The fact that our troops are sent in harms way without adequate equipment and body armor is something to shame even the most hardened soul. What is worse than that is what the Pentagon did today when they fired the commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
It was the right thing to do to fire him for the terrible conditions at the Maryland facility. It was absolutely wrong to replace him with Lt. General Kevin Riley. Riley's current position is as the Army's Surgeon General. His previous post was at....Walter Reed Army Medical Center, while the problems were ongoing!
From the Washinton Post:
Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, said he ran into Kiley in the foyer of the command headquarters at Walter Reed shortly after the Iraq war began and told him that "there are people in the barracks who are drinking themselves to death and people who are sharing drugs and people not getting the care they need."
"I met guys who weren't going to appointments because the hospital didn't even know they were there," Robinson said. Kiley told him to speak to a sergeant major, a top enlisted officer.
A recent Washington Post series detailed conditions at Walter Reed, including those at Building 18, a dingy former hotel on Georgia Avenue where the wounded were housed among mice, mold, rot and cockroaches.
Kiley lives across the street from Building 18. From his quarters, he can see the scrappy building and busy traffic the soldiers must cross to get to the 113-acre post. At a news conference last week, Kiley, who declined several requests for interviews for this article, said that the problems of Building 18 "weren't serious and there weren't a lot of them." He also said they were not "emblematic of a process of Walter Reed that has abandoned soldiers and their families."
So tell me, how does one claim these people support the troops while those that expose this shit hate America? What will it take for the wingnuts across the country to see that the real enemies of the troops at home are the ones that are supposed to take care of them. People like Kevin Riley, and people like George Bush.
The Albany Project has the story on NY's own Louise Slaughter's call for Riley's immediate removal.
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