Marines treated at Camp Lejeune for post-traumatic stress had to undergo therapy for months in temporary trailers where they could hear bomb blasts, machine-gun fire and war cries through the thin walls, according to servicemen and their former psychiatrist. The eight trailers were used for nearly two years, until a permanent clinic was completed in September in another location on the base, said a Camp Lejeune medical spokesman, Navy Lt. j.g. Mark Jean-Pierre. The noise from training exercises "shook me up real bad. I couldn't take it. I almost ran out of there a couple of times," said a Marine patient who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media. "My mind couldn't focus on the treatment. I couldn't tell the difference between the combat zone and the non-combat zone."

Since Veterans Day, Thomas E. Mahany, a 62-year-old Vietnam War veteran, has been on a hunger strike in front of the White House to raise awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder and protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mahany recently wrote a letter to President Obama calling on him to "withdraw our military men and women from the Middle East now." He said he plans to only drink water "until specific action is taken by your administration and our military to stem the tragic and ever-increasing rise in the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)" that has seen a meteoric rise over the years among those serving in the military. Earlier this week, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army, told reporters that suicides among veterans and active-duty soldiers have already reached a record high this year and show no signs of abating. [Note: What was interesting was the wonderful response that Obama gave to this man. And speaking of responses, why are not more vets out camping on the White House steps in support of this guy?]

THE HAGUE — A United States ambassador said Thursday that Washington was concerned about how aggression will be defined as an international crime.

"In the military, you're trained to shoot at a target, but sometimes the humanity of that target intrudes, and people come to question what they've done," said Dr. Shira Maguen (putting it, I would say, mildly). Maguen is a staff psychologist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and lead author of a recent study of the factors causing PTSD, conducted in conjunction with the University of California, San Francisco. The study, published in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, used data from 1,200 veterans of the Vietnam War. It found, much to the researchers' surprise, that "the negative psychological effects of killing" made all other factors pale in comparison.

"It is the problem of an imperialist military built solely to serve the profit system. Contractor industrial complex All U.S. aid, both military and what is labeled “civilian,” is funneled through thousands and thousands of contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. None of these U.S. corporate middlemen are even slightly interested in the development of Afghanistan or Iraq. Their only immediate aim is to turn a hefty superprofit as quickly as possible, with as much skim and double billing as possible. For a fee they will provide everything from hired guns, such as Blackwater mercenaries, to food service workers, mechanics, maintenance workers and long-distance truck drivers."

Speaking to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Clark said American leaders should strengthen the national partnership with Pakistan -- including sharing intelligence regarding al Qaeda operations -- and promote economic development in Afghanistan to undercut the drug trade fueled by growing poppies. Gen. Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate, praised President Barack Obama for taking his time in developing an Afghanistan strategy and said that any troop increase should wait until a firm endgame has been establsihed for U.S. Involvement in the country.

On Veterans Day the Brave New Foundation released this video to place pressure on President Barack Obama not to deploy more troops to Afghanistan. The proposed escalation, which Obama is expected to decide on in the next few weeks, means sending up to 40,000 more troops to the region. In this video, US Marine Corps Veteran, Sgt. Devon Read, said that: "Further troops in Afghanistan is going to escalate the violence, it's going to escalate the Taliban recruiting effort and its certainly not going to create a better situation."

According to a soldiers' advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base where an army psychiatrist has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage, the official suicide figures provided by the Army are "definitely" too low. Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives today. "I see the ugly," Luther told IPS. "I see soldiers beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all the time, and most folks don't want to look at this, including the military." Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of the Soldier's Advocacy Group of Disposable Warriors, knows about these types of internal problems in the military because he has been through many of them himself.

A psychiatrist who tried to prevent Fort Hood-style violence among Marines about to "lose it" instead loses his job.

Britain's Ministry of Defense has launched an investigation into new claims that soldiers sexually abused Iraqi detainees and subjected them to mock executions, hooding, and used dogs to incite fear--interrogation methods that were also used by US soldiers and personally approved by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The charges come on the heels of Britian's complete withdrawal from Iraq last summer. The allegations by former Iraqi detainees include one in which a 16-year-old Iraqi boy claims he was raped by two British soldiers on an army base. One of the victims has likened the alleged abuse to the torture and sexual humiliation that took place in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which was run by US forces.

After eight years of war, we’re losing – only to have turned Afghanistan and Pakistan into terroristic turmoil.

THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right [who proclaimed that] Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a terrorist. Joe Lieberman announced hearings to investigate the Army for its dereliction of duty on homeland security. Peter Hoekstra vowed to unmask cover-ups in the White House and at the C.I.A. It’s quite possible that some of what this crowd says is right . Yet the mass murder at Fort Hood didn’t happen in isolation. It unfolded against the backdrop of Obama’s final lap of decision-making about Afghanistan. In a week of horrific news, it was good to hear at the end of it that Obama is dissatisfied with the four Afghanistan options he has been weighing so far. The more time he deliberates, the more he is learning that he’s on a fool’s errand with no exit. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end.

The current U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, General Karl W. Eikenberry, who was top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, has told President Obama he opposes sending more troops. .... snip ... When the RAND Corporation held a forum on Afghanistan recently on Capitol Hill, Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that it was uncontroversial that US troops had to stay in Afghanistan. I pointed him to polls of Americans, and he replied that Americans get fatigued and don't know any better.

U.S. Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother, is being threatened with a military court-martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan, despite having been told she would be granted extra time to find someone to care for her 11-month-old son while she is overseas. Hutchinson, of Oakland, California, is currently being confined at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, after being arrested. Her son was placed into a county foster care system. Hutchinson has been threatened with a court martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, Nov. 15. She has been attempting to find someone to take care of her child, Kamani, while she is deployed overseas, but to no avail.---

In a last-minute dissent ahead of a critical war cabinet meeting on escalating the Afghan war, US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has cast doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government can address corruption and other internal problems. Meanwhile, a report reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting. Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack. JUAN GONZALEZ: The US ambassador to Afghanistan is warning against sending more troops to fight in the Afghan war. In a last-minute dissent, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry sent two cables this week casting doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government can address corruption and other internal problems. Well, today we turn to a new report that reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting. “How the US Funds the Taliban” is the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine. Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack.

Kellogg Brown and Root and its former parent company Halliburton, which at one time was led by former vice president Dick Cheney, had a government contract to destroy waste at US bases and camps in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort. In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. "It's a big part of their income," one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents. Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which "private security" ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren't ambushed by insurgents.

Article discusses Veteran's Day 2009, 101 years after the armistice that ended the "War to End All Wars." Obama's role as Commander in Chief, and the pending escalation of the central Asian wars.

Gen. Eric Shinseki was famously shunned by the Bush administration for daring to state the true costs of occupying Iraq. As President Obama’s secretary of veterans affairs, he is, thankfully, no less candid about the grinding problems veterans face at home. They lead the nation in depression, suicide, substance abuse and homelessness, according to data that Mr. Shineski is delivering in salvos in his current role. About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries. About 3 in 100 of them are back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of homelessness for Vietnam veterans is, shamefully, well known. But the men and women in this growing cohort took just 18 months to find rock bottom, compared with the five years-plus of the previous generation’s veterans.

I hope that the president and his advisers will pause a moment in their discussion over how many troops to dedicate to Afghanistan and consider this thought: We are sending our citizens to fight in an unwinnable war, only to have them come home to a broken healthcare system that does not even come close to adequately dealing with their physical and mental wounds. Instead of continuing to court the displeasure of the international community and waste untold sums of money, bring our troops home. Take all that money we're spending to prop up a corrupt Afghan government and put it toward a single-payer healthcare system. Put it toward the VA and legislation such as the Caregiver Bill. Put it toward a new GI Bill that will allow soldiers to come home to decent, stable jobs or to be trained in emerging industries. In other words, take care of our veterans first. Only then can you decide if we can afford the cost of war.