraq. Observers estimate military outsourcing will be a $200 billion annual business by 2010. In early 2005 CIA officials told the Washington Post that at least 50 percent of its estimated $40 billion budget for that year would go to private contractors.
The use of PMCs has put “both the military and security providers at a greater risk for injury,” the GAO says, because PMCs fall outside the chain of command and do not operate under the Code of Military Justice. PMCs, for instance, were implicated in the scandals at Abu Ghraib.
While Halliburton, formerly run by Vice-President Cheney, has become synonymous with war profiteering in Iraq, there are lots of other major companies with greedy fingers in the pie. Bechtel received one of the largest no-bid contracts -- worth $2.4 billion -- to help coordinate and rebuild a large part of Iraq's infrastructure. But the company's reconstruction failures range from shoddy school repairs to failing to finish a large hospital in Basra on time and within budget. In July, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), released an audit of the Basra Childrens' Hospital Project, which was $70 million to $90 million over budget, and a year and a half behind schedule. Bechtel's contract to coordinate the project was immediately cancelled.
In March, Custer Battles became the first Iraq occupation contractor to be found guilty of fraud. A jury ordered the company to pay more than $10 million in damages for 37 counts of fraud, including false billing. In August, however, the judge in the case dismissed most of the charges on a technicality, ruling that since the Coalition Provisional Authority was not strictly part of the U.S. government, there is no basis for the claim under U.S. law.
A new documentary, Iraq for Sale, by Robert Greenwald, shows a “revolving door” in which high-ranking officers leave the Pentagon to join defense contractors, which in turn lobby members of Congress and contribute millions of dollars to their electoral campaigns. The film shows that billions are being diverted to companies that are overcharging U.S. taxpayers for shoddy services, as illustrated by a $45 bill for a six-pack of Coco-Cola and a $100 fee for washing a bag of laundry.
Hawkins noted that Hillary Clinton is receiving increasing amounts PAC money for her campaign accounts from big military contractors like BAE North America, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. |
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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