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Obama Comment on 30,000 Vets Injured Criticized

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In his statement on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion today, President Obama referred to “30,000 Americans wounded in Iraq.”

MATT HOWARD, [email]
Communications director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Howard said today: “Hundreds of thousands of vets are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Many are suffering from military sexual trauma — an estimated one out of three military women. The VA now estimates that 22 veterans per day are committing suicide. Only half of this generation of veterans are even registered with the VA.”

Today IVAW launched the “Right to Heal” campaign with the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq, Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and Center for Constitutional Rights. In a joint statement, they said: “If the president really wants to mark the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, in addition to remembering the 30,000 U.S. service members wounded or killed, he should also acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost and ruined by the U.S. invasion, the poisoned land, the harm to human rights, women’s rights and worker’s rights in Iraq under the U.S.-backed government, and the generation of orphaned children with no one to care for them. And he should make concrete efforts to repair that damage and to provide proper care for not only the Iraqis still suffering from the trauma of the war but for U.S. veterans as well. The war is not over for any of us.”

The groups also filed a petition with the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to request a hearing on the U.S.’s responsibility for the human costs of the war.

See from Neiman Watchdog: “How many U.S. soldiers were wounded in Iraq? We have no idea,” which states: “The true number of military personnel injured in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands — maybe even more than half a million — if you just go a bit beyond the Pentagon’s narrowly-tailored definition of ‘wounded in action’. So why isn’t anyone keeping track?”