More on the Ills of Walter Reed

As I said in an earlier post, I wasn't sure if Maj. Gen. Weightman was to blame, but just as this admin is wont to do, they assigned Walter Reed to Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley. Is this another "Brownie" moment? Kiley was in charge of Walter Reed before Weightman was assigned. The problems of Walter Reed were pointed out to him and he did nothing.

So a man that has been there for 6 months is blamed for years of neglect. Did this man ask for changes and not get them? Was he a thorn in the side that demanded help and was not given it? Hopefully we will find out.

Washington Post, who broke this story, has more today:

Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's surgeon general, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups and members of Congress for more than three years.

A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, said he ran into Kiley in the foyer of the command headquarters at Walter Reed shortly after the Iraq war began and told him that "there are people in the barracks who are drinking themselves to death and people who are sharing drugs and people not getting the care they need."

"I met guys who weren't going to appointments because the hospital didn't even know they were there," Robinson said. Kiley told him to speak to a sergeant major, a top enlisted officer.

A recent Washington Post series detailed conditions at Walter Reed, including those at Building 18, a dingy former hotel on Georgia Avenue where the wounded were housed among mice, mold, rot and cockroaches.

Kiley lives across the street from Building 18. From his quarters, he can see the scrappy building and busy traffic the soldiers must cross to get to the 113-acre post. At a news conference last week, Kiley, who declined several requests for interviews for this article, said that the problems of Building 18 "weren't serious and there weren't a lot of them." He also said they were not "emblematic of a process of Walter Reed that has abandoned soldiers and their families."

But according to interviews, Kiley, his successive commanders at Walter Reed and various top noncommissioned officers in charge of soldiers' lives have heard a stream of complaints about outpatient treatment over the past several years. The complaints have surfaced at town hall meetings for staff and soldiers, at commanders' "sensing sessions" in which soldiers or officers are encouraged to speak freely, and in several inspector general's reports detailing building conditions, safety issues and other matters.

And another article, on Kiley, from Salon:

At a meeting last Dec. 20, a group of veterans advocates informed Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, former commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and now the Army surgeon general, that soldiers returning from Iraq were routinely struggling for outpatient treatment and getting tangled in the military's byzantine disability compensation system -- and that their families were suffering along with them.

"We are here to tell you that our soldiers and our veterans, and some of their families, are falling through the cracks," Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, told Kiley at a meeting of the Department of Defense Health Board Task Force on Mental Health. Kiley co-chairs the panel, which was created by Congress to probe military mental-healthcare capabilities. "Hundreds and potentially thousands of soldiers are facing barriers to mental healthcare," said Robinson, "and are facing improper discharges" because of the Army's complex discharge and compensation system.

Robinson also warned Kiley, who ran Walter Reed from 2002 through 2004 and still has responsibility for it as Army surgeon general, that the scandalous situation threatened to become a media firestorm. "If we identify something," said Robinson, "we would much rather bring it to the chain of command than see it reported in [CBS'] '60 Minutes.'"

Kiley called the veterans' remarks "very important testimony," and allowed speakers to go beyond their allotted time limits, but there's no evidence that he has followed up. Since the Post stories broke, Kiley has mostly insisted that the outpatient problems are confined to poor building maintenance, and has denied any evidence of poor healthcare treatment.

Kiley's office did not respond to an e-mail asking him to discuss what steps he may have taken to address the shortfalls described to him last December. Robinson, from Veterans for America and a retired Army Ranger, said Kiley should have acted after that briefing. "I took this as an opportunity to testify before Kiley and put on the record that we knew what was going on and we wanted him to do something about it," Robinson said in a telephone interview. "It was that the system was broke."

This is a disgrace, just as the handling of Katrina was and still is a disgrace! This admin seems to appoint people that rise to the level of their incompetence!