This is going to send ripples through this administration- accountability:
Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey abruptly stepped down Friday as the Bush administration struggled to cope with the fallout from a scandal over substandard conditions for wounded Iraq soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
The surprise move came one day after Harvey fired the two-star general in charge of the medical center in response to disclosures of problems at the hospital compound.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Harvey had resigned. But senior defense officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Gates had asked Harvey to leave. Gates was displeased that Harvey, after firing Maj. Gen. George Weightman as the head of Walter Reed, chose to name as Weightman’s temporary replacement another general whose role in the controversy was still in question.
“I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed,” Gates said in the Pentagon briefing room. He took no questions from reporters.
Rumsfeld would have promoted him and sent him to Iraq to run Abu Ghraib.
cd6
Doesn’t Gates know that “heck of a job” and Medals of Freedom are the SOP in these situations in this adminsistration??
Sombody get this guy the training manual, asap.
Punchy
Somebody watch Powerlie and RudeState and count the number of comments just shredding Gates for….well…supporting the troops.
Sick fucks, these Generals are.
mrmobi
Wow. Good on Gates.
Darrell will be in shortly to… you know.
scarshapedstar
Mmm, I don’t think this will have much of an impact. If he’d been impeached, or maybe drawn and quartered by a mob of angry citizens, maybe. But I imagine that tomorrow he’ll resurface with a vacant look and state that he “wants to spend more time with his family” and that’ll be the end of it.
Tsulagi
Damn, I give Gates a hat tip in one post then maybe I was a little too quick to retract it in a later one. Still, I’ll wait to see who is picked to replace Weightman before changing back. At least if I’m wrong I admit it.
But I do give Gates a little ding on competence. You would think with this Walter Reed thing so visible the entire change of command at WR would have been completely thought through before Weightman was canned.
BARRASSO
Hooray for privatization that totally is the awsomest mostest best way to go!! The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”
The letter said Walter Reed also awarded a five-year, $120-million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.
Did I also mention once that Darrell is just a pathetic contrarian who just wants to disagree with any position defined as ‘Liberal”
David
Maybe I’m overthinking things, but this makes yesterday’s dueling stories about Kevin Kiley even weirder. The secretary of the army gets kicked to the curb over this, but the guy who helped run the hospital into the ground not only gets off but gets his old job back. WTF?
Ditch Digger
I was pretty surprised to read how the right wing blogs also took this story to heart. Oh wait, sweet fuck all so far.
Ted
Destruction of this thread will commence in 5…4…3…
Ted
The accountability must be making Bush nauseated.
jaime
You can’t even goad Rightie Bloggers into talking about this. This scandal doesn’t exist. Walter Reed doesn’t exist.
Dreggas
It’s very simple. If it does not conform to the halcyon daydreams of the right wing then it will not be mentioned on right wing blogs.
BadTux
Count me as someone who is now quite pleasantly surprised. How in the world did Bush actually nominate someone *competent* for Secretary of Defense?!
Oh, Kiley is now out as Walter Reed CO. Maj. General Eric B. Schoomaker has now been appointed as head of Walter Reed. Schoomaker has been in charge of Ft. Detrich (the Medical Research Command) for a while. Whether he’s the right person for this job I don’t know (his prior jobs have been related to medical research, not medical care), but he does have the advantage of being completely outside of what appears to be a totally broken system. Which can be a disadvantage too, but if there’s some butt-kicking to be done, an outsider has an immediate advantage.
In other words, count me as one of those impressed by Gates’s performance here. Of course, compared to Rumsfeld, my stupid plastic-bag-licking cat would be better, but still… this is far better than I ever expected from a Bush appointee. (Oh, the curse of low expectations!).
-BT
jake
I blame the liberal main-stream media.
If Priest & Hull had focused on the ANS Corpse-o-Thon like good little reporters none of this would have been revealed, which is almost the same as it didn’t happen.
Oh, and Clinton is somehow to blame as well.
Zifnab
He didn’t. See: Rumsfeld. Gates is a Bush I guy who got hosted on Bush II in a moment of deplorable political weakness. See: the last election. You might have noticed how Gates and Bush II don’t make alot of public appearances.
As for privatizing Walter Reed and Darrell. I hear crow tastes much better with a bit of salt and some humble pie.
stickler
Yeah, what Zifnab said. Bush was offered a raft of new, unpleasant changes after the last election: Gates was one of them.
Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group was, too.
I’d guess that Little Boots chose the lesser of two unpalatable choices and went with Gates.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Culture of Accountability to take hold all across this great Administration of ours.
Richard 23
Enough Veteran stories. They’re rightfully depressing but have been going on since Clinton slashed the military in the 90s.
Finally someone (Ann Coulter, of course) has the courage to speak the truth:
Hahahaha. It’s so funny because it’s possibly true. For so long the lieberal media has been calling President Bush names like Chimpy and Monkey and Hitler and worse. So it’s about time that someone struck back with the truth!
Ace has a tongue in cheek response here. Shocked, shocked, I am. But hahahaha, it’s too funny! Even the wackjobs on the left are sure to find this humerous, even if they don’t dare admit it.
Walker
I know it is pointless getting into this discussion, but…
What media are you talking about here? Do you mean blogs? Or do you actually have evidence of this happening in the MSM (which is generally what “conservatives” mean by liberal media)?
Punchy
Heh. You act surprised. Niave fool, thy is.
Chuck Butcher
Actually my Blog also found it pretty funny, but maybe not quite in the way Richard23 does. You don’t suppose he’s one, do you?
BadTux
It is interesting that trolls go off-topic to make sexual innuendos against regular posters, but unsurprising. If trolls had positive contributions to make to substantive discussions, they would not be trolls. They would be penguins.
— Badtux the Substantive Penguin
Pb
Yeah, I have to agree, I’m relatively happy with Gates so far–and of couse he’s a way better SecDef than Rumsfeld… or Cheney!
Redhand
I certainly agree with John Cole that Rummy would have tried to sweep the mess under the rug. “Stuff happens,” and all that. Military outpatient care has been problematic for a long time, but the large number of wounded casualties from this war put the whole mess into high profile. And of course medical facilities, just like the military itself, have been strained beyond belief by a protracted war that has been anything but a “cakewalk.”
An even bigger scandal is the F*ck You mindset of the VA when these casualties re-enter civilian life and seek disability benefits. They are thrown into a bureaucratic culture of denial where their service counts as nothing and they are looked on as leeches trying to rip the Government off. The entire process is incredibly adversarial.
In my opinion the VA needs to be abolished as a bureaucracy. The VA’s culture is so poisoned that it can’t be “reformed,” I think. Abolish it and create a new agency that has a different mission from the get-go, and I think there’s a greater chance for better behavior.
HelenaMontana
I am happy to see that DefSec Gates has a slightly better PR sense than the rest of the Cheneybush cabal. However, as for the new commission to investigate the military medical system, the cabal will stymie it at every turn as it has all other commissions it has reluctantly assembled.
The “outrage” expressed by Cheneybush, two weeks after the initial reporting of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed is a sham and joke. I am sure at some point, Cheneybush will whine that nobody could have foreseen how many wounded soldiers would be produced by his misbegotten wars.
The situation at Walter Reed and other military hospitals would have been allowed to continue to quietly fester if Dana Priest and Anne Hull hadn’t exposed them to the world at large. And if there isn’t a coverup still in progress, why are the soldiers forbidden to speak to the media?
The problems at Walter Reed and at other military hospitals will continue to be largely unadressed because the sheer number of wounded coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan is overwhelming the system. And, of course, that nauseating prating hypocrite, Cheneybush, has cut funding for Veterans Affairs.
At least Gates has the sense to try to forestall another Katrina moment. However, I’m sure the next Secretary of the Army will be just another inept crony who’s a slave to defense contractors.
The Other Steve
I have to agree with everybody else.
After six years, I was very surprised by this move. Never have I heard of the Bushies actually firing someone for incompetence. Usually they promote them and act like it never happened.
BTW, the guy who said lawyers should be burned at the stake for defending Gitmo detainees also quit a while back to spend more time torturing his family.
jake
Do you mean Cully Stimson? Now there’s a gent who isn’t too popular at ABA conferences.
Paddy O'Shea
Wounded Troops: Bush’s Second Katrina
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brent-budowsky/wounded-troops-bushs-se_b_42507.html
Paddy O'Shea
Army Times article that discusses the privitization of Walter Reed. Apparently Halliburton was awarded $120 million by the Bush admin to abuse our wounded and dying troops.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/03/Weightmansubpoena
Question: If the decision to turn Walter Reed over to Halliburton was made by civilians, why are only military people taking on the chin?
This little Gates puppet show smacks of cover-up and blame assigning.
Zifnab
Now now, it wasn’t actually Halliburton. Just a medical contractor company started by a former Halliburton exec with heavy Halliburton investment interests.
And only a a true moonbat would defame capitalism by mentioning the care of our troops.
Da Bombz Diggity
John Cole used the proper word to describe this situation: accountability!
It’s not enough for the citizens of the US to be dragged into a war on faulty intelligence.
It’s not enough for over 3000 US servicemen and women to have had their lives sacrificed for such a war.
It’s not enough for us to realize that this war is hurting, not helping us fight the war on terrorism.
It’s not enough to hear Cheney state at the recent CPAC conference that,
“It is worth reminding ourselves, that like it or not, the enemy we face in the war on terror has made Iraq the primary front in that war. To use a popular phrase, this is an inconvenient truth: in Bin Laden’s words, ‘success in Baghdad will be success for the United States.’ Failure in Iraq is the failure of the United States.”
It’s not enough to know that Cheney will never say, that “if the US has failed in Iraq, it is my and the Presidents fault. And for that I know that my sacrifice will never be greater than any individual whose life was sacrificed in this failed war or any soldier whose limbs or mental stability was sacrificed in this failed war, or any parents and family members who sacrificed loved ones for this failed war, or to the American people who trusted that the government would (at least) make an effort to get it right about Iraq.”
But, it is enough, when at a time President Bush needs to build a consensus that a surge of 30,000 additional troops into Iraq is necessary to win the war on terror, to know that there is a neglect of US servicemen and women injured in that Iraq War. If the soldiers were good enough to be sacrificed for the Iraq War, shouldn’t they also be good enough to receive suitable treatment for their sacrifice if they are fortunate to be alive? This is why accountability in a democratic society is important. I was never and have never been in support of the Iraq War, but I would have assumed and expected that wounded soldiers from any war would be taken care of. This is signature of the series of missteps and blatant ignoring that is so characteristic of this administration. Everything that this administration touches fails, when will he be put out? If Clinton could be impeached for receiving a blow job in the oval office, shouldn’t Bush be impeached for all of the mistakes he’s made? I was never mad at Clinton, because his impropriety did not affect my life or any other American life (if his wife could deal with it, I could deal with it), but Bush is responsible for the loss and disregard of American lives. This should incite outrage! Bush should’ve been impeached years ago!
Read all of the stories on Walter Reed here: http://politicsplusstuff.blogspot.com/2007/03/walter-reed-scandal-annotated.html
TR
It’s not enough to hear Cheney state at the recent CPAC conference…
Speaking of CPAC, how about that Ann Coulter? The crowd sure seemed to like her jab at Edwards, but I bet it was even funnier in the original German.
Darrell
But in true moonbat knee jerk fashion, you assume without facts or detail, that such outsourcing is automatically bad for our troops, whereas, depending on the deal, it might actually provide better, more responsive services for the troops. You simply don’t know one way or another.
We don’t know the details of why the decision to outsource those services was made. One thing for sure is that Weightman was the head of a bureaucracy at WR, and had a personal vested interest at the time of his memo not to want to give up any of his empire. His opinion was not a neutral one. I have no idea whether the idea to outsource in this instance is a net good thing or net bad thing, but it’s telling how the moonbats mindlessly react on cue to the news.
Darrell
Funny, I don’t recall any lefties complaining about lack of accountability under Clinton, when wait times at the VA to see doctors was far, far worse than under Bush, despite the fact that Clinton had plummetting numbers of patients in the VA system.
That’s exactly why most complaints from the left on accountability are so phony, as the perpetually outraged leftists demand accountability only for Republicans with no sense of perspective whatsoever.
jake
The Washington Post used to run adverts with the tag line: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.” Harvey doesn’t get it.
Yes. Of course. If people would just shut up about the elephant in the living room, it wouldn’t wreck anything. Curse you, Priest & Hull! Curse you, populace!
jake
Oops. Link to the above mentioned story.
Kirk Spencer
David said:
You’re missing the critical step.
Gen Weightman (cmd off, Reed) gets fired.
The man in charge of deciding – Sec Harvey – appoints Kiley.
Harvey’s boss says that’s wrong and tosses Harvey, with remarks that indicate the sword’s hanging over Kiley, too.
Follow now?
Paddy O'Shea
Darrell: “Clinton! Clinton! Clinton!”
Guess he doesn’t want to discuss the topic.
ThymeZone
We weren’t killing 20+ US servicepeople a week, and shedding official crocodile tears about “supporting the troops” whenever anyone questioned the policy, then, were we, asshole?
chopper
yep. indeed.
hey now, you’re talking to a guy whose only metric for medical care is ‘wait time’. go easy on him, he’s a little ‘touched’.
o
They would have had better treatment then. /snark
Cyrus
Seeing Robert Gates’ name reminds me of Iran-Contra. Remember that? Well, I don’t remember it, I’m only 24, but I’m sure some people here do, and I’ve read about it.
If we have to have an executive branch breaking the law, why can’t it be like that more often? A scandal done competently. Very little actual harm done — one tyrannical Middle Eastern regime got supported over another tyrannical Middle Eastern regime. The effect on Nicaragua was more severe, but the contras weren’t nice people anyway. No harm done to Americans, or to the American legal system, except for the fact itself of a President breaking the law. And with the “evil empire” out there, supporting bad people on our “side” is, if not automatically necessary, at least a little more understandable.
Yes, this is at least half tongue-in-cheek. I’m just saying it’s sad that Gates is the best they can do to clean up George the Second’s mess, and yet if anything in our government were being managed as competently as that had been, we’d be thrilled.