Sick to Death | Fear & Loathing

This is just sick. Internal e-mails made public this week as part of a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court show what appears to be the deliberate attempt by top Veterans Administration officials to conceal the number of suicides and attempted suicides by veterans.

In one email message titled “Not for the CBS News…,” the VA’s head of mental health Dr. Ira Katz wrote "Shh!" and then claimed there were 1,000 suicide attempts per month by veterans under the care of the agency.

Meanwhile, the VA was telling Congress and the public that suicide attempts and overall suicides among Gulf and Iraq War veterans are nothing alarming. VA Official Grilled About E-Mails [CBS News].

To my mind, this is one of the biggest acts of hypocrisy imaginable. Almost 25 years ago it was the Agent Orange fiasco. Today, politicians love to trumpet their "support for the troops," but why is it that no one cares about — and worse, covers up — a plague of suicides after the troops come home? The Bush Administration owes them better than that. America owes them better than that. We all owe them better than that.