AMY GOODMAN: I want to go right now to Aaron Glantz. Matthis Chiroux, again, said no to war in Iraq, after serving in Afghanistan. And Aaron Glantz is an independent journalist, who has reported extensively from Iraq, from the invasion to 2005, has been now covering the stories of American military vets since his return. He co-authored with Iraq Veterans Against the War the book Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. And his forthcoming book is called The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans. His latest article is up on The Nation‘s website, called “On Veterans Day, Don’t Forget About the War.”
Your numbers, your figures, your statistics, Aaron, are quite remarkable. As you talk about the lack of the coverage of war in the headlines and the pain that veterans are suffering when they come home, like suicide, can you go through those figures?
AARON GLANTZ: Thank you, Amy. First of all, it’s important to think about the fact and the irony that while Matthis Chiroux and Nick Morgan and the other members of IVAW were being beaten by the police outside of the presidential debate, inside the presidential debate John McCain and Barack Obama didn’t even use the word “Iraq” or the word “Afghanistan.” It was like they were forbidden by the FCC. In the closing days of the campaign, only two percent of all news coverage was about the war. And yet, we have a tremendous crisis with veterans coming home from these wars. We have eighteen veterans committing suicide every day in this country. We have 200,000 veterans sleeping homeless on the street every night.
AMY GOODMAN: I have to stop you there. I want to just stop you there: eighteen veterans a day? Where are these figures coming from?
AARON GLANTZ: The government, the Department of Veterans Affairs. And, in fact, the government tried to cover this up. CBS News was doing an investigation, and there was an internal memo sent by the head of mental health from the VA, and the headline of it was “Shh! Don’t tell CBS News that eighteen veterans kill themselves every day in this country.”
