By Peter Van Buren

“My guilt will never go away,” former Marine Matthew Hoh explained to me. “There is a significant portion of me that doesn’t believe it should be allowed to go away, that this pain is fair.”

If America accepts the idea of fighting endless wars, it will have to accept something else as well: that the costs of war are similarly endless. I’m thinking about the trillions of dollars, the million or more “enemy” dead (a striking percentage of them civilians), the tens of thousands of American combat casualties, those 20 veteran suicides each day, and the diminished lives of those who survive all of that. There’s that pain, carried by an unknown number of women and men, that won’t disappear, ever, and that goes by the label “moral injury.”Continue reading→

Chelsea Manning left Ft. Leavenworth prison today at 2 a.m. Central Time. She had served seven years of an extreme 35-year sentence for whistleblowing, a sentence President Obama commuted just before leaving office.

In prison, the Army private, formerly known as Bradley Manning, struggled for transgender rights and wrote about her upcoming release, “For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea, I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world.”  Upon release, she expressed appreciation for “the wonderful support that I have received from so many people across the world over these past years.”Continue reading→

President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order on April 27 establishing, within 45 days, an Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection, to be led by a Special Assistant to the Secretary.

The office will “work closely with relevant VA components to ensure swift and effective resolution of veterans’ complaints of wrongdoing at the VA” and to “ensure adequate investigation and correction of wrongdoing throughout the VA, and to protect employees who lawfully disclose wrongdoing from retaliation.”

[Cross-posted from Whistleblowing Today}