{"id":29010,"date":"2012-03-06T15:05:49","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T19:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=29010"},"modified":"2012-03-06T15:05:49","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T19:05:49","slug":"what-stolen-valor-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=29010","title":{"rendered":"What Stolen Valor costs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I commend Combat CAsh for his post earlier<\/a> and agree that the case, at least from a veteran standpoint has never been put into words so well here. But what sticks in my craw about the Stolen Valor thing is that the government won’t even go after the criminals who are costing us money while they go about the business of slashing legitimate veterans benefits. For one example, something I’ve written about before is the benefits that the DVA is paying to bogus POWs which is so easily remedied from The Strategy Page<\/a>;<\/p>\n

There are only 661 officially recognized U.S. POWs from the Vietnam period. About 500 of those are alive, but when questioned, VA found that they were paying disability payments to nearly a thousand “Vietnam POWs.” It got worse after the 1991 Gulf War. There were 21 officially recognized POWs during that conflict, but the VA found it was paying disability to 286 Gulf War POWs. For years, the VA claimed that they checked out the records before recognizing all these phony POW vets. Apparently there were not a lot of people at the VA who knew how to count.<\/p>\n

Once recognized as a POW by the VA, you have several financial benefits (like not having to make copayments for medical services). Thus the fake POWs are also guilty of stealing money from the government. Veterans groups believe the VA resisted dealing with this obvious fraud because of unwillingness to deal with the resulting bad publicity. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our man in Congress who has investigated his own State estimates that each phony POW costs the state and federal government $36,000\/year in benefits.<\/p>\n

As I’ve said in the past, the Department of Defense Prisoner of War\/Missing Personnel Office<\/a> maintains an online datebase of every veteran who has ever been recognized by them as a POW, and the easiest thing in the world is for the Department of Veterans Affairs to do is check their list of the people they’re paying benefits to the very complete list that DoD has compiled, but the DVA won’t do it. I’ve even volunteered to do it for them, to no results. <\/p>\n

We all know that Joseph Cryer, the Chippendale SEAL, (links here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>) is a phony and he’s collecting $2000\/month for his totally phony mission into Libya in 1986. I’ve contacted the DVA OIG no less than three times on him, and still there’s no action and he continues to collect his benefit – which will never be recovered, even if he strips 24-hours-a-day up there in Ocean City.<\/p>\n

So tell me that the government’s blind eye doesn’t hurt veterans and makes us all look like lying leeches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I commend Combat CAsh for his post earlier and agree that the case, at least from … What Stolen Valor costs<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phony-soldiers","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}