Aidryane's blog

Some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for “extended deployments.”“I can’t imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal,” said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.  Read More »

U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops.  Read More »

The new attempt to solve the problem draws critics from the right and left. Of those who want tougher enforcement, the offensive on non-Mexicans tackles only a small portion of the flow of illegal immigration and amounts to "window-dressing" that obscures feckless efforts elsewhere."It's not quite as important as the administration would have you believe," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants stronger efforts against employers, foreign national fugitives, illegal immigrants and document fraud inside the United States.  Read More »

Beset by start-up and coordination problems in the new Homeland Security Department, ICE faced a $500 million budget deficit in 2004, leaving a fourth of its detention jobs unfilled. As arrests climbed last year, Border Patrol agents released 70 percent of non-Mexicans into the United States. Of those released and later ordered to leave the country, only 18 percent do.Word soon spread to smugglers and illegal immigrants, who rushed in to learn whether finding work in the United States meant only a short detention at the border.Federal statistics show the result, which has enraged border communities.  Read More »

Even if authorities overcome operational and legal hurdles to curb the flow of people from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries, experts say they will be addressing only a tiny sliver of the illegal immigration problem. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested nearly 1.2 million people last year -- the vast majority of them Mexicans who were promptly returned across the border -- and estimates that 500,000 others evaded capture."What Congress has built is one of the most expensive revolving doors in the world," said Victor Cerda, former chief of staff of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.  Read More »

Beefed-up enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border since Sept. 11, 2001, has substantially increased the number of arrests of illegal immigrants, but tens of thousands of captured non-Mexicans continue to be released into the United States because there is no place to hold them, according to experts and immigration officials. The vast majority simply slip away inside the country after being issued "Notices to Appear" for a deportation hearing -- documents known to Border Patrol agents as "Notices to Disappear." The success of border crossers who stay in the United States through this "catch-and-release" process has encouraged others who hope to enter the country the same way.In a dozen speeches since October, President Bush has vowed to replace catch-and-release with the "catch-and-return" of 150,000 "other than Mexican" (OTM) immigrants arrested each year.  Read More »

Greg Beatty's first look at "The Da Vinci Code" came when a neighbor reached across his back fence in 2003 and handed the Catholic lawyer the book and a question: Is this true?After reading the novel, Beatty saw the questioning spread from his Springfield yard to his downtown office at the National Labor Relations Board. Was Jesus really married? Do some members of the Catholic group Opus Dei really wear self-mutilating belts? Beatty could answer some things but not others.Forty-five million copies later, his challenge is about to get bigger.  Read More »

The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson's CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a "junket" to Africa.Cheney's notes, written on the margins of a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, were included as part of a filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the perjury and obstruction case against ex-Cheney chief of staff I.  Read More »