Leadership Failure Admitted At Walter Reed

WASHINGTON -- The Army officer who was fired last week over revelations about squalid conditions at the military's premiere medical facility told House members on Monday that there was a "failure of leadership" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Survey:

"Mistakes were made. I was in charge," Maj. Gen. George Weightman said.

Mice infestations, mold on the walls and other substandard living conditions at the facility were made public in a series of stories by The Washington Post. Building 18 at Walter Reed was singled out as especially bad.

During the hearing, former patients talked about those conditions.

"It was unforgivable for anybody to live -- it wasn't fit for anybody to live in a room like that. I know most soldiers have -- you've just come out of recovery, you have weaker immune systems. The black mold can do damage to people. Holes in the walls. I wouldn't live there, even if I had to. It wasn't fit for anybody," Army Spc. Jeremy Duncan told the panel.

Weightman said that, under his leadership, staff at the base failed to see and act on those conditions, "And we should have."

"We did not see where some of these soldier-patients were living, and we should have. There are 371 rooms in Walter Reed, where we house our outpatients at Walter Reed. Twenty-six rooms in Building 18 were in need of repairs," Weightman said.

Former Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey fired Weightman last week and replaced him with Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army's surgeon general and a former commander of Walter Reed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates then fired Harvey for putting Kiley back in charge of the facility.

Kiley appeared alongside Weightman at Monday's hearings in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's hearing.

"As we've seen over the last several days, the housing condition here in one of the buildings at Walter Reed clearly has not met our standards. And for that, I am personally and professionally sorry, and I offer my apologies to the soldiers, the families, the civilian and military leadership of the Army and the Department of Defense and to the nation," Kiley said.

A report in the Post Monday said the military health care problems extend to other facilities around the country, not just Walter Reed. Kiley said that inspection teams had been dispatched to 11 facilities around the country to investigate conditions.

Committee chairman Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., described the situation as "absolutely the wrong way to treat our troops."

He questioned whether the problems are a consequence of inadequate planning for the war in Iraq, or if they were created by contracting out work at the hospital to private business.

Part of the problem, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Richard A. Cody said, is that policies and rules governing many of the health care systems have not been updated for as many as 50 years and have been put to the test by the last five years of war.

"Soldiers and staff are faced with the confusing and frequently demoralizing task of sifting through too much information in too many interdependent decisions and bureaucracies," Cody testified.