Wow—Another exposé: First, Anna Nicole, and Now the VA!

Guess what? The media has discovered that our veterans are getting sorry-ass care. Wow – more Britney Spears (shorn hair on sale for a million dollars), Princess Diana, Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, Anna Nicole Smith, Nancy Grace-Greta van Susteren "missing-woman-of-the-week“. . . news.”

Does anybody imagine that anyone listening from outside the county has any doubt about what really motivates the U.S., foreign policy or otherwise? How meretricious, greed-minimalist miserable can you get? Keep watching; we’ll top it next week - bet on it.

The fact of the matter is that the truth of Veteran’s Administration mistreatment and abuse of U.S. vets was all in the book I first published seven years ago, so don’t say I didn’t tell you so. It was in 1989, doing a Knight Errant operation for a disabled soldier, that I first penetrated the inner sanctums of the Veteran’s Administration. Even when I found evidence that the benefits of thousands of veterans were being systematically stolen by bureaucrats there, and sought assistance from people like U.S. Congressmen and Senators Joel Hefley and Hank Brown of Colorado, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, Senator David Pryor of Arkansas, and others, no one paid the slightest attention.

When, moreover, I forwarded proof, not only to the lawmakers, but to all the major media, even people like Geraldo Rivera, programs like 60 Minutes, Twenty-Twenty, and the like, I got similar response. I even wrote to Soldier of Fortune Magazine. Same result. Gee whiz.

As I type this, Ted Koppel is on NPR, telling about thirty-five years ago and a “Potemkin Village” scene foisted then upon the Richard Nixon delegation to China by the “Red Chinese.

The story of one disabled soldier and the VA is excerpted here from my book, first published in 2000, and goes like this:


Richard Benton was one of what seems to have been dozens, even hundreds, of men subjected by the CIA to the RHIC-EDOM RHIC-EIOCI – “Radio-Hypnotic, Inter-Cerebral-Electronic Implantation of Controlled Ideation” - programs funded by the Congress in HR 15090. Generally, the government’s victims were people the plenipotentiary always considers expendable, people like the prisoners, drunks, addicts, and prostitutes who became Guinea pigs in the vile MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN, and MKNAOMI experiments. Sometimes, though, they used another group society always considers expendable, soldiers. Richard was a soldier.

The primary effort of the experiments was to develop methods similar to that celebrated in the move entitled The Manchurian Candidate. Whether it was successful where Richard is concerned may yet remain to be seen. As it is, Sergeant Benton, a bronze star recipient in Vietnam, was discharged as unfit for further service, his diagnosis that of “atypical psychosis.” Richard, of course, wasn’t alone. A man named Hadley Washington – another soldier - also underwent similar treatment, so similar that there can be little doubt as to its purpose. Both men believed – the latter has passed away – that they were subjected to ECT, Electro-Convulsive Therapy. That’s strange, because in both cases, the original cause for their having been admitted to treatment was listed as appendicitis.

When Benton had been in the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital for thirteen months, hospital records – more about those in a minute – show that he received medication unlike anything any doctor I could find would have associated with either appendicitis or electro-convulsive therapy.
More significant, perhaps, was the fact that when I initially – with written authorization from Sergeant Benton – requested the records, the Army denied ever having had Richard for a patient. Through repeated phone calls, they continued their denials. Walter Reed Hospital’s denials continued even after I had recovered the records by means surreptitious and made them available to a U.S. Senator, Hank Brown of Colorado.


I met Sergeant First Class W.R. Benton after he happened to hear me being interviewed on radio one night. Once having talked to with him and learned that the decorated and totally disabled Vietnam vet was getting “benefits” totaling $320 a month, I took the customary, this-is-the-U.S.-and-the-system-works measures. What happened?

If you thought “nothing,” you’re not only getting ahead of my story, you may have dealt with the U.S. government before. Six months into it all, I sought legal assistance from attorneys, too, among them a man referred to me as the “best VA attorney in Colorado.” Guess what happened? Yeah. “Nada,” as I said in my book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” “zip, zilch, bupkis.”

Undaunted, as the old cliché goes, and already engaged then in covert operations against several agencies of the criminal conspiracy that functions as government in the Nation of Laws, I did my “thing.” Confronted with Army hospitals denying any record of Benton’s treatment, I ninja-finessed a stack of records, then took them to the office of first Congressman Joel Hefley, then Senator Hank Brown.

It wasn’t until I added parts of the congressional record of the CIA MKULTRA stuff, though, that government paid even the slightest attention to my “ankle-biter” – a reference to yours truly obtained from one of my surveillance microphones - efforts. Then, “attention” went from zero to sixty – that being several attempts at mayhem attempts – with the acceleration of a scalded dog.

That’s all beside the point here, actually – suffice it to say that I had thrown a skunk into a federal chicken coop. Sergeant First Class W.R. Benton, you see, was had been a cryptographer at the Pentagon.

But, as I say, I digress. It is also a fact more relevant to the subject that I had begun having Benton wear a “wire” during his interviews with “counselors” at the Veteran’s Administration. The tapes, all sent to all the people I have mentioned here already, uncovered and recorded threats and brow-beating, contemptuous and insulting treatment, and incontrovertible evidence of both VA employee involvement in the attempts at assault on me, but grossly illegal surveillance and wiretapping.

This was 1989, let’s be reminded. 9-11 and the War on Terror began in 2001. Do you suppose the VA had gone to the FISA court? Maybe President Reagan has made one of those “signing statements” we’re hearing so much about?

Anyway, guess what happened. If you thought “nothing,” you’re not only getting ahead of the story, you know more about the media than most. But the VA reacted with the fury suggested by the muggings and other behavior typical of our federal protectors; then, however, the hearing that everyone – initially including Congressman Hefley and Senator Brown’s offices, the VA attorney, and the VA itself - said was impossible was suddenly “granted.”

The letter, incidentally said, “audience is granted.” Audience – does that maybe tell you something about the VA’s attitude where soldiers are concerned?

I would be remiss here, were I to fail to point out that Sergeant Benton’s appeal for full benefits had been rejected on account of his having failed to fill out properly or file on time the paperwork required by the administration. His disability, we should recall, was “atypical psychosis.”

Having at first been denied the apparent privilege of representing Sgt. Benton at hearings, the government inadvertently (apparently) provided me with a two-birds-with-one-stone kill when it conceded that as a retired Army officer I was by VA law permitted to do so. The Army had long – still does, until recently – deny that I am even so much as a veteran (during application for Social Security benefits and the fight that particular involvement with government entailed, the Department of the Army “conceded” – “for purposes of social security and veteran’s benefits” – that I “had military service.”).

The truth – however the nation’s propagandizing media would have us all believe – is that, like each and every one of the federal agencies of government I infiltrated, the Veteran’s Administration is rotten to the proverbial core. This is the United States of America, let us not forget, the bastion of Brobdingnagian Capitalism.

As Johanna, the heroine of my novel, says, “You can never trust a yanqui capitalist – everything is for sale.”