Word: reed
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...front-page stories about frustrated Army spouses and televised hearings with perspiring generals under congressional attack were only the prelude. The Walter Reed imbroglio has now morphed into a real Washington scandal with President Bush's announcement Tuesday morning that he is creating a commission to investigate the problem of poor care and bureaucratic snafus in the nation's military and veterans' hospitals. To lead the commission, Bush's White House deftly picked a severely wounded ex-soldier, former GOP Senate leader and Presidential candidate Robert Dole, and an expert on health care, former Clinton Cabinet member Donna Shalala...
...Creating a commission is such an obvious idea, in fact, that the Pentagon has already beaten the White House to it. On February 23, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he was launching a panel to examine the care at Walter Reed and any other military medical facilities it chooses to examine. Headed by two former Army secretaries, the eight-member group will have 45 days to investigate and report back on its findings. Of course, it isn't being called a commission; that turf belongs to Presidents and lawmakers. The Pentagon's board is more modestly called an "independent review...
...hospital accomodations as a big step up from the conditions they're forced to endure daily in barracks. "If you want clean bed sheets and unstopped toilets, lose a leg," he quotes one soldier. "Otherwise, suck it up and drive on, soldier." A general who had been in Walter Reed told Scales that "the barracks at Fort Stewart, at Fort Bragg, at Fort Drum and at Fort Polk are far, far worse than anything I saw at Building 18," where some Walter Reed outpatients lived amid squalor, rodents, mold and cockroaches. "The sense is that Walter Reed is the symptom...
...string of firings is raising questions about just who is being held accountable as the nation prepares to enter its fifth year of the war in Iraq. Harvey is gone, and the career of the Walter Reed commander he fired Thursday, Major General George Weightman, is all but over. The temporary Walter Reed boss, Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley is likely to meet the same fate. Yet, as the war the Bush administration predicted would be a "cakewalk" before it began has bogged down, not a single civilian boss or top military commander has taken a similar fall...
...That's why the firing of Weightman - who ran Walter Reed Army Medical Center for the past six months - seemed so out of line. Harvey canned him 10 days after the Washington Post exposed the poor living conditions - and lassez-faire attitude from hospital staff - that many outpatients experienced. Harvey replaced Weightman with Kiley, the commander of U.S. Medical Command, who had run Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004. Late Friday, the Army announced that Major General Eric Schoomaker, an Army doctor and younger brother of the current Army chief of staff, would become Walter Reed's new commander...