Clinton: Treatment Of Troops 'Outrageous'

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
USA Today
April 12, 2007
Pg. 6

Senator/candidate visits wounded, defends record
By Jill Lawrence, USA Today
FORT DRUM, N.Y. — One by one, their eyes on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, more than 40 soldiers recited a somber roll call: name, rank, company and where in Iraq or Afghanistan they had been wounded.
Later, after hearing their tales of chaos, confusion and shabby treatment by the military health care system, Clinton vowed to send her own staff here to help.
"These young men go off to war. They are motivated. They have volunteered. … And then we turn around and don't take care of them," Clinton told USA TODAY late Tuesday. "It's outrageous. I don't know how people sleep at night. I don't get it."
Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has spent the week highlighting the medical needs of soldiers and veterans leading up to a hearing today on their problems by her committee and the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. Her appearances underscored her dual role these days as a Democratic senator from New York and a presidential candidate seeking to be the nation's first female commander in chief.
Clinton also visited veterans hospitals in Syracuse and Canandaigua this week. The 10th Mountain Division, based here, has been deployed continuously since November 2001 and by its own account is the Army's most-deployed division.
She chatted with disabled veterans at their bedsides. She heard wounded soldiers here talk about problems in getting treatment and information, negotiating a chaotic bureaucracy, coping with denials of disability and life insurance claims, and making sure their records — and even they themselves — do not get lost in the system.
Clinton marveled at some tales and shuddered at others. "This has got to get fixed," she said at a tightly controlled meeting where military authorities didn't allow soldiers to be identified or quoted.
Later, she ripped into the Bush administration for talking up the troops but skimping on people, money and equipment. "To me, all this talk about 'We're going to go to war and we're going to demonstrate freedom and we're going to promote democracy and we're going to support our troops' — where's the reality?" she demanded. "The reality is what we do to take care of these people who are serving us and doing the mission that they are ordered to do."
Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, a spokesman at Fort Drum, said most people on the post aren't interested yet in the 2008 presidential election. "I can't say there's been any coffee talk about it. It's a long campaign season," he said.
Yet politics and celebrity were ever-present during Clinton's trip.
Hospital aides raced to get pictures taken with her. A meeting with 12 soldiers at Fort Drum turned into a meeting with nearly four times that many — and they lined the hall afterward to shake her hand. "Defending our country is the paramount job" of a commander in chief, Clinton said in the interview. "I think I'm equipped for that job, but I think that I also have to make the case because a woman has never been president."
Making the case often involves invoking her experience as first lady. "I've been on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and I understand the many tools a president must have to protect America's national security interests," she said.
Anti-war liberals want her to say her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war was a mistake. "Clinton's stance is a basic insult to the courage of those who showed the prudence to vote against the war or those who changed their minds," prominent progressive blogger Matt Stoller wrote in February.
Clinton says that vote was not a misjudgment, but a vote for "coercive diplomacy" — a stick to get weapons inspectors into Iraq — and it's a tool she says presidents must have. "When somebody disagrees with me, or if they want somebody who has apologized for their judgment about the use of coercive diplomacy and the role that that plays in furthering American national interests, they have other people to vote for," she said.
The reference to "other people to vote for" was an allusion to two rivals in the Democratic race: Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who was a state senator opposed to the war in 2002, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who has called his vote authorizing force a mistake and has apologized for it.
 
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