By Danielle Baussan

A group of retired high level U.S. military officers are calling on Congress to repeal an amendment to the FY 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that they say interferes with efforts to prevent military suicides.

USA Today reported last month that 2012 was the worst year for military suicides since careful tracking began in 2001. A military suicide occurs about once every 80 minutes and most of these suicides are a spontaneous act committed with a private firearm. But medical professionals and commanding officers can’t even ask at-risk service members about concerns about suicide or whether a suicidal service member has a gun at home. That’s due to an FY 2011 NDAA provision, Section 1062, introduced by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) that prevents any questions about firearms, even when a military member is thought to be considering suicide or a harm to others.

In a letter sent to Members of Congress last week, twelve retired military leaders, including Retired Brigadier General Stephen Xenakis of the U.S. Army, said Congress should repeal Inhofe’s measure as “an immediate step that can and must be taken now to save lives.” This is a clear call for action by military leaders who have seen the impacts of “suicide gag orders” firsthand.

Now, it’s up to Congress — really, the Senate — to make it happen. The New York Times quoted Inhofe supporting an amendment “if it clears up any confusion” about whether people can ask about weapons to prevent suicide. Earlier this year, the Republican-led House of Representatives cleared up that confusion, passing language in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to allow commanding officers and health officials to ask service members about suicidal thoughts and private guns.

So we’ve got the original sponsor on record supporting efforts to clarify the language, a House-passed NDAA that includes that language, and highly decorated military officials asking Congress for their help. And yet, there’s not one amendment in the current Senate version of the NDAA to help prevent military suicide.

It’s time for the Senate to take a stand and include some version of the House language in their NDAA. Leaving an issue like this on the cutting room floor does a disservice members of the U.S. military.

Just three days after the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said there were “demonstrations” at the U.S. diplomatic mission there and that the attackers “seized this opportunity to attack our consulate.” McCain also said during this Sept. 14 press conference on Capitol Hill that he wasn’t certain whether al-Qeada perpetrated the assault.

Yet McCain has been leading a smear campaign against U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice for essentially making the same assessment two days later on the Sept. 16 Sunday talks shows. Making clear that a more thorough forthcoming investigation would provide better information for “definitive conclusions,” here’s what Rice said about the Benghazi attack on that day, from CBS’s Face the Nation:

SUSAN RICE: Based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy — sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that — in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.

McCain has since blasted Rice for making this assessment. Here’s what McCain said on CNN last month during the height of his smear campaign against the U.N. Ambassador:

MCCAIN: It was obvious within 24 hours that the station chief from the CIA had said this was a terrorist attack. It was obvious to one and all that this was not a “spontaneous demonstration” because in real time, they saw there was no demonstration. … Everybody knew that it was an al Qaeda attack, and she continued to tell the world through all of the talk shows that it was a “spontaneous demonstration” sparked by a video. That is not competence in my view

But McCain’s analysis of what occurred in Benghazi in the days after the attack on Sept. 14 mirrors Rice’s assessment during her Sept. 16 Sunday show appearances, saying that the attackers took advantage of a demonstration at the U.S. diplomatic mission:

MCCAIN: It’s hard to know exactly what took place and how long it was planned, and — I don’t have that information. I know very well that there were demonstrations, that there was a group of either al-Qaida or some radical Islamists who — about 15 of them, armed with RPGs and other lethal weapons, that seized this opportunity to attack our consulate. And it was an act of terror. It wasn’t an act of a mob getting out of control. We should understand that. This was a calculated act of terror on the part of a small group of jihadists, not a mob that somehow attacked and sacked our embassy.

So both McCain and Susan Rice believed at roughly the same point after the the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks that the terrorists took advantage of a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islam video at the U.S. diplomatic mission there. And like Rice, McCain couldn’t say definitively if it was al Qaeda. When asked if it was al-Qaeda during his Sept. 14 press conference, McCain said, “It certainly was extremist elements. If it’s not al-Qaida, it’s certainly one of the affiliated organizations.”

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