Joseph Stiglitz

Speaker: Mark Worden (Standard British accent)

The November issue of Speak Up features an interview with Joseph Stiglitz, author of the disturbing book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: the True Cost of the Iraq War. In this out-take he talks about the Bush administration’s mistreatment of American war veterans:

Joseph Stiglitz (Standard American accent):

Well, we were shocked about a number of things. I mean, when I began the exercise, I knew that government accounting doesn’t reveal full cost and so I thought that there would be, you know, a number that was maybe 20 per cent greater, 30 per cent greater, not so much greater. So, at one level, I was shocked at the magnitude of the discrepancy, but I was also shocked at the lengths that the Bush administration went to try to hide the costs, the fact that we had to work with veterans groups to get (the) Freedom of Information Act to find out what they were doing. I think we were scandalized when it started coming to the way they were treating veterans. You know, I thought, you know, here is an administration that said “We’ll do anything for our… life is priceless, we’ll do anything for our… people who are serving us” and then you start seeing how they treat the people who are serving us and we were scandalized. I, quite frankly, did not think I would wind up doing a book where the veterans would be our allies! You think of the veterans being pro-war and we were obviously questioning some of the premises, but, as we did our book, we realised that the veterans are outraged that… the way they were being treated by the Bush administration. And these are non-political veterans. I mean, obviously some of the veterans groups are political, but the Disabled Veterans of America worked with us very closely because so many disabled people are being treated so shabbily.

(Joseph Stiglitz was talking to Julian Earwaker)

For more on Stiglitz’ book, visit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Trillion-Dollar-War-Conflict/dp/1846141281/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225815915&sr=1-3