Military institutions can classify toxic exposure harm as non-combat-related to deny pensions

Evidence

The Department of Defense discharged Carol Picou in March 1996, five years after her return from the Highway of Death. She was dismissed with “Bowel and Bladder Incontinence—Etiology Unknown.” According to the document that terminated her service, the barrage of illnesses she suffered from was “non-combat-related.” She was thus denied the kind of pension that servicewomen and men injured in the battlefield secured. Her decisive dismissal on the basis of a medically indecisive narrative further undermined Picou’s physical and financial prospects. Beneath the camouflage of slow violence, and despite soaring uranium levels in her urine five years after combat, Picou’s catastrophic physical collapse was dissociated entirely from the environment of war. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 606

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the bureaucratic euphemism strand (ch. 1 ‘Rhetorical unmasking of euphemism’) and the ‘environment of war’ chapter 42-43 material on precision-warfare masking toxic deaths. — connects to: Diffuse responsibility and insulated authority permit denial of collectively caused harm — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1826
• SEED: The ‘medically indecisive narrative’ as a tool of denial is an article angle on how diagnostic uncertainty functions as institutional weapon.

Broader Connections

• Diffuse responsibility and insulated authority permit denial of collectively caused harm #complicates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1826