Dr. Dawg

Support our troops!

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The Harper government has been busy persecuting our veterans again. First it was spending our tax money fighting off vets who want to keep their pensions; then it was dismissing out of hand an ombudsman’s report about government mistreatment of disabled soldiers.

The courts have decisively dealt with the first attack on our vets: their pensions are safe from Harper clawbacks. The second battle, still on-going, deserves more scrutiny.

The ombudsman who reported on the abuse of two soldiers by Department of National Defence brass spent five years on his investigation, and issued two separate reports. At the end of this long journey, here is the reaction of DND:

The military is claiming that Daigle, the Canadian Forces ombudsman, has no jurisdiction to even investigate such cases, according to documents obtained by the Citizen.

The Canadian Forces leadership has refused to accept the findings by Daigle that the two combat veterans were treated unfairly and that steps should be taken to deal with their situations. The soldiers had made complaints against a senior officer and other Defence Department managers who deal with stress-disorder issues.

The decision to ignore the recommendations in Daigle’s two reports, the result of five years of investigation, appears to be a hardening of the attitude in the military leadership toward PTSD cases and what the Canadian Forces ombudsman can and cannot investigate. [emphases added]

So it took five years and a couple of damning reports for the brass to “discover” that the ombudsman had no jurisdiction? Isn’t that sort of thing dealt with at the beginning of a proposed investigation, not at the end?

In any case, this is what the Harper government is doing to real flesh-and-blood human beings (not yellowing illustrations in a 200-year-old history book):

In May, one father went as far as to kidnap his son from Canadian Forces Base Petawawa and admit the Afghan war veteran into a civilian treatment facility after the military failed to deal with the soldier’s problems.

The soldier had tried to commit suicide twice.

Support our troops. Yeah, I’m talking to you.

[H/t A. Picazo]

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This page contains a single entry by Dr. Dawg published on September 24, 2012 10:33 AM.

The corporate media ethics machine was the previous entry in this blog.

State eye for the queer guy is the next entry in this blog.

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