A War Within

STAR-TELEGRAM
Pfc. Jacob Hounshell was classified as a deserter after he refused to return to Fort Hood. The Iraq war veteran has contemplated suicide and is losing his hair in spots.
A war within
A GI's story illustrates the challenges the military faces in delivering mental health services to troubled soldiersBy Chris VaughnStar-Telegram Staff Writer

BROWNWOOD - Pfc. Jacob Hounshell wrote his goodbye on notebook paper, wrapped it around a photo of himself in uniform, left it on his bed and climbed into his pickup.
He was supposed to be heading back to Fort Hood. But he had no plans to make it that far. He'd already figured out what he would do -- drive as fast as he could into an oncoming 18-wheeler. Less than three months after returning from a 14-month hitch in Iraq, Hounshell had come undone.
He could barely remember the excitement he carried to Iraq in early 2004. He was an excellent soldier, by most accounts, even though he was only 18 when he left. On one memorable night, his quick thinking helped his platoon defeat a group of insurgents in Baghdad.
Today, the same soldier, now 20, is wanted for desertion, a particularly loathsome act during wartime and one that could bring a prison sentence.
Hounshell's problems began after he returned to Texas in late February. He couldn't sleep, often wandering through Killeen's all-night Wal-Mart. He had panic attacks and sometimes exploded in anger at the slightest change in plans. He played chicken with other drivers on Central Texas highways.
When he asked the Army for help, he said, he was greeted mostly with indifference.
"I told them numerous times, 'I'm having problems here. I'm seeing ... [things] at night.' They didn't take it seriously," he said. "They did the minimum thing they had to do."
Finally, in May, at the end of an emergency leave, he vowed never to go back to Fort Hood.
It was May 15 when he wrote the suicide note. His mother found it before he could leave the driveway. She jumped in the pickup and wouldn't let him leave.
His family is desperate to get him help, but they have no idea where to turn.
"We're not trying to hurt our soldiers overseas, and we didn't want this fight with the Army," said his mother, Bobbie Hounshell. "But my son had problems when he came home, and all he was told was, 'Drive on.' "
An Army spokesman said Hounshell got help and should have taken the initiative if he needed more. His commander took his situation seriously enough to begin the process of discharging him early, Maj. Scott Bleichwehl said.
"The bottom line is, he got the counseling," said Bleichwehl, spokesman for the 1st Cavalry Division, to which Hounshell was assigned. "He had the attention of the command. He had access to all the services and counseling that all soldiers do.
"The vast majority of our soldiers make the right decisions, and they don't go AWOL."
Whatever happened to Pfc. Hounshell, his story illustrates a challenge facing the U.S. military amid the first massive, extended deployment of troops in a war zone since Vietnam.
Thousands of soldiers are returning home mentally and emotionally spent, some of them with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Pentagon is making unprecedented efforts to help them deal with the trauma, including sending counselors to the battlefield. But the military's culture keeps many troops from seeking help, fearful of being labeled weak or damaging their careers.
"Some commands are sensitive to the fact that not everybody is Superman," said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Silver Spring, Md., and a retired Army Ranger. "But those soldiers that do need help should not be belittled. They should not feel as if the military does not support them.
"Because none of us should forget that the soldier supported the nation."
Soldiers' symptoms
American troops in Iraq are dealing with an unpredictable and unseen enemy, close-up urban fighting, complicated rules of engagement and yearlong deployments. The conditions have taken a toll on many soldiers and Marines on a scale not seen since the late 1960s.
One in six soldiers and Marines reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression or anxiety after deployment in Iraq, according to researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine last summer.
Things might be worse now, some experts said.
Walter Reed conducted its survey in 2003, well before the insurgency escalated and before the deadly Sadr City uprising and the bloody attack on Fallujah in 2004.
The Army is trying new approaches in the field of mental health, including sending professionals to Iraq for on-scene counseling and quizzing every soldier about potential problems when they come home -- part of a process known as reintegration training.
But several advocates for soldiers said getting help still requires a sympathetic chain of command, which is not always present in the Army's warrior culture.
A majority of soldiers who reported mental health problems in the Walter Reed study said they had no intention of seeking help because they would be viewed as weak, their commanders would blame them or their leaders would treat them differently.
Martha Rudd, an Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon, said the Army's leaders are working to lessen the fear of stigma.
"Command influence is the most powerful tool," she said. "When a commander tells his staff that something is important to him, they will pay attention to it. That's the way the Army works."
Deploying to Iraq
Hounshell enlisted in June 2003, eager to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, who fought in World War II. He selected the infantry, knowing that he would go straight to Iraq.
The thought of war excited him. He was, after all, a kid from a sleepy farming community north of Brownwood. His town, May, had one blinking traffic light.
Hounshell flew out of Fort Hood on Jan. 9, 2004, with a cast on his right foot. He had broken his ankle in a fight during Christmas break and needed crutches to climb the stairs to the plane.
He trained for almost a month in Kuwait until his unit -- D Troop, 9th Cavalry Regiment -- prepared to move into Iraq at the beginning of February. It took them three days to drive to Baghdad, escorting a group of non-combat Army units.
Hounshell drove a Humvee the entire trip, braking with his left foot because of the cast on his right.
In Baghdad, Hounshell monitored the radios and did desk jobs in the headquarters platoon until his cast came off in late March.
His commanders told him he'd be going to 1st Platoon and driving for a highly experienced combat veteran and sniper, Sgt. Daniel Osborne.
"Me and him got along great," he said. "We were both from Texas. He was older, probably in his late 20s, and he knew a lot. He'd been on, like, seven combat deployments. He was an ex-Marine. I didn't have to watch what I said with him. I trusted him."
Their newfound friendship was forged April 8.
Five trucks and 18 soldiers were patrolling an area north of Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, "an area in constant combat between Coalition and anti-Iraqi Forces," according to the Army's report of the incident.
At 9:15 p.m., the lead truck spotted 20 insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and rifles preparing a roadside bomb. The platoon attacked. Osborne did not have a night-vision scope on his rifle and couldn't see.
Hounshell gathered all of the flares from the platoon and shot them into the air with his grenade launcher, a tactic that no one had taught him.
Osborne, suddenly able to see, killed six insurgents, and the platoon captured numerous weapons as well as bomb-making material.
"Hounshell was directly responsible for the platoon's victory," read the citation for an Army Commendation, signed by his company commander.
His picture appeared in Stars and Stripes after he and another soldier stopped a car carrying makeshift bombs, and his father proudly recounted his son's wartime exploits in the Brownwood Bulletin newspaper.
Louis Vivian was a sergeant in D Troop during the Iraqi deployment and remembers Hounshell favorably.
"I thought he was a good soldier," Vivian said. "He followed orders."
On his 19th birthday, Hounshell received a four-day pass to relax in the "Green Zone" of Baghdad, where he ate a whipped cream pie and called his mother during a mortar attack.
"I never had any problems over there," he said.
Still, it was a war zone, and 2004 was a tough year for the 1st Cav and its units.
Hounshell rolled down "IED alley" virtually every day, waiting to see which coalition vehicle would be the target of a roadside bomb, or "improvised explosive device," as the Army calls them. He picked up the rotting bodies of Iraqis killed for collaborating with the Americans.
He stood guard at roadblocks, wondering whether the next car might carry a suicide bomber or if he might get in trouble for shooting an innocent civilian who made a threatening gesture.
He killed people, too. He keeps a photograph of his first in the back of his scrapbook.
Seeking help
Once back home, in late February, he couldn't sleep or eat at first. Then, during his scheduled leave in March, he began jumping at loud noises. He screamed at his family for inexplicable reasons and had panic attacks in crowds.
"His 30-day leave here was a nightmare," his mother said.
In early April, he was hospitalized in Brownwood for a bacterial infection in his intestines, his family said.
About a week later, his mother met with D Troop's first sergeant, William C. Davis. Her son was under tremendous stress, she told Davis, struggling to adjust after Iraq and weighed down by a series of medical crises in his family.
The meeting, as she described it, did not go well. Davis, she said, was curt and seemed disinterested. Frustrated, she cursed at him and went with her son to a psychiatrist on post, she said.
Hounshell said he answered a series of questions on a computer and was told that he had three disorders, including paranoid schizophrenia. The doctor, he said, told him she would forward her recommendations to his company commander, Capt. William O. Hickok.
"I never saw any paperwork, though," he said. "She told me she couldn't let me see it."
Shortly after, he went to see an Army chaplain, at the suggestion of his commander.
"He told me the same crap -- you're OK. It'll pass. There's nothing wrong. If you need someone to talk to, call this hot line," Hounshell said. "It was the same crap they give you at reintegration training."
At the same time, family pressures were bearing down on Hounshell.
His older brother's first child was stillborn, and he didn't get permission to attend the funeral. His father had gallbladder surgery. His mother had to quit her job at a dry cleaners to handle the family's medical problems.
His commanders, he said, were unsympathetic.
"The Army says they support families," Hounshell said. "It's true, if you're married. They'll bend over backward to support a soldier who's married. But if your family is your parents, your family don't matter."
The Army declined to make Davis or Hickok available for an interview. Hickok responded generally to questions through Bleichwehl, the division's public affairs officer.
Bleichwehl said he would not engage in a "he said, she said" regarding Hounshell's account. But he said Hounshell's commanders communicated often with him and tried to help, including granting the emergency leave in early May.
"He's had access to all the same post-deployment training and services that all soldiers do," Bleichwehl said. "If he wasn't getting it, there are recourses other than going AWOL.
"You could call the IG [inspector general]. You could call the 800 numbers. You could go to the walk-in clinic. It's ludicrous to say that they prevented him from doing any of it."
Hounshell was also told that he was "being processed for separation," a non-punitive method of granting soldiers an early release from their enlistment, Bleichwehl said.
It sometimes happens, officials said, when a soldier is no longer fit for duty. They are told to seek care from the Department of Veterans Affairs, said Jaime Cavazos, a spokesman for the Army Medical Command in San Antonio.
"It's not a case of the military wanting to get rid of the individual," he said. "If the Army has done what it can, at some point the decision is made to refer them to the VA. ... We're interested in caring for soldiers. We wouldn't have all these programs in place if we didn't."
But Robinson, of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said that, too often, busy top sergeants and commanders in front-line combat units expect soldiers "to buck up and move on." Junior enlisted troops are in no position to say otherwise, he said.
"What the Army has to recognize -- and I was part of the Army -- [is] that we have this mentality that 'if I can't use you, you're not worth anything to me,' " Robinson said. "But you want these guys to recover. You want to help them recover. There is treatment and care to get these guys back on their feet."
Going AWOL
Hounshell went AWOL a few weeks before he probably would have been discharged.
After he contemplated suicide, his parents sought help at a hospital in San Angelo but said they were told that the hospital couldn't admit an AWOL service member unless given approval by the soldier's commander.
A hospital spokeswoman said last week that she was unaware of such a policy.
It's unclear what will happen now.
"I want my son back," Bobbie Hounshell said. "I'm a strong woman, but this is very hard. He deserves a normal life."
Hounshell mostly spends his days tinkering with electronics and doing odd jobs for petty cash. He began using methamphetamine, he said, because it's the only thing that helps him control his anxiety.
His family is in financial difficulty. Jacob Hounshell had been the primary wage earner, his parents said, and his father, Larry, is disabled and doesn't work.
His military health benefits and pay ceased when he went AWOL, so he has yet to see a mental health professional or drug treatment counselor. He probably ruined his chances of receiving care from the VA, which does not treat veterans who have been dishonorably discharged.
He knows there will eventually be other consequences.
"What happens to me, I don't care," he said. "But I want parents to know that the Army is not helping their kids the way they're supposed to. You're a piece of equipment to the Army. If you're broke, they throw you away."
IN THE KNOW
Casualties of war
Conditions in Iraq -- including close-in urban warfare, harassment from a sometimes-invisible enemy and longer tours of duty -- have created tremendous stress for U.S. troops on the battlefield, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs and a study by Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
"Taken together, these unique features of the war in Iraq create the conditions whereby stress hormones are released excessively, with unknown, but likely significant, consequences regarding health maintenance, restoration and coping capacity," said Brett T. Litz, author of a VA report.
Here are some facts about the toll on today's military:
• Almost 20 percent of soldiers and 17 percent of Marines qualified as having "moderate or severe" mental health problems when surveyed in late 2003 after returning from Iraq.
• Of those, 65 percent said they would not seek help because they would be seen as weak, and 51 percent said their leaders would blame them for the problem. "Rather than focusing on their medical needs, they must weigh the risk of self-reporting mental health concerns and the possible career stigma attached to it. The military is aware of service members' fears of career stigma, but to date has not broken down this crucial barrier to care," wrote Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center in a report titled Hidden Toll of the War in Iraq.
• One of the most common illnesses is post-traumatic stress disorder, which results from exposure to an extreme stress involving threat of death or serious injury. The trauma, although most often associated with combat, can also happen after rapes or other violent crimes.
• Symptoms of PTSD include sleeplessness, extreme anxiety or hyperalertness, frightening dreams, depression, social withdrawal and outbursts of anger.
• Studies suggest that most people who experience even horrifying combat adjust, adapt and do well in life. But others, particularly if the PTSD is untreated, are more likely to be unemployed, have lower incomes, show poor problem-solving capabilities, express violent tendencies and use more government and medical services in their lives, a VA study said.
• Through April 2005, the Army had evacuated 1,118 soldiers from Iraq for psychiatric reasons, mostly depression, PTSD and suicidal thoughts. That represented 6 percent of the total medical evacuations. The Army prefers to treat and counsel soldiers in Iraq, as close to their units as possible.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs has treated and/or counseled 6,400 men and women for PTSD who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and are no longer in the military.
• The Army's suicide rate fell from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2003 to 11 in 2004. So far this year, the rate is 6.7. The Marine Corps' rate rose from 13.8 in 2003 to 16.6 in 2004. So far this year, the rate is 14.7.
• Forty soldiers and nine Marines have committed suicide in Iraq since March 2003. At least 20 soldiers and 23 Marines have committed suicide after returning from Iraq.
• Most of those troops commit suicide at their home installations, and the majority use firearms. The largest number of suicides were in two age categories -- 21 to 25 and 36 to 40.
• Desertions -- defined as being absent without leave for longer than 30 days -- have decreased significantly in recent years. In 2001, 4,597 soldiers deserted. In 2003, 3,680 deserted. In 2004, the number had dropped to 2,436.

Hell of a Book Report

Right-Wing Sucker Punch

By Richard CohenPostTuesday, June 28, 2005; A15

Edward Klein has written one hell of an exposé. His new book on Hillary Clinton, "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President," insinuates epic mendacities, sapphic sex, fiscal improprieties and marital rape. All of that Klein documents either vaguely or not at all and is so beyond belief and good taste that the very fact his book is selling like proverbial hotcakes starkly exposes the anti-Clinton people as the village idiots of our time. It takes one to buy this book.
I did anyway. But I did so out of solemn duty and because I wanted to see if this book could possibly be as bad as its reviews -- not a single good one that I know of. The review in The Post, for instance, called it "a bad college term paper." And while that might be expected from the supposedly hyper-liberal Post, the same verdict was reached by the Economist, the vaguely right-of-center British publication. It began its review by letting its readers know just what it thought of Hillary Clinton: "There are lots of reasons to distrust or even dislike Mrs. Clinton." Then, having cleared its throat in such a fashion, it dismisses the tome and says that Klein "should be ashamed of himself."
The reviews are convincing. Klein has gone so far over the top that I, an acquaintance of lo these many years, am astonished. He is, after all, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine and, by credential, a member of the august establishment press. He was also an editor at Newsweek, which is owned by the aforementioned Washington Post, so the magazine is next door to Pravda in the fantasy neighborhood where good right-wingers live. All this leads me to conclude -- Ed, you sly devil, you -- that Klein set out to expose the right wing for the gullible nincompoops they are. He has succeeded, and vast riches await him.
His book is flying off the shelves -- more than 350,000 shipped. The other day it was No. 4 on Amazon's bestseller list and was sold out at my sedate neighborhood bookstore when I checked. It has become a Rorschach of conservative madness -- proof that they will buy anything, no matter how badly done, that attacks the Clintons or liberalism. Klein's book is just the most recent example. He looked at conservatives the way P.T. Barnum looked over his audience: "There's a sucker born every minute," Barnum said. Ed is nodding all the way to the bank.
This calculating contempt for the IQ of right-wingers is not limited to opportunistic authors, of course. Last week it was demonstrated by Karl Rove, of all people. Speaking to the New York State Conservative Party, the president's most important adviser had this to say: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Actually, a Los Angeles Times poll taken in November 2001 showed Bush with an approval rating approaching 90 percent and Democrats almost as supportive as Republicans for going into Afghanistan and pounding the Taliban.
So Rove's crack is simply not true. I attribute it, possibly, to his deep, subconscious shame over never having served in the military or, more likely, a cynical appreciation that his audience would rather hate than think. So he patronized them, knowing that they would not for a moment connect such simplistic thinking to the quagmire of Iraq, the debacle of Social Security reform or the dash back to Washington from Texas so that George W. Bush could sign a bill attempting to keep the sadly brain-dead Terri Schiavo alive. The real reason such conservatives frequently wear Gucci loafers is that they cannot tie their own shoes.
If I were a right-winger, I would be offended by both Klein and Rove. But I am not a conservative, and so I can only wonder at their gullibility. Right-wingers are the useful idiots of our times and while they have their occasional left-wing counterparts, the lefties will not buy essentially the same book over and over again -- if only because they lack the funds. Maybe Klein has taken this as far as it will go. I hope not. My book on Hillary's romp with Paris Hilton will be out soon. It's hot

Rumors

Would this constitute a crime? I don't know. But if our government is indeed doing this it would (at the least) raise even more serious questions about its truth-telling abilities and its "commitment" to a transparent administration. Not to mention its ability to shut off the leaks. This is one administration that has shown itself to be completely incompetent in the area of subservient unity. And you must remember that one of the first things they did after 9/11 was close ranks and begin dismissing anyone who even privately disagreed with an order. They must be pissing off a lot of career employees.

Charcoal, Anyone?

whenever there's a selloff of our public utilities, you can bet that politicians and the government are behind it to enrich their friends. just like they tried with the estate tax, social security, big tobacco fines that would have gone toward smoking cessation programs, the No Child Left Behind faith based groups that got the lion's share of the funding. now, both the House and the Senate are poised to pass an amendment that will open the doors to companies like Enron, Halliburton and other giant conglomerates so they can take over ownership of our electricity, water, gas. remember the "crisis" we had in California with electricity not so long ago in which a certain company shut down transfer stations for no reason, shuttled power to other states and then sold it back to us at obscene rates? with the passage of this amendment they won't have to. just as the telephone companies have won a huge victory by not having to share their broadband lines with the smaller competition (thereby ensuring competition, which in turn creates fair pricing), the power and gas moguls will ensure a new generation of robber barons.

From Rick "Man On Dog" Santorum

Fishers of Men
7/12/2002 - 3:30 PM PST

Fishers of Men By the Honorable Senator Rick Santorum

Like most American Catholics, I have followed the recent sex scandals in the Church with profound sympathy for victims, revulsion over priests who prey on minors and frustration at the absence of hierarchical leadership. Unlike most, I have been visited by the gift of hope; for I see in this fall an opportunity for ecclesial rebirth and a new evangelization of America. This "new evangelization," advocated strenuously by Pope John Paul II, has the potential for restoring confidence in the priesthood while empowering all American Catholics. The most obvious change must occur within American seminaries, many of which demonstrate the same brand of cultural liberalism plaguing our secular universities. My hope was rekindled last week as our American Cardinals proposed from Rome an "apostolic visitation" of seminaries emphasizing "the need for fidelity to the Church's teaching, especially in the area of morality." It is an arduous task. However, the Pope made it clear last week that he expects the strong appeal of the Cardinals to be followed by decisive Episcopal action. It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm. The cultural change needed cannot end with our seminaries. Most of the American Cardinals, while strong defenders of the faith , are from a different era with only a few responding to the new demands our decaying culture has place upon them. With God's grace, a new hierarchy must emerge that will be both faithful in thought and courageous in confronting all infidelity within the Church. Such Church leaders have a great example in Pope John Paul II's battle with communism's attempt to destroy the Church and human dignity. A new hierarchy must similarly fight against an array of "isms"-moral relativism, cultural liberalism-inside and outside of the Church. Most importantly, I hope this crisis in the clergy will remind the laity of the call of Vatican II, a call the Pope has re-echoed throughout his incredible papacy. This is not just the hierarchy's church; it belongs to all the baptized. Pope John Paul II reminds us time and again of Luke's Gospel: "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch." We are all called to be "fishers of men." Both clergy and laity have mutually supportive and indispensable roles in the "new evangelization" through administration of the sacraments and proclamation of the Gospel and all Church teachings. Even now we witness this "new evangelization" through many ecclesial lay movements such as Opus Dei, the Neocatechumenate, Focolare, Regnum Christi, Communion and Liberation. The laity across America is also demanding faithful Catholic schools and colleges. The key to success, as the Pope stated in his 1999 exhortation, The Church in America, is to be "formed in the truths and values of the Church's social teaching and in the basic notions of a theology of the laity." A renewed, united effort of clergy and laity will transform the Church. That this does not already occur belies the greatest systemic failure of the Church in America where so many cradle Catholics have left the Church or go "unchurched" because of exposure to uninspired, watered down versions of our faith by those with deficient seminary training. In light of recent events, the laity must guide them back. We as the Church, the people of God, cannot and should not leave the mission of the Church to the clergy alone, nor should our role be limited to overseeing priestly training and conduct. The laity must assist the whole Church in America reclaim our nominally Catholic colleges, schools, hospitals and social welfare agencies for the sake of our souls. The Pope reminds us that Catholic educational institutions make possible "a wide-ranging evangelizing effort as long as there is a clear will to impart truly Christian education. Many Catholic social service agencies, while serving the human needs, have been co-opted by a secular culture. The Pope calls them also to "faithfully reflect the attitude of Jesus who came to proclaim good news to the poor." As a Catholic U.S. Senator, I am proud to see the Church, often alone, take one courageous stand after another on the great moral issues of the day: abortion, cloning, third world debt relief, AIDS and the breakdown of the family to name a few. The Catholic Church remains true to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the dictates of the natural law. Through 2000 years, the Church, built upon rock, has survived every arrow sinful man has shot at her from within and without. Another arrow has been loosed from within, piercing the Body of Christ. The time is now for the laity to come to her aid. We must heed the call of Christ through his Vicar on earth: Climb into Peter's boat and go into the deep!
Contact:
Senate Republican Conferencewww.catholic.org DC, USSenator Rick Santorum - Senator, 202-224-9068
Email:
loredana_vuoto@src.senate.gov

12 More Years! 12 More Years! 12 More Years!

The Washington POst has chimed in with its two cents about the "war". Although the writer's estimate of "collateral dead" might just be a bit of a misunderestimation.
http://www.herald-dispatch.com/2005/June/24/OPlist3.htm

Oil execs from all over will be meeting in Britain, possibly to carve out an early thanksgiving Iraqi turkey:
http://www.thelondonline.co.uk/theline/article.php?articleID=437

So, if the Alaskans don't want to deal with climate change and global warming, which is contributing to massive changes for the worse in their eco-system, but putting more rain and cooler temperatures in Central California...should I just keep my mouth shut and enjoy these nicer-than-normal summer months?
http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/05sum/alaska1.asp

I disagree that Donald Rumsfeld is the brains behind the Iraq war as stated in this article, though having his name and the words "brain" and "behind" so close together in a sentence do "trend" well;
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=700005

Get Off The Meat And Win A Masturband

(from Rolling Stone magazine, current issue)

The Young & the Sexless
A new generation of young men and women is embracing celibate life By JEFF SHARLETWhat if the true face of the Christian right in America is not that of Dr. James Dobson or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; not that of an aging, comb-over preacher orange with pancake makeup, smiling orca rows of ungodly white teeth on The O'Reilly Factor or Hardball? Nor that of spittle-flecked Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas, roaring that God hates fags? What if the true face of the Christian right is, instead, that of a twenty-four-year-old religious-studies graduate student at New York University?
Matt Dunbar is a handsome young man, though his face is still ruddy with acne. He has rounded cheeks, a soul patch beneath his lips and soft eyes that hold yours like he trusts you. He's not a prude. He will say the word "fuck," but he will never, not even in the wedding bed he hopes God has prepared for his future, embody it as a verb. He will make Christian love. What most of us call sex he calls communion, and he believes it can happen only within marriage.
Chastity is a new organizing principle of the Christian right, built on the notion that virgins are among God's last loyal defenders, knights and ladies of a forgotten kingdom. Sex outside of marriage is, in the words of D. James Kennedy, pastor of the influential Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida, "an uprising against God." But if sex is the perfect enemy of the blessed lifestyle, it is also the Holy Grail for those who wait: "A symphony of the soul for married couples," according to John Hagee, author of What Every Man Wants in a Woman.
"Abstinence," says Dunbar, "is countercultural," a kind of rebellion, he says, against materialism, consumerism and "the idea that anything can be bought and sold." It is a spiritual war against the world, against "sensuality," according to one virginity manual popular with men like Dunbar. This elevation of virginity -- especially for men -- as a way of understanding yourself and your place in the world is new. It's also very old. First-century Christians took the idea so seriously that many left their wives for "house monasteries," threatening the very structure of the family. The early church responded by institutionalizing virginity through a priestly caste set apart from the world, a condition that continues to this day within Roman Catholicism. Now, though, the Protestants of the Christian right are reclaiming that two-tiered system, only they're projecting it onto individual lives, making every young man and woman part of an elite virgin corps.
"The world hasn't yet seen what God can do with an army of young men free of sexual fevers," write the authors of Every Young Man's Battle, one volume in a hugely popular series of "purity" manuals. "You can remain pure so that you might qualify for such an army."
It's a never-ending war, and not one that can be fought alone. Which is why virgins like Dunbar tend to travel in packs, to church and to Bible studies but also to parties and even to bars. Dunbar and his friends help one another stay "pure," which they consider "authentic." He lives with three close friends in a warehouse apartment in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn hipster neighborhood of artists and slackers. Two of his roommates are virgins; the other, a Mormon named Edd Lewis, is a "recycled virgin." He's had sex but won't again until he's married.
All four are from Visalia, California, a small farming city far from the coast. Dunbar's best friend in the group is Robin Power, whom he met in the ninth grade. Power's whole family looked like the ideal of Christian authenticity Dunbar had begun desiring for himself since his parents divorced when he was seven. Dunbar grew up in an Episcopal church and entered evangelicalism only after the separation; Power's family had always been zealous for God. Power's dad recorded Christian rock albums and the whole family jammed together, not like the Partridges but like Christian Ramones. Power played around town in Visalia's punk scene; Dunbar practiced the drums at home and dreamed of joining one of Power's bands.
Then, when Dunbar was fifteen, he became "convicted of secular music," which means he decided it was causing him to be sinful. He had a lot of friends who were destroying their collections, hammering their CDs or burning them or snapping each in two, but Dunbar concluded that it wasn't the music itself that was wrong, it was his own shallow response. He couldn't distinguish between the mood of the music and the meaning of the lyrics. Rage Against the Machine were all right, because they were angry and their music told you so. Sublime, with their punk-ska beat married to brooding lyrics about heroin and whores, were too advanced for him. He tossed his copy and committed himself to a painful period of Christian music. Later, he bought another copy.
When I first meet Power, he's working a gutter-punk look, a thick, dark beard and layers of ratty hoodies and buttons advertising deeply obscure bands. Faith, to him, is an ascetic discipline, its purity polished by constant self-criticism. "I can get aroused looking at a stoplight," he says, his giant eyes leaving mine and following a woman down Broadway. They snap back to me and he says, "Anything can be inappropriate. If I look at some woman and undress her with my eyes, that's just as bad as going down on her."
After church one day, Dunbar, Power and I sit on a bench and lean back in the sun and watch Sunday morning stroll by. "Cleavage everywhere," notes Dunbar, not disapprovingly. Power holds up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. "This," he says, "is a 'masturband.' " One of their friends at college -- Pepperdine University -- came up with the idea. As long as you stay pure -- resist jerking off -- you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. "It started with just four of us," says Dunbar. "Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain." Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. "Eight and a half months," he says. I notice he's not wearing one now. He's not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter.
Dunbar has started dating, a gorgeous blond actress named Anna Larson - also a virgin -- and Power is engaged to a makeup artist at UCLA. She's a virgin, too. Dunbar and Larson believe in kissing, but he'll always tell Power and his other housemates if he feels tempted to push it further. Power and his fiancee sometimes get hot talking on the telephone, but afterward Power likewise confesses to Dunbar or another Christian brother. On Sundays they attend services at the Journey, a floating evangelical church. The congregation is around seventy-five percent single, most of them under thirty. Not having sex means talking about it constantly; the topic of sex and why to wait for it comes up in nearly every sermon, under titles such as "Desperate Sex Lives," "Sex and the City" and "What a Girl Wants."
One spring Sunday, the church meets in a theater on Upper Broadway. (It's since moved to a larger venue. Only three years old, the congregation is growing so fast it doesn't want to commit to real estate.) The lobby is packed and loud right up to the beginning of the service, with well-scrubbed men and women greeting one another with chaste sideways hugs. Body to body, chest to chest, says Power, is just too enticing.
Church takes place on a stage set for a play. Half of every service features the Journey band, a competent ensemble that sets hymns to grunge and emo arrangements. During my visit, I can't take my eyes off the three female backup singers, especially a redhead on the right, swinging her hips in loose cargo pants that are nonetheless tight in the ass. She's braless and grooving, way too sexy for church, shooting a single finger over her head -- the "One Way" Jesus sign Billy Graham embraced more than thirty years ago.
Since then, the Christian right has steadily reinvented itself by co-opting the language of the sexual revolution. Pastor Nelson Searcy, a roly-poly thirty-three-year-old Jimmy Buffett fan who moved from California, "called" by God as a pastor to New York, preaches not in a suit or a collar but in a hipster's bowling shirt, and he references his Bible as often as he shows trailer clips from contemporary movies like The Stepford Wives and The Notebook. But the message remains the same: a laundry list of fundamentalist prohibitions rephrased in PowerPoint alliteration. The three proper passions -- God's presence, God's people and God's plan - combined with purity equals power. Power is the objective, the strength to stay "pure" in a world full of sexed-up heathens.
A few days earlier, Dunbar says, he'd gone to a bar with "secular friends." They all got a little buzzed -- the Bible is big on wine, he points out -- and began talking about sex. "Dunbar," volunteered one of the secular guys, "is a virgin." The guy was laughing. "By choice," the guy added.
Which was a huge mistake, notes Dunbar. All female eyes left the man who wanted their attention and rotated Dunbar's way. Four girls surrounded him, demanding to know everything. Was he embarrassed? ("I'd only be embarrassed if I was trying to get some.") Is oral OK? Anal? Hand jobs? (He doesn't like to be "legalistic," caught up in rules, and he has friends who had enjoyed anal sex and still call themselves virgins, but - no.) Has he always been a virgin? ("Uh, yeah. That's what 'virgin' means.") Why? (Jesus, romance, it all blends together.)
One of Dunbar's roommates once found himself in a similar situation, Dunbar tells me. He'd had a harder time deflecting the attention, until one woman had moved in for the kill. "Sex is something I just do," she'd said, and then took a chip off a plate of nachos. "Like eating." If she'd had a chance of bagging Dunbar's virgin comrade, she'd lost it there. "The whole sex/ nacho thing?" Dunbar tells me. "It just doesn't make sense to a virgin."
Food, in fact, is the opposite of sex among most Christian virgins. Food, after all, belongs to the material world. Sex, on the other hand, is supernatural. They read the biblical Song of Solomon -- lovers rhapsodizing over each other, he obsessed with her breasts like "two fawns" and her "rounded thighs like jewels"; she with his legs like "alabaster columns" and his lips like lilies, "dripping sweet-smelling myrrh" -- not as erotica but as a metaphor for the love between man and God. Sex that is just two bodies in motion strikes them as empty, even if love is involved. Every encounter must be a kind of threesome: man, wife and the Lord. Without that, it's just fucking.
Suckers for romance," leslee Unruh, the founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, describes men like Dunbar and Power. She means that as praise, because she considers virgins revolutionaries. "We want authenticity," she says. "We want what's real." Unruh launched Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1997. She had been a self-declared "chastity" educator since the early Eighties, but it wasn't until the Clinton years that the Christian right fully discovered sex as a weapon in the culture wars, and Unruh began working with conservative politicians.
Abstinence Clearinghouse acts as a nexus for activists and as their voice in Washington, claiming as "our friends" a who's who of the GOP's hard-right edge, Karl Rove, Sen. Rick Santorum, Sen. Sam Brownback and a slew of officials with unrecognizable names and a great deal of money to work with, abstinence crusaders in the departments of Health and Human Services and of Education. Abstinence Clearinghouse brings these people together with activists at conferences, "purity balls" and abstinence teas. It sponsors "Faces of Abstinence" around the country, good-looking young men and women who work the Christian lecture circuit spreading the no-sex gospel.
The Clearinghouse has been working with the federal Centers for Disease Control, in part to establish a "gold standard" for abstinence-only sex-education programs in public schools. Meanwhile, this year the Bush administration is backing the movement with $167 million in public funds. By statute, these programs are secular, but Unruh considers herself broad-minded enough to work within those guidelines. If religion is to be kept out of the schools, she says, "shame and conscience" are important tools in its place. But romance, more than anything else, guides her understanding of sexuality. This is what she finds romantic: a father who gives his teenage daughter a "purity" ring, which will be returned on her wedding day and handed to his daughter's new husband, her virginity passed from man to man like a baton.
Therein lies the paradox of the virginity movement. It is at once an attempt to transcend cultural influences through the timelessness of Scripture and a painfully specific response to the sexual revolution. The "women's lib" movement, Dunbar believes, preached a message of self-satisfaction: "Do what you want." It is, in his view and that of many in the virginity movement, a product of the same cultural mindset that produced America's booming porn industry. Both are based on instant gratification: women obsessed with winning the privileges of men rather than learning to enjoy the pleasures of Christian submission, men demanding the fast-food sexuality of explicit imagery.
But it's not just feminism that's to blame. It's also what the Christian right sees as an effeminized church. "Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men," writes John Eldredge, the author of a best-selling manhood guide called Wild at Heart. He thinks that church life in America has pacified Christian men and made them weak. Women who are frustrated with their girlie-man husbands and boyfriends seize power, and the men retreat to the safe haven of porn instead of whipping the ladies back into line. What women really want, he says, "is to be fought for." And men, he claims, are "hard-wired" by God for battle; Jesus wants them to be warriors in the vein of Braveheart and Gladiator.
Wild at Heart and Eldredge's other best sellers, The Journey of Desire and The Sacred Romance (as well as "field manual" workbooks that can be purchased separately), address sexual "purity" as part of the fabric of Christian manliness. The most important of these books is Every Man's Battle, which, in the past five years, has become a powerful brand name unto itself, with dozens of Every Man spinoff titles: Every Young Man's Battle, Every Woman's Battle, Preparing Your Son for Every Man's Battle and on and on. There's also an Every Young Man's Battle movie filmed on actual battlefields from history and featuring an interview with former NFL player William White and a discussion between Christian-right leader Dr. James Dobson and serial killer Ted Bundy.
The Every Man premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don't stand a chance of resisting temptation in the form of premarital sex, masturbation and straying eyes. I first heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at the Journey, a twenty-five-year-old man who said he'd slept with forty women before he re-virgined with the help of the series.
"Your goal is sexual purity," write Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife." To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war. Citing Dobson, they note the "fact" that men experience a buildup of sperm demanding "release" approximately every seventy-two hours. For single men, wet dreams, if purged of sexual imagery, can act as "God's natural release valve." (Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.) "Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly," they report. They encourage making lists of "areas of weakness." They seem particularly concerned with shorts: "nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts"; "female joggers in tight nylon shorts"; "young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to "bounce" their eyes off female curves. They recommend memorizing the locations of sexy billboards so that you can look away and switching your TV to ESPN or Fox News if a tempting commercial comes on the screen. And there's always Scripture. The authors hold up the books of Joshua and Ezekiel as armor against non-Christian women. "Mixture," they write, "can destroy a people."
The books' implicit disdain for non-Christian women - in Every Young Man's Battle, one name for a sexually active unmarried woman is "Betty Jo 'B.J.' Blowers" -- is matched by their reverence for the virtue of Christian womanhood. There are books that address the temptations faced by Christian women, but the Every Man series more often presents the decadence of the world as a result of men's failure to be guardians and servants of female purity.
Every Man operates a hot line, 800-NEW-LIFE, for men who've "threatened" their relationships through their use of pornography. When I called to confess that reading about tight nylon shorts in Every Young Man's Battle had aroused me, a professional masturbation counselor named Jason told me that pornography is "probably the number-one cause of divorce." Then he suggested I sign up for a five-day, $1,800 Every Man's Battle workshop (held monthly in hotels around the country) in which I would take classes on shame, "false intimacy" and "temptation cycles" and work with other men in small groups toward "recovery."
They also offer a two-day "outpatient program" for women, Every Heart Restored, to help wives deal with their husbands' depravity. The message there is that women are inherently more pure than men and thus simpler, and yet their sexuality is complicated and subtle. Husband and wife must play carefully scripted roles. "True manhood," promises one Christian manhood guide, gets "polished by the hand of God." True womanhood, meanwhile, requires the servanthood of a man devoted to his wife's pleasure, a dedication virgins believe will be diluted by men's premarital adventures. "Robin read a statistic," Dunbar tells me on the phone one day, "that men who have sex before marriage are something like 600 percent more likely to experience a drop-off of sexual passion once they are married." If you accept that number, the incentive for premarital chastity is stunning: a post-wedding life of sex that's 600 percent more awesome.
One night, Dunbar and Power show me a video of a party they hosted at their Williamsburg apartment. They and their two roommates were the entertainment, playing Eighties covers for a packed house. Since the last time I've seen him, Power has shaved his beard and taken to wearing eyeliner for no particular reason. In the video, he wore snakeskin tights and played a red guitar; Dunbar was a retro vision in white pants, white muscle shirt and a red, white and blue headband. They sang "Like a Virgin" and "I Want Candy." Power wailed "Roxanne," Dunbar closed his eyes and moaned "Tainted Love."
"You're so hot!" screamed a girl in the crowd.
After the video, we head out to a bar to meet a group of Christians celebrating a birthday. It's a low-ceilinged basement with dim light and a belly dancer. We sip our beers, hovering over a table of dancers and musicians, mostly women, about half of them, to the best of Dunbar's knowledge, virgins. I tell him I'd like to talk to one of them about her chastity.
He nods toward a brunette at the end of the table. "That's Hilary. She'd be good. She's a Rockette."
"How should I broach the subject?"
Dunbar looks confused. "Just tell her you want to talk about her virginity."
So I walk up to a beautiful woman in a bar and say, "I hear you're a virgin." And she looks up at me with eyes like blue velvet and smiles like I've just paid her the best compliment of the evening.
It turns out Hilary Rushford is an inch too short to make the official Rockette squad, but she performs backup with them. And she is, indeed, a virgin, twenty-five years old. Next to her sits her date, Chad Riley. It's their second time out together. He's twenty-seven, lean and muscled, a commercial photographer and also a "warrior," an "on-fire" Christian who describes himself as a "total virgin."
Rushford says that a friend of hers had sex and said it was awful.
"I hate fornication!" agrees Riley, who is still recovering from a relationship that lasted nine months without a kiss. But he doesn't want me to mistake him for frigid. "I love kissing," he says. "But I know my body and who I am." Riley, it turns out, is actually a "born-again virgin." In his early twenties, he strayed.
Rushford giggles. "Ephesians 5:3," she says -- the signal verse for Christians who prize chastity. " 'But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality. . . .' "
"A hint?" I ask. "How can you tell?"
"Once I get aroused, I know," Riley says.
"Do you ever wonder what you're missing?" I ask.
"How can you worry about what you're missing if you've never tried it ?" he says.
Not knowing, he explains, is the best part, the biggest selling point of virginity for both Riley and Rushford. They will each be their spouse's first lover, which means that she will not have to worry if her husband wishes her breasts were bigger, because he wouldn't know, and he will not have to worry whether size matters, because she wouldn't know.
Back in high school, Rushford dated guys who called themselves Christians who constantly pressed her for more. She kept her virginity, but only just, and when she left for college, she vowed to never let herself get used again. For her, virginity is the one truth about herself that no man can touch. But then, that's long been the case for Christian women. Riley regards his chastity, lost and regained, as just as precious. His feelings about it are, by traditional standards, almost feminine. That's what celibacy offers Christian men: the vulnerability of being a woman.
The closest Anna Broadway ever got to the "one flesh" of sexual communion were the busy hands of a secular man who took her on her first date in New York. She'd just moved here from Arizona, where she'd finished a master's degree in religious studies at Arizona State University, when she met a man she describes as a short James Gandolfini. Not exactly her style. Broadway is twenty-six, tall and slender, with eyes the color of aspen leaves and lush lips that enjoy what she calls "salty language." She's busty, and she likes to wear tight tank tops and baby-doll tees. This particular date was a chubby, balding advertising executive she refers to only as "Ad Weasel." Their evening went from dinner to his car to parking on the street outside her apartment, where Broadway, a virgin, felt for the first time a man's hands "down there." It felt good. Then he made his offer: His tongue, he said, would be more nimble. "That's when I realized," she tells me, "I don't have a battle plan." So she made one up on the spot. Chastity, she decided, could not include orgasm. She removed Ad Weasel's hands and informed him of her decision. Months later, he said to her, "Call me when you want to fuck," and left her, still -- by her definition -- pure.
Broadway (a writing pseudonym she created so she wouldn't shock her missionary parents) poured her frustration into her blog, "Sexless in the City," and revisions of a dense essay on John Cusack movies she'd written in graduate school, "The Cult of the Orgasm as Romantic Mysticism." "In a world that functionally operates on atheistic terms throughout most of its supposedly separate and autonomous spheres," she writes. "What kind of ecstasy is left us, even, but that which occurs in sexual release?" In the movies, she writes, secular romance leads only to orgasm, but the real answer to her question is, of course, Jesus.
Broadway was part of what she describes as the "first wave" of Christian home-schoolers, protected by her parents from the false teachings of evolution and all the attendant pornography of so-called alternative lifestyle education, but her sex life began at age eight, when she began fantasizing about Almanzo, from The Little House on the Prairie. At twelve, she began lulling herself to sleep every night with elaborate sexual scenarios in serial form. Always, she swears, in the context of marriage.
Now she is part of an intellectual avant-garde of the purity brigades, an elite made up mostly of women. Besides Broadway, for instance, there's Lauren F. Winner, a Jewish convert to Christianity and a religious-studies graduate student at Columbia and author of Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity, and Dawn Eden, also a convert from Judaism who writes a blog called "The Dawn Patrol" and is working on a book about "becoming newly chaste."
Broadway views the Every Man books and Dobson's precise approach to sexual regulation (Dobson offers a ten-stage scale in which pretty much everything after stage one -- holding hands -- is off-limits) as bad theology. She doesn't want a sexuality that's controlled and contained, and after much consideration, she's decided that a sexless wet dream isn't very hot. Broadway longs for a chastity that isn't so much a denial of desire as its embrace. One of her favorite verbs is "savor," and she talks about sex like it's a food she is waiting for. In "Sexless in the City," she writes about sending a vagina made of chocolate to "Ad Weasel" in lieu of her taking him up on his offer of cunnilingus.
The world, she says, is pulsing with sex. Some of it ugly; some of it, like the Song of Solomon, very beautiful; and most of it stupid and sad. Most people, she says, can't help but look at the world through what she calls the "flesh-colored lens." But Christians, she says, see a different reality. Like The Matrix, she claims. The Wachowski brothers' trilogy of women in black latex and men with big guns have become cult films to Christian conservatives, drawn by the Christ story at the movies' core, the search for "the One" - i.e., the Messiah. The fact that the series portrays the everyday world as not only in a state of decay but ruled by evil forces makes for an easy parallel to the theology of Christendom.
Years ago, in college, Broadway participated in a Campus Crusade for Christ "infiltration" of the University of California at Berkeley, an attempt to plant covert evangelists in "subcultures" at the university so that they could gather information that could later be used to convert Bay Area heathens. It was, she says, a raid on enemy territory.
"The students were the enemy?" I asked. She thinks for a while. No, she said. Lust was. Evil is like an ocean, icy cold. Non-Christians are on the verge of drowning, but they don't realize their peril. Their minds are dulled by hypothermia. When a Christian pulls them out of the water, they struggle. The warmth makes their frozen nerve ends scream. "It hurts," says Broadway.
Before power became fully Christian - back when he cared as much about his guitar as he did about God - he dated a non-Christian girl. His voice gets husky as he remembers: "There were times, when we were naked, and my tongue was inside her, and she's whispering for me to go further." Dunbar is staring at him. He knows this story, but he doesn't mind hearing it again. It's not prurient for them, it's bonding. "There were times," continues Power, "when I had to ask myself, 'What do I believe?' "
"But you weren't alone with her," Dunbar says.
"No."
Dunbar turns to me. "He had responsibility to us." His brothers.
But Power kept letting them down. After high school, he stayed at home for a year while Dunbar and the rest of his friends went on to college. He joined a Christian punk band, Straight Forward. He started slipping. At Pepperdine he continued to slide. He began dating a woman only recently born again, still immature in her faith. She was thrilled by Power's attention: He was a man known to be on fire for God. The girl - a "baby Christian," in the lingo -- wanted to get closer to that warmth. She did so the only way she knew how.
"A blow job," says Power.
It had been one thing to go down on his girlfriend when he wasn't sure what he believed. It was another to let a girlfriend go down on him after he'd committed himself to God. But then, he says, that's how it works all too often when a man looks like he's devoted to Jesus. "It becomes more about giving than receiving" -- an implicit recognition of the sexism he knows permeates the best intentions. Even among Christians, the girls, he says, "will go down on you, but you don't have to go down on them."
The experience, he says, broke his heart. What it did for the girl, he can't even imagine.
In August, Power and his fiancee will be married back home in Visalia, where Dunbar will be his best man. Power feels like he has waited a long time. He didn't want to marry for sex, so he restrained himself from proposing until it did not even enter his mind. Soon he will experience his reward. A "sexual payoff," according to the authors of Every Man's Battle, that will "explode off any known scale."
Like the fundamentalists of old, today's Christian conservatives define themselves as apart from the world, and yet the modern movement aims to enjoy its fruits. To the biblical austerity of chastity, they add the promise of mind-blowing sex, using the very terms of the sexual revolution they rally against. And that's just the beginning. Sexual regulation is a means, not an end. To believers, the movement offers a vision grander even than the loveliness of a virgin: a fairy tale in which every man will be a spiritual warrior, a knight in the service of the king of kings, promised the hand and the heart and, yes, the sexual services of a "lady." That is the erotic dream of Christian conservatism: a restoration of chivalry, a cleansing of impurity, a nation without sin, an empire of the personal as political. "Power," as Pastor Nelson of the Journey promises, is the guaranteed result of "passions properly pursued."(Posted Jun 23, 2005)

Get Off The Meat, Nixon, uh, I Mean Schwarzenegger!!!

Program raises spying concernSTATE NATIONAL GUARD UNIT SET UP TO DETER TERRORISM MONITORED ANTI-WAR RALLYBy Dion NissenbaumMercury News Sacramento Bureau
SACRAMENTO - Three decades after aggressive military spying on Americans created a national furor, California's National Guard has quietly set up a special intelligence unit that has been given ``broad authority'' to monitor, analyze and distribute information on potential terrorist threats, the Mercury News has learned.
Known as the Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion program, the project is part of an expanding nationwide effort to better integrate military intelligence into global anti-terrorism initiatives.
Although Guard officials said the new unit would not collect information on American citizens, top National Guard officials have already been involved in tracking at least one recent Mother's Day anti-war rally organized by families of slain American soldiers, according to e-mails obtained by the Mercury News.
Past abuses recalled
Creation of California's intelligence unit is already raising concerns for civil libertarians who point to a string of abuses in the 1960s and 1970s, when the military collected information on more than 100,000 Americans, infiltrated church youth groups, posed as reporters to interview activists, monitored peaceful protests and even attended an elementary school Halloween party in search of a ``dissident.''
``The National Guard doesn't need to do this,'' said Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer who first exposed the military's domestic spying operations in 1970. ``Its job is not to investigate individuals, but to clear streets, protect facilities and help first responders.''
Top Guard officers said they have no intentions of breaking long-established rules barring the military from gathering information on Americans and that the evolving program is meant to help California and the nation thwart terrorist attacks.
``We do not do any type of surveillance or human intelligence or mixing with crowds,'' said Lt. Col. Stan Zezotarski. ``The National Guard does not operate in that way. We have always had a policy where we respect the rights of citizens.''
Generally, the National Guard is called upon to help the state deal with natural disasters and riots. But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have put major strains on the military, which has started drawing more on Guard soldiers to fight overseas. And now Guard units are being integrated into anti-terrorism efforts in the United States.
The intelligence unit was quietly established last year by Maj. Gen. Thomas Eres, the National Guard leader who was forced by the Schwarzenegger administration to retire this month amid allegations that he failed to prove his shooting skills for a trip to Iraq, set up a questionable military flight for a Republican friend's political group and improperly used money meant to stem the flow of drugs for anti-terrorism programs.
Right before Eres retired, the Guard hired its first director for the intelligence unit who has ``broad authority'' and is expected to ``exercise a high degree of independent judgment and discretion,'' according to the job description obtained by the Mercury News.
``However, highly controversial or precedent-setting decisions, directives and policies are discussed with the appropriate senior leadership prior to implementation,'' the description states.
A one-stop shop
Col. Robert J. O'Neill, a veteran intelligence officer who started last week as director of the new program, said he envisions his team as being a one-stop shop for local, state and national law enforcement to share information. Intelligence officers will have access to sensitive national security information that they can analyze and potentially share with state and local law enforcement, he said.
``We are trying to integrate into their systems and bring them information that they don't have,'' O'Neill said.
He said his unit would not cross any legal lines into spying on Americans. But the Guard's role in monitoring at least one demonstration has already alarmed civil libertarians.
Last month, a group of anti-war activists, including the parents of American soldiers killed in Iraq, held a small Mother's Day rally at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial near the California Capitol to call for the return of all National Guard troops by Labor Day.
Three days before the rally, as a courtesy to the military, an aide in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's press office alerted the Guard to the event, according to e-mails obtained by the Mercury News.
The information was passed up the chain of command directly to Eres and other top Guard officials including Col. Jeff Davis, who oversees O'Neill's operation.
E-mail reveals actions
``Sir,'' Guard chief of staff Col. John Moorman wrote in the e-mail to Eres that was copied to Davis and other top commanders. ``Information you wanted on Sunday's demonstration at the Capitol.''
In response, Davis indicated that Guard intelligence officers were tracking the rally.
``Thanks,'' Davis wrote. ``Forwarding same to our Intell. folks who continue to monitor.''
That rainy Sunday, the protest organized by Gold Star Families for Peace, Raging Grannies and CodePink drew about three dozen supporters.
Guard spokesman Zezotarski said the monitoring did not involve anything more than keeping tabs on the protest through the media and that no one went to observe the demonstration.
But he said the military would be ``negligent'' in not tracking such anti-war rallies in the event that they disintegrate into a riot that could prompt the governor to call out troops.
``It's nothing subversive,'' Zezotarski said. ``Because who knows who could infiltrate that type of group and try to stir something up? After all, we live in the age of terrorism, so who knows?''
Civil libertarians scoffed at such defenses.
``That's ludicrous,'' said Joseph Onek, a former Carter and Clinton administration official who now heads the Liberty and Security Initiative for the Constitution Project at Georgetown University. ``That's not what the American people expect its military to be doing.''
Pyle, the Army officer who exposed the abuses in the 1970s and is now a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, said that the evolving intelligence programs are susceptible to dangerous ``mission creep'' that led to overaggressive tactics during the Vietnam War.
Since the Civil War, the United States has tried to create firm barriers preventing the military from getting involved in domestic issues. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act prevents the U.S. military from taking part in domestic law enforcement.
Military role expands
The Army got involved with collecting intelligence on Americans in the 1960s when it was called in to deal with civil rights protests and riots. Its role expanded as the decade wore on and the anti-Vietnam War movement grew more confrontational.
At the time, according to congressional records, the military collected files on more than 100,000 Americans and embraced aggressive tactics to try to undermine anti-war groups, including attending a Halloween party for kids and infiltrating church youth groups.
In response, Congress and the military set up new rules to strictly regulate military spying in the United States.
But the Sept. 11 attacks raised concerns that the controls had gone too far. Since then, the FBI and military have been expanding their intelligence operations.
The notion of creating intelligence ``fusion centers'' is slowly gaining momentum. Massachusetts is setting one up, but it is housed in the state police headquarters, not its National Guard.
Currently, federal law allows the U.S. military to gather information on Americans under exceptionally tight restrictions. The intelligence must be essential to their mission, publicly available or related to national security issues.
The Pentagon has created a new operation in Colorado known as the Northern Command to help protect the nation from terrorist attacks. Its leader, Gen. Ralph Eberhart, raised some concerns among civil libertarians last year after telling a National Guard group that ``we can't let culture and the way we've always done it stand in the way'' of gathering intelligence.
Last year, the U.S. military came under fire after it was reported that two Army lawyers in civilian clothes attended a forum on sexism in Islam and later demanded a roster of those in attendance, along with a videotape of the conference, after being questioned by three Middle Eastern men during the event.
Army officials said the attorneys had ``exceeded their authority'' and ordered a refresher course for agents.

I Believe i asked Someone To Close The Door A Few Posts Ago. I Can Still Feel The Draft, Dammit!!!

i have not read the new york press before that i know of (and had i my press escort would have informed me). but this editorial is very engaging and does provide verifiable info. fun. but scary.

http://nypress.com/18/25/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

New Millennium Mob War?

this one may get interesting. it may even get play in the newspapers if any of our people open their mouths. notice that our government has said nothing in this article. but it's the first day.
looks like the DC gang invaded someone else's turf.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/international/europe/24cnd-milan.html?hp&ex=1119672000&en=f2537cb9c32da240&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Very Long (but interestink!) Blogspot

http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004637.html
Torture Isn't a Laughing Matter--It's Deadly Serious
From this week's Economist (no link avail), a book review:
Reports of the brutality of American interrogators—or their surrogates in Egypt and Uzbekistan—have become commonplace. Still, this book, by an army sergeant who spent six months at the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, has something to add, not because of what it says about the effects of inhumane treatment on suspects, but for what it did to soldiers like himself.
Erik Saar is “every American”. At the age of 22, he had never been outside his own country, had been married for three years and had proudly voted Republican in 2000. Not seeing much future in a marketing job at UPS, he joined the army to pursue a career in intelligence. The army taught him Arabic, and after September 11th, he “couldn't imagine anything more satisfying” than using his training to “flush out the terrorists who wanted to bring on a holy war.”
At Guantánamo, Mr Saar's world crashed. He attended a PowerPoint briefing by an army lawyer on the Geneva Convention, which George Bush decreed did not apply to the men picked up in Afghanistan, or elsewhere, in the “war on terrorism.” It was “nothing but spin,” he says, adding that the administration referred to the men held in Guantánamo as “detainees”, because to call them “prisoners” would have meant regarding them as “prisoners of war”.
As a soldier this bothered Mr Saar. If America ignored the Geneva Convention, “what kind of brutality might we be visiting upon ourselves in the future fight?” Mr Saar had also been taught that torture doesn't work and that it produces less reliable information. When he saw torture being used at Guantánamo, he struggled to “reconcile my beliefs as an American, my conscience, and my religious beliefs with my duty as a soldier.”
The struggle was lost during the interrogation of a 21-year-old Saudi. The man was believed to have taken flight training with two of the September 11th hijackers. Interrogators got nothing from him. After each gruelling session, he returned to his cell and prayed, but a female interrogator sought to break him by making him feel dirty before his God. With the prisoner shackled in an uncomfortable position, she unbuttoned her blouse and began rubbing her breasts against him. “Do you like these big American tits?” she asked. She made another sexually crude remark, then added, “How do you think Allah feels about that?”
The prisoner spat in her face. She grew cruder. She told him she was having her period, unbuttoned her military trousers and wiped what she said was menstrual blood on his face (it wasn't blood; it was from a red magic marker). He screamed but did not break. Outside the room, she began to cry. So too did Mr Saar. “I hated myself.” Tears rolled down his cheeks. He went home, and took a shower, but “there wasn't enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean.”. [emphasis added]
The Economist reviewer concludes: "Not a policy to be proud of."
No, it's not. But I guess this is the kind of stuff that leaves tough guys from Ye Stolid Heartland like Lileks supremely Not Giving A Shit (or maybe titillated--it's kinda hard to tell from his sophomoric ditty over at the aptly named screed-blog).
Lileks, detailing a different interrogation than the one mentioned in the Economist, writes:
Invasion of Space by Female: Over the next few days, al-Qahtani is subjected to a drill known as Invasion of Space by a Female
Mind you, this is considered punishment. Right now across America there are guys who are seriously peeved because they ordered “Invasion of Space by a Female IV” on pay-per-view and the cable went out. They’re on the phone admitting they wanted it, and demanding they get IV and V no charge, understood?...
...One suspects it isn’t the presence of a woman that bothers him; it’s the fact that she doesn’t take any guff, looks him in the eye, laughs at him, blows smoke rings in his face and generally fails to behave like one of the 72 docile celestial whores he was promised. In short: he was broken by the concise application of cultural insensitivity.
How witty and whip-smart! Applause all around right blogosphere! He writes like a dream and he's one of our own! Hurrah. Or not. Poor Lileks, no? It looks like he's clicked on the Dominatrix-Spankavision-Pay-for-View-Channel one too many times on his travels around Minnesota motels or such. And so gotten a little carried away with his fantasizing about all those prison warden hotties----sultry vixens who don't take any "guff" from assorted sand-nig&*az--whilst going about the hard, patriotic duty of nobly rubbing America's finest D cups in detainees faces so as to Save the Republic. So let's help him climb back on the clue train, shall we? The real issue here, at least for anyone with half a brain, is that we cannot win a long-term war on terror by being widely seen to denigrate the religion and mores of those we seek to win over to our political model. As Michael Ignatieff writes in the New Republic:
Thinking that torture will help us in a war against terror also falsifies what our problem is. We think that our problem is information, and so we need torture to get the truth. In reality, before September 11 there was plenty of information in the possession of the American authorities (noise, but no signal). No, our problem is not a problem of knowledge. It is a problem of belief. It is not what terrorists know that makes them dangerous; it is what they believe. And beliefs cannot be changed by physical duress. Indeed, they may be reinforced. Those who survive torture become living monuments to the brutality that has been inflicted upon them. If they die under torture, they become martyrs to their cause.
Any counter-terror campaign is a battle to persuade as well as to dissuade. Terrorists do need to know that what they believe about us is false. They believe that we are weak and will not fight; and so we should prove them wrong. They believe that we are hypocrites; and so they need to know that we actually believe in the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. They need to know all this if we are to win. Winning is about not losing our nerve, about not losing control in the face of provocation. The military logic of terror is to provoke us into reciprocal atrocity that will lose us the war for legitimacy and the war for opinion.
The barbarians who kidnapped Daniel Pearl undoubtedly tortured him. He was subjected to indecent abuse, followed by horrifying death, because he was an American and a Jew. It is hard not to want to do the same in return, but it would be a mistake. Torturing his captors would set in motion an escalation of reprisals that would probably end up jeopardizing the life of every American in Pakistan. The people who killed Pearl may have violated all humane norms, but we have strong prudential reasons for holding on to these norms, even when our enemies do not.
Controlling the impulse to escalate in a counter-terror campaign is not easy, but other countries have shown that it can be done. British interrogation techniques in Northern Ireland in the early years of the Troubles did fall foul of the European Convention on Human Rights. Then the British realized that their methods were losing them important friends abroad, not to mention the support of the Catholic population in Belfast. Over time, they shifted from interrogation under duress to signal interception and infiltration, and managed to gain the upper hand. Information was never effective enough to prevent all bombings: mistakes and tragedies occurred, but each bombing ended up with the terrorists slowly losing public support.
Also worth noting, of course, in an era of non-stop Internet feeds and 24 hour cable, acts of abuse, felony abuse and torture quickly becomes fodder for our enemies. Perhaps Lileks would have preferred that, as the saying goes--what happens in Abu Ghraib; stays in Abu Ghraib. But as Rumsfeld has awkwardly expressed himself, when he was seemingly dumbfounded that people, you know, have cameras and can jpeg shots of soldiers flashing the thumbs up next to murdered detainees (cool!)--shots that go around the world mighty quickly--well, a big part of this war is going to be making sure such public relations debacles don't occur. One way to help ensure it doesn't is not to have free-ranging improvisation going on in Bagram, in Abu Ghraib, in Gitmo, in other detention centers. We need cohesive top-down directives on what is and isn't permissible. We need real accountability beyond the party line about a few-bad-eggs-on-the-night-crew-at-Abu-Ghraib bullshit (oh, and Colonel Karpinski too, how could I forget?!?). We desparately need some real leadership on this issue (Where are the Wise Men who would step in and intervene as in yester-year? To0 busy making money in Manhattan or just plain extinct, I guess).
Look, I'm not sure Guantanamo needs to be closed down (I'll have more on that topic soon). There has been a huge amount of hyperbole painting Guantanamo as some modern Auschwitz-on-the-Caribbean. The orange jump suits and outdoor cages and shackled detainees being wheel-barrowed around didn't help in the salons of Paris or London or Cairo when the first pics of Gitmo hit the media circus. "Tortured" blared an English tabloid! But, yeah, there are some of the hardest of the hard core al-Qaeda mother fuc*ers in the batch. They have to be somewhere--and that might have to end up being Guantanamo (though shouldn't they be tried, like, some day?). Furthermore, there are strong arguments indeed for why POW status should not extend to al-Qaeda (or even the Taliban) so that the exact letter of the Geneva Convention need not apply (more on this below). But surely the time has comes, as the New Republic editors write, to figure out what the hell is going on in our detention centers worldwide:
More than a year after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, we still lack a sufficient understanding of what goes on in the entire system--from Guantánamo to Afghanistan to the secret facilities run by the CIA--and how well it truly serves the war on terrorism. In order to gain that understanding, rather than simply shutting Guantánamo down, Congress and President Bush should appoint an independent commission of Republican and Democratic security experts to investigate the system and suggest how it should operate.
It's true that the Pentagon has conducted numerous reviews of its detention and interrogation policies and practices in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. But important doubts remain about their independence and thoroughness. Consider the March report of Vice Admiral Albert Church on Defense Department interrogations, which found "no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse." This week, Time published excerpts from the interrogation log of would-be September 11 hijacker Mohammed Al Qahtani, whose resistance to questioning prompted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to expand the list of approved interrogation techniques. That expansion resulted, among other things, in Qahtani being intravenously fed 312 bags of fluid and forced to urinate on himself. With the Pentagon defending his interrogation as taking place under "active supervision and oversight," it's difficult to accept Church's conclusion that official policy was unrelated to Qahtani's clear abuse. Then there's the question of what the abuse gained us. Church refers directly to Qahtani when praising "effective interrogation policy," but Time, citing senior Pentagon officials, reports that true breakthroughs came not from stripping Qahtani nude or intimidating him with dogs, but from confronting him with information gleaned from other detainees--in short, traditional intelligence work.Whatever the problems with the Pentagon's investigations, the CIA hasn't conducted any policy reviews. All we know about its detention facilities comes from press reports: In March, The Washington Post published an account of a CIA-operated prison near Kabul known as the Salt Pit, where an uncooperative inmate was allowed to freeze to death and was buried in an unmarked grave. The CIA contends that it has had legal authority for all its conduct in the war on terrorism--but the administration won't disclose the sources of that authority.
I won't hold my breath for some bipartisan national commission to be appointed. Washington (both parties) has become all about 'stay on message' and political courage and character are often in low reserve indeed. But, who knows? If enough of us clamor for it--and weren't seen as Mooreian types mindlessly trying to turn the torture issue into a political football to hurt Chimpie and BushCo and Big Oil and so on--but instead as allies of this Administration on the War on Terror (I'm thinking of people like Tacitus, Jon Henke, John Cole, Andrew Sullivan), maybe? Well, one can hope at least...
But I digress. Permit me to return to the beginning of this post and the Economist book review. Simulating the slopping of menstrual blood on a detainee's face is repulsive, it is grotesque--it should never have happened in a U.S. run detention center. Period. It also most assuredly constitutes an "outrage(s) upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment"--in contravention of the Third Geneva Convention. (I know, I know--the Geneva Conventions don't apply, but I'm blogging from Geneva, so let's just pretend for a second). And wait, maybe, to a fashion, they do apply somewhat:
On February 7, 2002, President Bush announced that the U.S. government would apply the "principles of the Third Geneva Convention" of 1949 to captured members of the Taliban, but would not consider any of them to be prisoners-of-war (POWs) under that convention. As for captured members of al-Qaeda, he said that the U.S. government considered the Geneva Conventions inapplicable but would nonetheless treat the detainees humanely.
Was the treatment of the detainee Dick Durbin recounted "humane"? Was the sexual degradation involved in the menstrual high jinx in Gitmo "humane"? Is the death of some 108 detainees in U.S. custody "humane"? Well, not from where I'm sitting friends. And at least a quarter of these deaths may have been homicides (I suspect the proportion is actually higher). But, hey, who gives a shit? We didn't put them through some Saddamite-shredder, or pour nitric acid on them, or rape their daughters in front of them for kicks, or hack an arm or tongue off--it's torture lite, the cool, American, Gitmo-way. 'Cept 108 people are dead. A footnote, you might say. Get on board you sap; there's a war on!
I want to make a few additional points here because this is very tricky, sensitive terrain indeed. I'll start by reiterating that I found Lilek's treatment cretinous and infantile. But he did pick an easy example to crack jokes about. The specific interrogation that he wrote of, in my view and all told, was probably handled mostly appropriately. The individual in question, al-Qahtani, was the likely 20th hijacker, had tremendously important intelligence to impart, and clearly was an avowed, deadly enemy of these United States. So I agree with Andrew Sullivan who writes:
It may well be that the important interrogations were indeed professionally handled and that abuse was kept to a minimum, although some of the techniques are still offensive. Perhaps the real story of the last couple of years is how these techniques filtered down the ranks, how unprofessional individuals got the message from above that the gloves were off and went further, with far less significant figures.
I do think that could be a big part of the larger story. After all, of course, Rumsfeld himself wasn't poring over each detainee's approved methods of interrogation regimen (like he did for al-Qahtani's) stating specifically what was and wasn't allowable. He's got a war to run (rather poorly)--and he doubtless only scrutinized the specific interrogation techniques of a handful of detainees. But in an era when 'socialite' Paris Hilton (no Brooke Astor, she!) doesn't care a whit to fellate on camera; or junior high girls in private schools on the Upper East Side jpeg and videotape masturbatory acts to E-mail around so as to egg guys on to date them--we do have a quite sad pornification of the culture. This maybe helps explain why a not insignificant amount of the top-down authorized interrogation procedures involved sexual degradation (and also that Muslims are deemed to be sensitive to such tactics so that intel would get dished out quicker). Guys like Lileks can't resist the 'dude, wouldn't you like to have tits rubbed in your face?' idiocy, which is unfortunate. I guess it's part of the new and exciting, middle-brow porned-out US culture. But don't let these empty screeds divert you from the bigger story. Part of which, at least, is that top-down authorized tactics for specific high-value detainees--like the sexual humiliation tactics used with the presumed 20th hijacker--got transmongrified into more frequent, unapproved techniques used by varied free-lancers from Bagram to Gitmo. Like, say, the simulated menstrual blood smears and such assorted grotesqueries.
Finally, let me close with a little noticed part of Dick Durbin's recent speech that caused so many marathon bloviations like the one about the war effort being imperiled in the Weekly Standard and so on:
Former Congressman Pete Peterson of Florida, a man I call a good friend and a man I served with in the House of Representatives, is a unique individual. He is one of the most cheerful people you would ever want to meet. You would never know, when you meet him, he was an Air Force pilot taken prisoner of war in Vietnam and spent 6 1/2 years in a Vietnamese prison. Here is what he said about this issue in a letter that he sent to me.
Pete Peterson wrote:
From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival....This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us....We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime. Abusive detention and interrogation policies make it much more difficult to win the support of people around the world, particularly those in the Muslim world. The war on terrorism is not a popularity contest, but anti-American sentiment breeds sympathy for anti-American terrorist organizations and makes it far easier for them to recruit young terrorists.
Polls show that Muslims have positive attitudes toward the American people and our values. However, overall, favorable ratings toward the United States and its Government are very low. This is driven largely by the negative attitudes toward the policies of this administration. Muslims respect our values, but we must convince them that our actions reflect these values. That’s why the 9/11 Commission recommended: “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors.”
No, it's not all Mr. Rogers-in-the-Hood, hunky-dory fare, popularity contests. But our basic values, not least that we will not countenance the torture of detainees in American detention, must be abided by. This must be a red-line for all thinking conservatives. The President says this is our policy. That torture will not be tolerated. But how can we know for sure this is the case now? The dismal record of these past years provides little comfort or confidence on this score, alas. At the end of the day, a not insignificant part of our national greatness stems from America being the 'gold standard' in its respect for its fellow man, in its role as ultimate guarantor of democratic liberties in the international system, on, yes, the standards governing the detention of our detainees and POWs. Sober wisdom and our better angels must prevail as we move forward towards what will doubtless be a difficult, troubled decade ahead. There will likely be more chaos and bloodshed on our shores. What will we do when, say, there is a WMD attack that kills 12,000 in Tulsa or San Diego or Peoria in 2009? Round up the Muslims in our midst and place them in pens governed by Lileks-compliant standards of detainee treatment? No, better that we standardize the rules and have a top-tier, bipartisan outside commission thoroughly look at America's detention facilities and policies from the bottom-up, the inside-out. There's simply too much rot that has been accumulated these past years. And the bright sunlight of judicious, wholly unbiased and serious scrutiny is needed to disinfect it. This will help America re-gain its footing as undisputed avatar of the rule of law and standard-bearer of human rights on the world stage. We owe this to ourselves, to our country, to our grandchildren. It's the right way. And it's not a joke. It's deadly serious.

The Big Boobie Woman Is Back!!!

washingtonpost.com
Ashcroft Gone, Justice Statues Disrobe
By MARK SHERMANThe Associated PressFriday, June 24, 2005; 7:24 PM
WASHINGTON -- With barely a word about it, workers at the Justice Department Friday removed the blue drapes that have famously covered two scantily clad statues for the past 3 1/2 years.
Spirit of Justice, with her one breast exposed and her arms raised, and the bare-chested male Majesty of Law basked in the late afternoon light of Justice's ceremonial Great Hall.
The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak in the Great Hall without fear of a breast showing up behind him in television or newspaper pictures. They also provoked jokes about and criticism of the deeply religious Ashcroft.
The 12-foot, 6-inch aluminum statues were installed shortly after the building opened in the 1930s.
With a change in leadership at Justice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced the question: Would they stay or would they go?
He regularly deflected the question, saying he had weightier issues before him.
Paul R. Corts, the assistant attorney general for administration, recommended the drapes be removed and Gonzales signed off on it, spokesman Kevin Madden said, while refusing to allow The Associated Press to photograph the statues Friday.
In the past, snagging a photo of the attorney general in front of the statues has been somewhat of a sport for photographers.
When former Attorney General Edwin Meese released a report on pornography in the 1980s, photographers dived to the floor to capture the image of him raising the report in the air, with the partially nude female statue behind him.
The first attorney general to use the blue drapery was Republican Richard Thornburgh, attorney general under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He had the drapery put up only for a few occasions when he was appearing in the Great Hall, rather than permanently installed as it was under Ashcroft.
Most news conferences now are held in a state-of-the-art conference room, although the Great Hall still hosts speeches and other special events.

Democracy: The Next Mad Cow?

Hardline mayor wins Iran election in landslide
By Parisa Hafezi
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Ultra-conservative Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swept to a landslide win in presidential elections on Saturday, spelling a possible end to Iran's fragile social reforms and tentative rapprochement with the West. Ahmadinejad, 48, won the backing of the religious poor to defeat veteran political heavyweight Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was supported by pro-reform parties and wealthy Iranians fearful of a hardline monopoly on power in the Islamic state. "The figures show that Ahmadinejad is the winner," Interior Ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani told reporters. He will be Iran's first non-cleric president for 24 years when he takes office in August.
An official at the Guardian Council, which must approve the election results, said that out of 24.8 million votes counted, Ahmadinejad had 61.7 percent, defying forecasts of a tight race.
Officials said turnout was about 26 million, or 56 percent, down from the 63 percent of Iran's 46.7 million eligible voters who cast ballots in an inconclusive first round on June 17.
"It's over, we accept that we've lost," said a close aide to Rafsanjani, who was president from 1989 to 1997.
MODERATING INFLUENCE GONE
Although Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the last word on all matters of state, a hardline presidency removes the moderating influence on decision-making exercised by outgoing reformist President Mohammad Khatami since 1997.
"This all but closes the door for a breakthrough in U.S.-Iran relations," said Karim Sadjadpour, Tehran-based analyst for the International Crisis Group.
Washington broke ties with Iran in 1980 and now accuses it of developing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism. Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil producer, denies the charges.
"I think Ahmadinejad is less amenable to compromise on the nuclear issue, but it is unclear how much influence he will have on it," said Sadjadpour.
The result was a crushing blow to Rafsanjani, 70, who has been at the forefront of Iranian politics since the 1979 Islamic revolution and was widely considered Iran's second most powerful figure before the vote. His last venture to the polls in 2000 parliamentary elections also ended in failure.
"Today is the beginning of a new political era," Ahmadinejad said after voting on Friday.
His victory was the latest by a new breed of hardline politicians, many of them former Revolutionary Guardsmen, who won local council and parliamentary elections in 2003 and 2004 amid widespread disillusionment with the slow pace of reform.
DEEP DIVISIONS
Friday's vote exposed deep class divisions in the nation of 67 million people.
A former member of the special forces of Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards, Ahmadinejad's humble lifestyle and pledges to tackle corruption and redistribute the country's oil wealth appealed to the urban and rural religious poor.
"I vote for Ahmadinejad because he wants to cut the hands of those who are stealing the national wealth and he wants to fight poverty," said Rahmatollah Izadpanah, 41.
Rafsanjani voters had said they feared Ahmadinejad would reverse modest reforms made under Khatami that allow women to dress in brighter, skimpier clothes and couples to fraternise in public without fear of arrest.
Washington repeated accusations that the vote was unfair due to the disqualification of more than 1,000 hopeful candidates.
"We remain skeptical that the Iranian regime is interested in addressing either the legitimate desires of its own people or the concerns of the broader international community," said a State Department spokeswoman.
Supreme Leader Khamenei banned victory celebrations after a fractious campaign marred by allegations of dirty tricks.
Aides to Rafsanjani had accused the hardline Basij militia of intimidating voters to back Ahmadinejad. The Interior Ministry also complained of illegal election-day campaigning.

$806 Million Cut From No Child Left Behind

House Approves Cuts to Labor Programs
Friday June 24, 2005 10:16 PM
By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Funding for job training, rural health care, low-income schools and help for people lacking health insurance would face big cuts under a bill passed Friday by the House.
The measure, which passed 250-151, contains $142.5 billion in spending under Congress' control for labor, health and education programs. That's essentially a freeze at current levels.
But new demands, including $870 million to administer the new Medicare prescription drug program, have forced cuts in scores of programs.
The cuts include the outright elimination of 48 programs whose current budgets total $1 billion. Among the programs to be eliminated is the Healthy Communities Access Program, currently funded at $83 million, which helps communities offer health care to the uninsured.
Also eliminated is the $205 million budget for an Education Department grant program targeted at low-income and underachieving schools.
Democrats said the overall bill falls far short of what's needed for education, health research, help for the poor and many other programs.
``This bill just doesn't measure up to our national obligations,'' said Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
Republicans said they had done they best they could under President Bush's tight budget for domestic programs.
``We made some tough decisions,'' said Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, who led the floor effort to get the bill passed. ``But when looked at as a whole, this bill provides $142.5 billion to over 500 discretionary programs. It is a lot of money and it does a lot of good.''
Regula added that the bill's program terminations and other cuts were used to fund high-priority items such as Pell Grants and the budget to run the Medicare drug program.
Still, a steady parade of both Republicans and Democrats came to the floor over the two-day debate seeking restoration of cuts to favored programs such as an initiative that trains doctors and nurses willing to work in underserved rural areas and inner cities. But without acceptable cuts elsewhere, most lawmakers had to settle for a promise from Regula to keep their requests in mind during negotiations with the Senate.
The cuts are the result of Bush's tight budget for federal programs outside of the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. Congress hewed to Bush's demands when passing its budget in April and is implementing an almost 1 percent cut to domestic programs through passage of 11 spending bills.
In practice, that translates to an 84 percent cut - from $300 million down to $47 million - in training programs for doctors and nurses, and $806 million in cuts to Bush's No Child Left Behind education initiative, a more than 3 percent drop. Grants for local community-action agencies that help the poor would be cut in half, to $320 million.
The National Institutes of Health, whose budget has doubled in recent years, would be held to a less than 1 percent increase. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would absorb a 5 percent cut from current funding.
In a high-profile vote Thursday, lawmakers turned back an effort to slash federal public broadcasting subsidies by $100 million, demonstrating the enduring political strength of the Public Broadcasting Service, whose supporters rallied behind popular programs such as ``Sesame Street,'' ``Postcards From Buster'' and ``The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.''
PBS and National Public Radio benefited from a nationwide lobbying effort. But no such national constituency exists for dozens of lower-profile programs that would be cut by the measure.
On Friday, the House also voted 219-185 to go on record against a Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation agreement with United Airlines letting United dump its employee-pension plans and their $9.8 billion shortfall on the PBGC, which could mean pension cuts of 25 percent to 50 percent for more than 120,000 United workers and retirees.
United says the move is required to emerge from bankruptcy and supporters of the airline said that without the pension relief, 62,000 United employees could lose their jobs.