GAO Report: Pentagon Deserting Our Troops, no health assessments

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

http://www.guerrillanews.com/sci-tech/doc3048.html

Deserting Our Troops
Steven Rosenfeld, September 30, 2003


The Army and Air Force failed to obey Congress' orders to create baseline medical records for soldiers sent to overseas war zones, in this case Iraq, Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) concludes in a just-released report (download PDF here -
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d031041.pdf )


"The percentage of Army and Air Force service members missing one or both of their pre- and post-deployment health assessments ranged from 38 to 98 percent of our samples," the GAO, Congress' investigative arm, found. "Moreover, when health assessments were conducted, as many as 45 percent of them were not done within the required time frames."
These statistics confirm what veterans of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and members of Congress have been saying for months: the Pentagon has been ignoring a law whose primary intention was avoiding a repeat of the military's mistakes surrounding its handling of veteran illnesses that have become known as Gulf War Syndrome.


After the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, tens of thousands of veterans became sick with mysterious illnesses. But because the Pentagon did not have baseline medical records for each soldier in that conflict, it was very slow to acknowledge and act on its responsibility to provide health care for these veterans.
So, in 1997, Congress passed a Public Law 105-85 requiring the military to conduct detailed pre- and post-deployment medical records for every soldier sent into a war zone. The GAO says the military "did not comply" with that requirement in the Iraq War. It also found the Department of Defense (DOD) "did not maintain a complete, centralized database of service members' medical assessments and immunizations."
The issue has been simmering in veteran's circles for some time, but with the Pentagon announcing last week a new round of National Guard deployments to Iraq, it raises the question anew: will the Pentagon fully implement the law?


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