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But there's more, lots more. The total doesn't include the following:
-- An estimated $100 billion direct cost of the 9/11 attacks.
-- $66 billion to replace destroyed or unusable military equipment.
-- $125 billion in backlogged veterans' claims.
-- Unknown billions for CIA torture-prisons.
-- Multi-billions for homeland security (now budgeted at over $45 billion and rising) to keep a growing restive population in line with hardball tactics like illegal spying, mass roundups and incarcerations, and construction of secret US concentration camps for tens of thousands of aliens and US citizens Bush may label "unlawful enemy combatants" meaning lock-em-up and throw away the key.
-- And there's another major suppressed future expense: the hugely underestimated cost to provide care alone for chronically sick, wounded and disabled Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard economist Linda Bilmes believe will be a minimum $536 billion and may end up much higher. They arrived at the number from their calculation of the number of wounded soldiers to each one killed coming up with the astonishing ratio of 16 to 1 the result of improved medical care and life-saving armor. They used data from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) indicating 50,000 surviving casualties from the wars and 200,000 veterans so far treated at VA centers, 40% of whom incurred serious brain or spinal injuries, amputations of one or more limbs, blindness, deafness, severe burns, or other severe chronic injuries.
They also cited data from the brief Gulf war in which less than 150 Americans were killed noting 48.4% of its veterans sought medical care and 44% filed disability claims, 88% of which were granted. That amounts to an astonishing total of 611,729 Gulf war vets now getting disability benefits, a large percentage suffering psychiatric illnesses including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression - for a campaign lasting six weeks with no occupation.
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