Griper Blade: Bush's Kind of Guy

When the Walter Reed scandal broke in February, everyone seemed surprised that veterans were being kept in squalor and treated like warehoused goods. Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant defense secretary who oversees veterans' care, said, "This news caught me -- as it did many other people -- completely by surprise." But it was pretty obvious that everyone couldn't possibly be surprised and heads started to roll. A series of fall guys -- including Winkenwerder -- were thrown out until the scandal had died down.

Now, Salon shows us that not only was the Dept. of Defense aware of conditions at Walter Reed, they were actually tracking them.

...[T]he Defense Department had been conducting monthly focus group discussions with soldiers treated at Walter Reed since before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had even begun, and that it continued to do so as wounded veterans of those conflicts arrived at the facility. The interviews with outpatients were set up to monitor Army healthcare and provide military officials with direct information about it.

"They were trying to find out the good and the bad and the ugly," said a former Defense Department official familiar with the DoD focus groups. "That is the good-news story. The bad-news story is they did not do anything about it."

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