CBS Face The Nation-Transcript

CBS Face The Nation-Transcript

SCHIEFFER: Good morning again. Joining us now from Detroit, Senator Carl Levin. With us here in the studio, Senator Joe Lieberman. And we begin this morning with a story that we should not be reporting, because it's a story that should not have happened. Over the last two weeks, Washington and the nation have been shocked to learn, from The Washington Post, of the appalling conditions in which some of our wounded war veterans are living at Walter Reed Military Hospital. Rat and mold-infested rooms in various states of disrepair. When the story broke, the military rushed in to make repairs, but first tried to blame it on low-ranking enlisted men. But as the pressure has mounted, the hospital commander, General George Weightman, was fired; and Friday, the secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, was forced out. Senator Levin is joining us from Detroit. He is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Senator, I know that you and Senator Lieberman went out to Walter Reed Friday. Is getting rid of these two top officials enough, or is there going to be more things that have to be done?

Senator CARL LEVIN (Democrat, Michigan; Chairman, Armed Services Committee): There's got to be a lot more done, both on the physical situation in various buildings, but, equally important, there's got to be some changes in the bureaucracy, changes in the way that there's an assessment of disability. There's real, deep concern about different standards that exist to assess disability of our troops that are wounded and--between the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration. There's a lot of complaints about bureaucracy not responding. They're understaffed. We need people to be advocates for our wounded, to make sure they get their appointments on time, that they can get there. There's a lot of things that need to be done here.

But, basically, I believe this disgraceful neglect has been the result of a--two things. One is a lack of accountability. There's been a real shortage of accountability in this administration, particularly at the higher levels, for mistakes which have been made. And you'd go all the way back to before 9/11, when the warnings that we got were not heeded, and nobody was held accountable to Abu Ghraib, to all the other mistakes which have been made. There've been no--almost no high level people have ever been held accountable...

SCHIEFFER: Well...

Sen. LEVIN: ...until Secretary Gates came along. And I give him credit for probably--for finally really holding some people accountable.

SCHIEFFER: Senator Lieberman, do you think this is something--one thing that's happened, or is this the tip of the iceberg here?

Senator JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (Independent, Connecticut; Armed Services Committee): I'm afraid, Bob, that it's the--it's the tip of the iceberg. And I think, ultimately, we're going to look back and say that that extraordinary Washington Post investigative series, which drew all our attention because of the mold on the wall and the rodents on the floor at that one building, 18, at Walter Reed, did something much larger. You--you--you could fix the walls and get rid of the rodents, but what that series has uncovered, I believe, is that we are not keeping the moral responsibility we have for the men and women who are fighting for us in the war on terrorism, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. We--we never have--have made the national commitment commensurate with going to war to give our soldiers the best medical care they can receive from the battlefield to back home. In fact, we're giving them the best possible care on the battlefield and in a lot of the inpatient services at places like Walter Reed. But there's too much paperwork, and the Veterans Administration--when the--when the handoff from the Department of Defense to the VA occurs, the VA is just overwhelmed and not giving the kind of first rate treatment to our veterans when they get home that they need, including, particularly, those who are suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome, psychiatric effects of war, and traumatic brain injury. And this is what we, together, have to do urgently.

I just want to add one more word. It's a very important thing you said at the beginning, Bob. Carl Levin and I are good friends. We have different positions about the war in Iraq, but there is not an inch between us on the question of fulfilling our responsibility to the soldiers who are fighting that war, and we, in Congress, have to now get it right.

SCHIEFFER: Senator Levin, do you think any of this is because Walter Reed was actually on the list of bases that are--were proposed to be closed, and they were going to shift a lot of this responsibility over to the Bethesda Naval Hospital? And do you think that is still a good idea to eventually close down this facility?

Sen. LEVIN: Yeah. I don't know whether or not these problems were caused by that. I think they preceded that. I think the basic problem here, in addition to a lack of accountability, which sends the wrong signal to people about their responsibility, is the over-optimism which just symbolized this administration right from the beginning of this war. That the mission was accomplished, well, you don't prepare for this kind of a problem. If, in fact, the insurgency is just about over, as we heard last year from the vice president, it's on its--in its last throes, the vice president says; that when the president says we're absolutely winning, which was just a few months ago, the signal that this sends to the people who are responsible for care is, "Hey, we don't have to plan for a big problem, for big numbers of wounded." Now, maybe it's hard to exactly connect those dots. But when that kind of a message is sent throughout this four year period, it reduces the level of concern and planning which is so essential. I think those are kind of the fundamental flaws.

I don't know whether or not the proposal which has been adopted to close Walter Reed and to shift to Bethesda is--was the cause of this. It may be necessary that we continue to do that in order to have the best possible care. But we're going to look into both of those issues. The Veterans committee, headed by Danny Akaka, and I, as heading the Armed Services Committee, with Joe Lieberman on that committee and others, we're all interested in making sure that the best possible care is given, not just to inpatients...

SCHIEFFER: Well...

Sen. LEVIN: ...not just on the battlefield, but to our outpatients as well. So we're going to have joint hearings to look into the very questions that you've identified.

SCHIEFFER: Senator Lieberman, anybody who saw the documentary that Bob Woodruff--who was badly injured in Iraq working for ABC--the one hour that he put on about how the Veterans Administration, number one, seems to be sort of de-emphasizing, they're trying to play down the number of people who've actually been injured in Iraq. And--and they are--seem so out of touch with their own system that they're sending soldiers with injuries to the wrong hospitals to get the treatment they need.

Sen. LIEBERMAN: Right.

SCHIEFFER: Do you think he should step down as secretary of Veterans Affairs?

Sen. LIEBERMAN: Let me answer that question. Actually, I want to say first about Walter Reed, I--I think this--this second look at Walter Reed, brought on by The Washington Post investigation, ought to lead us to take a second look at the BRAC decision to close Walter Reed. The fact is we're going to be in this war on terrorism for some time to come. It's going to give us more veterans. We need to decide, frankly, whether we want to expand and improve Walter Reed as opposed to closing it and consolidating it up at Bethesda.

Second, I'm--I'm not prepared to say that the secretary of the Veterans Administration ought to be let go. But I can tell you this, that Veterans Administration needs an urgent review from the president, from the White House, from Congress. It's not doing the job we need it to do. We've already had hundreds of thousands of new veterans coming out from Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers are going to grow. That administration is not prepared to give them the treatment that--that we have a moral responsibility to give them. Let me say something else, Bob. It's not going to be done on the cheap. These--these men and women are putting their lives on the line for the rest of us Americans. We've got to be willing--even if it requires a special tax increase--to support more services for our veterans, to give them the best from the battlefield to when they get back home.

SCHIEFFER: You're ready to raise taxes to give these veterans a better...

Sen. LIEBERMAN: I am. I am in a moment. You talk about the fact, as people have said since 9/11, that a very small percentage of Americans have actually sacrificed for our security in a war against radical Islam. That's right. The rest of us ought to sacrifice a little bit more to take care of those who are sacrificing, less than 1 percent of our population.

SCHIEFFER: You know, Senator Levin, it is clear now that the government is keeping two sets of books, it seems, on the number of non-fatal casualties. What is it--the Defense Department says about 25,000, something, 30,000, in that range, have been wounded. Now we had the head--head of the Veterans Administration admitting that 200,000 have come there for treatment. He tried to play it down by saying, I think his quote was, `some of them just to get dental work.' But I think he may want to rethink that a little bit. What's going on here?

Sen. LEVIN: Well, what's going on is that there are two different standards, one by the Department of Defense, one by the Veterans Administration for what represents disability, what represents a sufficient situation which is difficult for a soldier or a veteran so that they're not prepared to return to duty. There's--there is bureaucratic snafus. You know, the administration tried to cut the--the Veterans Administration budget by a couple billion dollars a few years ago, and it took Congress to restore that needed money. It's just been, I think, a fiasco in terms of the way this administration has dealt with this war. And part of it has been the lack of planning and preparation for the casualties of war. And that's something which absolutely needs to be corrected, and we're determined to correct this now. We've got, again, the committees in the Senate are going to come together and hold joint hearings, because we belive it's so essential that we--we eliminate the differences and standards, and that we fill in these cracks that exist between the two agencies.

SCHIEFFER: Let me--let me--I want to come back to this in a little while, but I do want, while you're both here, I want to ask you, Senator Levin, what is the next step in the Senate? Now, you're coming back into session this week. Will Democrats try another approach to constrain the president on the war? Or where do you go from here?

Sen. LEVIN: Well, there's going to be a resolution which we believe will get the support of almost every Democrat and, hopefully, a few--a few Republicans, because it should not be a partisan issue, which will modify the authorization so that our mission in Iraq is more limited. It will not be combat in the middle of Baghdad. It will be a transition to a more limited mission of supporting the Baghdad army training and logistics of that army. And we will, of course, have a limited presence for a targeted counterterrorism mission, as well as trying to see if we can't provide some support for the--the out-the borders of Iraq. But we--we feel that the...

SCHIEFFER: Do you think that has--let me just ask you...

Sen. LEVIN: ...fundamental issue has got--sure.

SCHIEFFER: ...do you think that has any chance of passage?

Sen. LEVIN: If we can avoid--if we can avoid two things. Number one, reauthorizing the war, which will not pick up a lot of votes. And if we can avoid repealing the previous authorization which creates all kinds of legal problems of retroactivity. But if we can focus on--on this purpose, keeping American troops out of the middle of a civil war, if we can just focus mainly on that with the understanding that there needs to be a limited mission that remains after that, I believe we could get all the--almost all the Democratic votes, plus we can pick up some Republican votes. But that should be our goal. The American people do not want us to get in deeper militarily into Iraq. They want to truly change course. We ought to have a vote which gives us that opportunity. It should not--if it's filibustered then you got a whole different problem. If the Republicans are going to continue to filibuster the effort to simply have a vote as to whether or not we support a surge into Baghdad, more military troops, then we have a real problem...

SCHIEFFER: OK.

Sen. LEVIN: ...because then the Republicans are stopping us from doing that.

SCHIEFFER: And would that--with what you're talking about, would that be binding or nonbinding?

Sen. LEVIN: It would be binding and it should be binding, it seems to me.

SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, let's--let me ask Senator Lieberman, what--what's your reaction to that?

Sen. LIEBERMAN: Well, obviously I'm--I'm against it. I--I don't think the resolution makes sense in so far as--look, if people want to stop this war, the way that the Constitution gives Congress authority to do it is to stop the funding. They won't do that because there's not the support for it, and they--and they don't want to seem to be not supporting our troops, so I think what--what Carl is talking about, to me doesn't make sense. Because if you say the troops can't be involved in combat, but are involved in counterterrorism, the terrorists, al-Qaeda, are there trying to stir up the sectarian violence that we're trying to stop and are doing with some success in Baghdad today. Here--here's my hope. I wish instead of going into this kind of trench warfare, parliamentary partisan battling in Congress off and on for the next few months, that instead we do two things. One is concentrate on something all of us agree on, which is fixing the unacceptable immoral gaps in our treatment system for the veterans who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second, we've got in Iraq now a new plan, additional troops, a new general. The general has said to us by the summer he'll have a clear idea of whether this is working or not. So, as I've said, let's have truce in the political war here in Washington over the war in Iraq so we can give our general and our troops the opportunity to show some success in the real war in Iraq. I--respectfully, I don't believe any of the things that're being talked about by Carl Levin or Jack Murtha or others in the House have a chance of passage. And if they don't, why waste time? Let's keep our eye on what's happening in Iraq, let's help our vets, let's increase the size of the Army and the Marines, and--and let's hope that our troops succeed.

SCHIEFFER: All right. Well, thank you very much, gentleman.

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