For Immediate Release:                                               FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Wednesday                                                                         CONTACT: Barry E. Piatt

November 4, 2009                                                          PHONE: 202-224-0577

Tens of Thousands of Soldiers May Have Been Exposed:

SENATE DPC HEARING WILL EXAMINE FAILURE TO PROTECT U.S. TROOPS FROM HEALTH IMPACT OF BURN PITS IN IRAQ

( WASHINGTON , D.C. ) — Chairman Byron Dorgan (D-ND) announced Wednesday the Senate Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) will conduct a congressional oversight hearing on Friday, November 6, to examine the health risks associated with the continued use of open-air burn pits by the U.S. military and contractor KBR in Iraq and Afghanistan .

The hearing is set for 10:00 AM and will be held in Room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington , DC .

Although military guidelines allow the use of burn pits to dispose of waste only in emergency situations, most large U.S. military installations have continued to use burn pits for years, despite growing evidence that exposure to burn pit smoke may be causing an increased incidence of chronic lung diseases, respiratory ailments, neurological disorders and cancer.

Hearing witnesses are expected to testify that plastics, paint, solvents, petroleum products, rubber, and medical waste have been burned in the pits.

The hearing will also examine whether military contractor KBR operated the burn pits in a safe and cost-effective manner.

Witnesses will include the Air Force’s former Bioenvironmental Flight Commander at Joint Base Balad, who warned three years ago about health hazards associated with burn pit smoke at the base, two KBR whistleblowers, and a medical expert who will describe  the adverse health consequences associated with burn pit smoke inhalation.

Details follow:

WHO: Senators: Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Chairman, and others.

Witnesses: Lt. Colonel Darrin Curtis, former Air Force Bioenvironmental Flight Commander at Joint Base Balad; Rick Lamberth, former KBR employee; Russell Keith, former KBR medic; Dr. Anthony Szema, MD, expert on health impact of burn pit smoke.

WHAT: Congressional oversight hearing

WHERE:                Room 628 Dirksen Senate Office Building

WHEN: 10:00 AM, Friday, November 6, 2009

WHY: To examine the health impact of burn pit smoke on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan , whether the Army is providing exposed soldiers and veterans with accurate information about the risks, and whether contractor KBR is safely operating the burn pits.

Contact email addresses for the DoL and DoJ for our overseas injured contractors

DLHWC-Public@dol.gov

AskDOJ@usdoj. gov

Michael Niss 202-993-0944

Niss.Michael@dol.gov

Chiu.miranda@dol.gov This Miranda Chiu

Miranda Chiu 202-693-0865

Chamberlain.john@dol.gov

John Chamberlain 202-693-0925

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2009) — The Veterans’ Administration should expect a high volume of Iraq veterans seeking treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, with researchers anticipating that the rate among armed forces will be as high as 35%, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

“Management Insights,” a regular feature of the journal, is a digest of important research in business, management, operations research, and management science. It appears in every issue of Management Science.

The article “A Dynamic Model for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among U.S. Troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom” is by Michael P. Atkinson of the Naval Postgraduate School and Adam Guetz and Lawrence M. Wein of Stanford University.

The tempo of deployment cycles in the Iraq War is higher than for any war since World War II, the authors write, and military survey data suggest that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is common among service members.

To assure ample mental health resources to care for returning troops, the authors argue that it is important for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to forecast the timing and number of new PTSD cases over the coming years, which is complicated by the fact that many cases have delayed onset.

The authors combine a dynamic mathematical operations research model with deployment data and PTSD data from the Iraq War, and estimate that the PTSD rate among Iraq War veterans will be approximately 35%, which is roughly double the rate from the raw survey data. This doubling is due to the time lag between the PTSD-generating event and the onset of symptoms and to the fact that many surveyed troops will do subsequent deployments.

Consequently, the authors write, the VA system, which is already experiencing significant delays for PTSD treatment provision, urgently needs to ramp up its mental health resource capacity.

The current issue of Management Insights is available at http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/reprint/55/9/iv.

The following post by Joan E Dowlin at Huffington Post does not mention that this hero should be receiving treatment for his PTSD under the Defense Base Act.

A close family friend’s son recently returned from Afghanistan where he had been working as a government contractor for the US war there. He is a Veteran Marine who joined in 2002 right after terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11/01. He unselfishly wanted to serve his country and defend us from these attacks.

He was readily accepted by the United States Marine Corp. and his fellow soldiers, having been voted #1 Honor Man of his boot camp even though he was at least 10 years older than most of his peers. He worked his way up to Staff Sergeant and was so well liked by his battalion that they resisted sending him out to the battlefield. They didn’t want to lose him.

But go to war he did with tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He served proudly with many honors and awards until 2006 when he started contract work in Afghanistan.

He has a wife and young son, two parents and a sister who love him dearly. You can imagine his family’s sense of relief every time he returned home safely and in one piece after each tour of duty. His last trip home in September of this year seemed as any other, but then something very strange and frightening happened. He tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head. Luckily, he was a bad shot and survived, ending up needing surgery to repair his eye socket, but the emotional damage is the harder part to heal. We are told he is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which afflicts many soldiers and anyone who has been in life threatening situations. We can only imagine what horrors he has endured being in a war zone off and on for over six years.

This is where we are failing our heroes and veterans. How can Congress pass a $680 billion defense authorization bill on October 22, 2009 to keep spending money and sending soldiers to die or be maimed overseas and not allocate enough for their recovery when they return?

The mother of this heroic Marine informed me that they wanted to get their son transferred to a VA hospital near them so they could visit and support him. Initially, the local VA hospital said no because they didn’t want to take responsibility for this ex-soldier being a danger to himself and others. Then they changed their mind and agreed to admit him, only to days later refuse to take him once again. Finally, they admitted him as a patient the following week. The family has been “tearing their hair out” over the bureaucratic red tape and hoops they have had to go through just to get their son treatment. Hasn’t this family suffered enough from this tragic event? Why has our country’s military hospital system failed them in their greatest hour of need?

So now that he is in the hospital, all is well, right? Well, not exactly. I am told he is currently in a four week Substance Abuse program, although he maintains he does not have an alcohol or drug problem. He agreed to go on the program because the waiting list is far shorter than the PTSD list. Once he began the treatment classes he realized he didn’t relate to the others because it was for “the worst of the worst — guys who have sold their children for alcohol or have drunk rubbing alcohol,” his mother has told me. “But he is choosing to stay because it is important to his future to be able to say he completed the program, however inadequate it is.”

The PTSD program is six weeks long and even though our favorite son is rated at the 90% level on the VA scale of PTSD, he doesn’t qualify because again it is for the worst of the worst and has a very long waiting list. I am told by his parents that thinking six weeks will cure PTSD is like “putting a band-aid on cancer.” The only other approach these government-run hospitals have is to give the patients an RX for anti-depressants and a monthly check from Uncle Sam. To quote our courageous soldier’s mom: “Doesn’t cure a thing.”

She says and I wholeheartedly agree: “It is quite criminal how we’re treating the vets from yet again, another war.” These brave souls have risked lives, limbs, and psyches to keep us safe. They are our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and aunts and uncles. They are true American heroes.

I recently saw an alarming statistic that said that 43% of homeless males over 25 are veterans. What kind of a country are we when the men and women who fight for us overseas return to a system that neglects and discards them at home? Where is the moral outrage?

If you feel as I do, then join me and other friends and family members of these selfless veterans and write to your Representatives, Senators and the President and demand that more be done to care for our returning war heroes.

by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica – October 13, 2009 10:15 am EDT

The Labor Department has launched a series of changes to improve the controversial federal system designed to provide medical care and disability benefits to civilian contractors injured in war zones, department officials say.

The agency has stepped up enforcement, set new goals to speed delivery of benefits and begun tracking the performance of the insurance carriers that sell the highly lucrative policies for war zone workers, a senior official said.

The department is “reaching out to the carriers who are on the front lines to get them to perform at a higher level,” said the official, who declined to be named because he was discussing internal issues. The department will “start collecting data so we can show who’s doing well and who’s doing not so well.”

A joint investigation [1] we did with ABC News and the Los Angeles Times showed that civilian contractors’ claims for medical care and disability payments were routinely denied by insurers. Another investigation [2] by us showed that foreign workers often received no payments at all, though taxpayers had paid premiums to cover their injuries.

The Labor Department oversees the system, which requires defense contractors to purchase workers’ compensation insurance for employees in war zones. The insurance giant AIG dominates the market for such policies, which earn as much as 40 percent profit in some cases. Taxpayers have paid more than $1.6 billion for the policies, which are required by a law known as the Defense Base Act.

Labor officials plan to hold informal meetings to settle disputes between insurers and injured contractors  within 14 days of a request; it takes about 45 days now.  But it remains unclear whether speeding the process will quickly resolve disputes. The meetings hold no legal weight, and the insurers and the contractors  are free to ignore recommendations made by Labor Department examiners.

The department will also begin collecting data on how quickly insurers pay out claims. Without that information, the department has been unable to measure their  performance.

Labor and Defense Department officials also met late last month to discuss broader reforms to the system, the Labor official said. The discussions follow a Pentagon report [3] in September that suggested [4] the government provide its own insurance to cover contractors, at a potential annual savings of $250 million. The system has ballooned in size and cost as civilian contractors have flooded into Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We believe there’s a need for reform,” the official said. “DOD has indicated they believe so as well. Now it’s a matter of getting together and figuring out how to build something.”

The Labor Department’s efforts come as legislators consider new legislation to address flaws in the system.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., held a hearing on the system this summer and had planned to introduce fixes in a bill this year. But he now plans a larger effort to include the Defense Department suggestions, a major legislative undertaking that will probably not take place until next year, according to a Hill staffer.

“I read the report from the Department of Defense with great interest, and I have directed my staff to alter the bill, taking into account this new information.” Cummings said. “The opportunity to keep our civilian contractors protected, while saving the government hundreds of millions of dollars, is one we cannot ignore.”

Oct 14 2009 Cordelia O’Neill

THE fiancee of a Scots security guard shot dead in Baghdad gave birth to their first child on the day he was due home.

Nicci Prestage told yesterday of her joy and sadness after having their baby girl four weeks early.

The youngster’s dad Paul McGuigan, 37, was a former Royal Marine working as a contractor in the Iraqi capital.

Nicci said the baby, who weighed 5lb, was “the image of her father”, originally from Peebles in the Borders.

Nicci, 36, of Tameside, Manchester, added: “She is gorgeous. I still can’t believe that Paul is never going to see her. He would have been such a proud dad, I can picture him grinning like a Cheshire cat showing off his ‘little princess’.

Paul was killed in August with Australian Darren Hoare.

A British national, Danny Fitzsimmons, has been charged with the murder of both men and is being held in custody in Baghdad.

Nicci said: “The last few months have been an emotional roller coaster “I know I have to face up to life without him but it is so very hard to. We were looking forward to being together as a family and bringing up our baby.”

Paul left Peebles in 1990 when he joined the Marines. He started work for security company ArmorGroup Iraq in 2003.

His dad is now in Ireland and mum Corrine has also left their home town.

A spokesman said: “Paul’s family have met their granddaughter – a very moving experience, especially as baby looks so like their son.”

Original Story here

Civilian Contractor Toll in Iraq and Afghanistan Ignored by Defense Dept.

by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica – October 9, 2009

An Afghan policeman walks past a vehicle that had carried U.S. civilian contractors, after it was targeted by a suicide bomber in the Logar province. (Farzana Wahidy/AFP/Getty Images/January 2007 file photo)

As the war in Afghanistan entered its ninth year, the Labor Department recently released new figures [1] for the number of civilian contract workers who have died in war zones since 9/11. Although acknowledged as incomplete, the figures show that at least 1,688 civilians have died and more than 37,000 have reported injuries while working for U.S. contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More than 5,200 soldiers have died in the two war zones, meaning that one civilian contractor has died for every three soldiers — a ratio that reflects the unprecedented degree to which the Pentagon has outsourced the work of war. Civilian contractors make up [2] about half the total U.S. forces in the war zones and they have been deployed on the front lines far more than any previous U.S. conflict [3]. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most outsourced wars in U.S. history.

Despite the importance of civilian contractors to its mission, the Defense Department hasn’t been measuring their sacrifice. A little-noticed report [4] from the Government Accountability Office last week noted that the Pentagon has yet to implement a Congressional requirement to track contractor fatalities.

Military officials brushed off inquiries from the GAO, telling the agency that they “continue to lack a system to reliably track killed or wounded contractor personnel.” To get a handle on the issue, the GAO examined a sample of files from the Labor Department, which oversees a workers compensation program required by a federal law known as the Defense Base Act. The act requires contract firms to purchase insurance to cover civilians injured or killed while working abroad on federal contracts.

While the system is not designed to track war injuries, investigators determined that about 11 percent of reported contractor casualties stem from combat — about the same percentage of soldier casualties attributed to hostile action, according to an April 2007 report [5] by the Veterans Affairs Department. For both groups, most injuries are due to vehicle collisions, muscle or back strains or common, everyday accidents.

The Department of Defense is not alone in ignoring its hired help. Neither the State Department nor USAID could tell with certainty how many contractors they employed, the GAO found. USAID, for instance, failed to report how many civilians it had put to work under a $91 million contract to develop hydroelectric plants and small and medium businesses in Afghanistan. A State Department contracting officer insisted that there was no need to track local Iraqi hires, despite specific statutory language to the contrary, the report found. “Officials acknowledged that they are likely undercounting the actual number of contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the GAO concluded. State, USAID and DOD officials all told the GAO that they were working to fix the problem.

What it all means is that nine years after the launch of the most contractor-intensive war in U.S. history, nobody is sure how many contractors there are, what they are doing, or how many have been killed or wounded.

Thank you Senator Dorgan for your efforts to expose these issues.
Many Civilian Contractors working in the war zones are suffering from the same toxic exposures as the soldiers.

INSPECTOR GENERAL TO INVESTIGATE ARMY’S RESPONSE TO EXPOSURE

OF U.S. TROOPS TO DEADLY CHEMICAL IN IRAQ

By

U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan

Chairman, Senate Democratic Policy Committee

There’s an important development regarding the exposure of hundreds of U.S. troops to the deadly chemical compound sodium dichromate in Iraq . The Department of Defense’s Inspector General, has agreed to investigate the Army’s response to that exposure.. I requested such an investigation, in a letter in August, along with six other Senators.

The reply we have now received is heartening. What happened to U.S. troops – mostly National Guard men and women from Indiana , Oregon and West Virginia – should never have happened and must not be allowed to happen again. They were exposed because of shoddy work by one of the largest military contractors, KBR, but the Army’s deeply flawed response is just as troubling.

The exposure of troops to this deadly chemical compound was first revealed at a June 20, 2008, hearing by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee (DPC), which I chair. We found ample evidence that KBR dropped the ball multiple times with regard to the contract it held for assessing the site, cleaning it up, and getting it running again. It failed to inform the Army of the contamination until months after it knew there was a problem and after hundreds of U.S. soldiers had been exposed. It failed to clean up the site properly. KBR failed to warn even its own workers of the danger.

But the evidence suggests the Army’s response was also highly inadequate and compounded the problem.

We found that when the Army finally got around to informing the soldiers, they consistently down played the seriousness of the exposure. When it finally got around to testing soldiers to determine the amount of exposure they had experienced, too much time had passed. The test results were useless.

We found troops back home in the U.S. coping with illnesses consistent with exposure to sodium dichromate with no idea why they were sick. They did not know they had been exposed to sodium dichromate or that that exposure was life-threatening.

When I called the head of the Indiana National Guard after our 2008 hearing to tell him what we’d learned heard about the exposure of his troops in Iraq to the deadly chemical, he said it was the first he’d heard of it. No one at the Army thought to tell the Commander of the Indiana National Guard that his troops, while serving our country in Iraq , had been exposed to one of the most potent carcinogens in the world.

I asked the Army to review its response to the exposure.

The Army appointed a task force, which reported back, months later, that the Army had not only acted appropriately, but that its response had been exemplary!

Hardly.

We scheduled a second hearing to examine the Army’s response ourselves. That hearing was held on August 3, 2009. We heard very little that was reassuring.

Following the hearing, Senators Evan Bayh (D-IN), Robert Byrd (D-WVA), John Rockefeller (D-WVA), Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) joined me in formally requesting an investigation by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into the Army’s handling of all this.

We now have a written response from the Inspector General’s Office, agreeing to conduct an investigation and making clear it will get underway immediately.

Someone recently asked me what I hope will come out the investigation. The answer is simple – in a word, accountability. I want to know how all this happened, why it happened, and whose being held accountable for it. I want to know what is being done to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

I also want every soldier exposed at Qarmat Ali to be accurately informed, first, that he or she was exposed, and second, that the exposure presents serious health risks. I want every exposed soldier to have access to on-going health monitoring and, if they should get sick, treatment, through the Veterans Affairs network of hospitals. I want this exposure made part of the service file of every soldier who was at Qarmat Ali during this time, so doctors can proactively look for sodium dichromate exposure related symptoms. Time is of the essence in treating illnesses that result from sodium dichromate exposure. Doctors need to know immediately, and up front, that the soldier was exposed.

I also want there to be no question about whether illnesses that result from this exposure are service connected. They can take years, even decades, to show up. If every exposed soldier’s service record includes information about what happened at Qarmat Ali, there will be no question about whether a resulting illness – no matter when it appears – is service connected, and therefore, eligible for treatment at a VA medical facility. If an illness develops, time is of the essence in treating it. I don’t want anyone to have to waste time fighting to establish that the illness is service connected.

War is risky business. Soldiers know that when they sign up. But there is no excuse for any of that risk to come from sloppy work by a U.S. military contractor. Nor is it acceptable for that risk to be increased because the Army dropped the ball in dealing with the aftermath of that contractor’s failure.

I look forward to the Inspector General’s report.

View Video Of Senator Dorgans response here

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE            FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Wednesday                            DORGAN: Barry Piatt – 202-224-0577
September 30, 2009

DOD INSPECTOR GENERAL TO INVESTIGATE ARMY’S RESPONSE TO EXPOSURE OF U.S. TROOPS TO DEADLY CHEMICAL IN IRAQ
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — The Defense Department’s Inspector General (IG) will investigate the U.S. Army’s response to the 2003 exposure of hundreds of U.S. soldiers to the deadly chemical sodium dichromate in Iraq.

A major component of sodium dichromate is hexaalent chromium, one of the most carcinogenic substances on earth. The Senate Democratic Policy Committee has held two hearings on the exposure, revealing a number of failures by contractor KBR to warn troops, and even their own employees, of the exposure and to clean up the contamination. The hearings also exposed multiple failures by the Army to hold KBR accountable and to properly inform and test soldiers once the Army did learn of the contamination.

The Department of Defense (DOD) Inspector General’s investigation of the Army’s actions was requested in August by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who called and chaired the DPC hearings on the issue, and six other members of the U.S. Senate, including Senators Robert Byrd (D-WV), Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA), Evan Bayh (D- IN), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

Charles Beardall, the Deputy Inspector General for Policy and Oversight, has informed the Senators by letter that the IG will initiate an investigation that will begin this month. The Senators asked the IG to investigate seven specific areas related to the exposure and the Army’s response to it.

Dorgan said the hearings revealed “repeated and almost unbelievable failures by both the contractor, KBR, and the Army to take needed steps to protect and even to inform soldiers and workers who were needlessly exposed to this deadly chemical. We want to know how it happened, why it happened, and who is being held accountable. An IG investigation is not only welcome, it is overdue.”

“Oregon National Guard members have suffered serious health problems as a result of the deliberate contamination of the facility by the Iraqi army,” Wyden said. “This investigation will determine whether the U.S. Army and KBR took appropriate precautions to safeguard the health of National Guard members and appropriate action after exposure. I thank the Inspector General for conducting this investigation and look forward to his report.”

Another concern of the Senators has been whether the Army is adequately informing the Department of Veterans Affairs about the exposure and its potentially deadly consequences. Having such information is vital to proper treatment and even the ability of former soldiers to be treated by the VA for a “service connected” sickness that could take years after the initial exposure to develop.

In his letter informing the Senators of the investigation, Beardall said the IG will coordinate his investigation with the Department of Veterans Affairs.