Maybe they will consider embedding some reporters in Walter Reed.

IMPEACH THESE ASSHOLES

those wanna bee wombat veterans of neoconia

They'll send them to Guantanamo?

Just like the prior policy in terms of Abu Graib. The best way to deal with the Abu Graib torture photos was to take away the cameras.

That's exactly what they did.

Did I miss something, is Walter Reed now part of the People's Republic of China? or The Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

Public Relations = Minders

Follow chain of Command = Ensure info is lost in Bureaucracy

Even inmates in prison have more rights than these poor heroes.

In Nazi Germany, the populace and the German politicos were convinced that the prisoners in the camps were being well treated with dignity. The PR machine was leading the media around a very carefully managed subset of the camp that was spit-shined for consumption.

This smacks to me of the same strategy of damage control.

...this is VERY much like the "Potemkin Villages" erected by the Nazis to fool the world during World War II. This was most recently described in this past Sunday's 60 Minutes report called "Brundibar: How The Nazis Conned The World". Here are the first passages from this report, as published online:

- - - - - - -

(CBS) How did the Nazis manage to kill six million Jews and keep so much of the world in the dark? Part of the answer can be found when looking at the history of a concentration camp called Theresienstadt, in what was Czechoslovakia. Near the end of the war, the Nazis used the camp to con the world.

Reports had begun circulating in allied capitals that the Nazis were exterminating Jews. The Nazis wanted to refute those reports, so they took this one camp and turned it, if ever so briefly, into a model town. They shot a movie there to prove how good they treated the Jews and invited the Red Cross to inspect it.

Central to the deception was the performance of a children's opera called "Brundibar." The opera survived the war and so did a few members of its cast. They are in their mid-70s now and a few months ago, they invited 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon to spend some time with them.

- - - - - - -

As Yogi Berra might say, "Deja vu all over again!" How sad to realize that leaders of all political stripes, desperate to maintain their power and avoid responsibility, fall into this trap over and over again. And sadder still to recognize that a large portion of the public doesn't value the spotlight of a free press being trained on the excesses and mistakes of OUR GOVERNMENT, which acts in OUR names and by OUR authority.

When I reported to the interservice language school at the Presidio of Monterrey after Army boot camp in 1976, another student (also Army) had already started talking to the media about things that he believed were wrong with the way the military was conducting business on that base. Not long after he was dismissed from the school and sent to a post in Alaska.

This is how the military deals with such things, and always has. You are in the military to do the military's bidding, not the other way around, and need to understand that, in many ways, while you are under the terms of your enlistment you are government property. In any instance of damage to said property, you are the first and foremost suspect-even the enemy gets more benefit of the doubt than you do.

Seriously. In the military mindset the enemy is expected to try to kill or wound you, and you are expected to not let them do that. If you are killed or wounded, then you have failed, not the enemy or the military organization that sent you to fight. And if you can't be patched up and sent back into the fray, then you are of no use whatsoever to that organization.

And people are surprised by things like Walter Reed? Sheesh!

I presume this to be part of the Walter Reed clean-up and refurbishment plan implemented by this morally corrupt administration. Hopefully CNN and Discovery will redirect their focus and do an in-depth report on what led to the brush off. However I won't hold my breath waiting for the broadcast.

...that it can't be solved by making sure that nobody knows about it. Well, according to Bushco, anyway. Most of us learned while we were growing up that when you cover up a problem instead of dealing with it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and when it finally is exposed, you are in more trouble than you would have been if the problem had been dealt with when it was small. I wonder if Bush and Cheney's nannies read them fairy tales when they were little? I'm pretty sure they would have learned some valuable life lessons that they seem to have missed.

a copy of the DVD "The Ground Truth." Excellent film of the mistreatment of our war vets.

Invite some friends over to see it. Spread the word.

Here take an aspirin and call me, in the never.

Restricted travel, restricted speech, and a regimented schedule for soldiers who did nothing to put them in the situation but to get injured. That's how the republicans treat our valorous soldiers.

Potemkin villages were erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787.

If you run into any high school kids this week, be sure and make them aware of what the dirty little secret is, the one that the slick recruiters at their schools won't tell them.

The secret is, on the day of your induction into the military, you stand and raise your right hand. You swear an oath, out loud so that everyone can clearly hear you.

Then the officer who is doing the swearing in ceremony says that to affirm what you just said, you must physically take one step forward. The symbolism of that single step is that you are voluntarily (or not so, under the draft) stepping out of civilian life, with its laws and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, and you are placing your entire being, your very life itself, in the hands of the military and you are agreeing that you will under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Be sure you know what you sign up for. Be sure when you take that symbolic step forward, you know that the Commander in Chief, no matter how vain and stupid he may be, can commit you to certain death or a lifetime of disability at his whim.

It's something to think about after the recruiter shows you all those neat toys you get to play with and how they are going to teach you a skill you can use and how it's all just one big frat party with automatic weapons.