The Washington Post National Weekly - January 3, 2016

Politics Obama’s acts of faith 4

World Harboring great hopes 10

Money Are you ready for a buyout? 16

5 Myths About gluten 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

the wrong men for the job

Soldiers entrusted with key roles in the Army’s campaign to protect sexual assault victims and punish offenders have themselves been accused of misconduct PAGE 12

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Sample Flavors of the Region at the Wenatchee

Presented by Forte Architects

Wenatchee Valley Museum 127 S. Mission St., Wenatchee Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016 6pm to 9pm v $50, or $40 for museum members; group pricing available v Sample award-winning wines and tasty bites v Live music v Silent auction v Bottles of wine available for purchase v Event proceeds, including wine sales, benefit the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center v Tickets may be purchased in person, by calling 509.888.6240, or online at www.wenatcheevalleymuseum.org

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KLMNO WEEKLY

INSPIRED LIFE

The year is full of fresh starts BY

C OLBY I TKOWITZ

O

ver these several weeks of overindulgence, we’ve excused every pumpkinspice latte and holiday sugar cookie with one eye fixed on that near date that allows us to wipe the slate clean and start again.

The date gives us an out. Why deprive ourselves now of that unhealthy treat, or force ourselves to go to the gym, or start that longignored project, when we’re so close to the day that absolves us of past sins?

And yet, year-after-year, as studies have shown, just over 25 percent of us keep them past the first week.

But Jan. 1 isn’t the only day for new beginnings. All year long, people make silent promises to themselves to change something in their lives. And the start date for that change is rarely selected at random. It’s a conscious choice to wait until Monday, or the first of the month, or the day after a birthday to course correct.

Humans love do-overs. And Katharine Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, has named it the “fresh start effect.”

Milkman, who specializes in individuals’ decision-making, was visiting the Google headquarters in California to give a talk to the tech company’s human resources department on how to encourage employees to engage in healthier behaviors. The head of HR asked her when specifically the company should roll out such strategies to get the best response.

Milkman couldn’t say for sure, but she had a hunch.

She spearheaded a study with Wharton colleague Jason Riis and Washington Univer-

KLMNO WEEKLY

ISTOCKPHOTO

14.4%

Research found that more people did a Google search for “diet” at the beginning of a week, month and year.

Interest in dieting was 14.4 percent higher on Monday than the end of the week.

sity professor Hengchen Dai to determine whether it was possible to pinpoint moments when people are most motivated. And that’s where they discovered the link between what she called “temporal landmarks” and “aspirational behavior.”

In their research, published in late 2013, they found, for example, more people did a Google search for “diet” at the beginning of a week, month and, of course, year. Interest in dieting was 14.4 percent higher on Monday than the end of the week. The same was true for gym attendance, which was highest at the start of the week, month and year and then dropped off significantly.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 12

“We have cycles in our motivation,” Milkman said in an interview. “There are moments we’re particularly open to seeking out tools to change ourselves for the better.”

The psychological explanation for this is that people often divvy their lives up in chapters. Specific moments — graduation, marriage, childbirth, a new job or promotion, a new school semester — punctuate a fresh starting point. After a temporal landmark, people can detach from past failures. “This is a new me,” a person might think. “Who I was in December was a different person, this is now 2016 me.” It’s a means of closure; a clear delineation between past and present.

Milkman, Dai and Riis published a related study in August that further explored this idea. In one test, a group of participants, who wanted to tackle a goal more effectively, were asked to pick from a set of different dates in March to receive goal reminders. When provided the dates, one group was given an option of the third Thursday in March and the other were given first day of spring. Both were March 20. Overwhelmingly, people were 3.5 times more likely to choose March 20 when it was seen as the beginning of a new season and more than just an ordinary day.

Motivation naturally wanes, but framing days other than New Year’s as opportunities for do-overs provides many chances for people to seek positive self-improvements throughout the year. So even though almost everyone will fail at their initial 2016 resolutions, hope is not lost.

Just pick a moment that can be viewed as a fresh start, and try again.

“Those of us who break (resolutions) have new opportunities around every bend,” Milkman said. “We give ourselves a lot of opportunities to get back on the horse.” n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY MONEY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER A lieutenant’s sworn statement, explaining why she did not trust the Army to handle her sexual assault and harassment complaint.

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POLITICS

The quiet impact of Obama’s Christian faith

2012 POOL PHOTO BY OLIVIER DOULIERY VIA BLOOMBERG NEWS

Why the president believed he could unite a divided country — and why he failed President Obama, who did not grow up in a religious household, has relied on his Christian faith in trying to bring civility to the nation’s political debates. But no modern president has had his faith more routinely questioned or disparaged.

BY

G REG J AFFE

P

resident Obama was flying over Los Angeles in June as he listened to the first accounts from a courtroom in Charleston, S.C., where family members of nine dead parishioners who were gunned down at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church had just addressed the accused killer.

He heard the words of a daughter who had lost her mother: “May God forgive you. I forgive you.”

He listened to the plea of a mother who had lost her son: “Every fiber in my body hurts . . . but may God have mercy on you.”

The president paused, the thump of the helicopter’s blades filling the otherwise silent cabin.

He had planned to tweet some statistics later that day comparing gun violence in the United States and other developed countries,butnow he told his staff to cancel that.

Instead, in the Oval Office two days later, he seized upon something that seemed more important to him than any argument about gun control — an idea central to his political identity and his conviction that he could unify the divided nation.

“The essence of what is right about Christianity is embedded here,” he said of the families, ac-

cording to notes taken during the meeting.

As Obama saw it, the parishionersandtheirfamiliesmetthemost demanding teachings of Christ.

“They welcomed the stranger,” he said in the Oval Office meeting.

“They forgave the worst violence.”

These were Obama’s thoughts as he prepared to deliver the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. He wanted to use the moment to talk about the example that the pastor, who was killed in the attack, his parishioners and their families had set for a country that had grown so suspicious and gridlocked over the course of his presidency.

“How do we conduct ourselves?”

he asked. “Don’t we have to do something more than just praise how wonderful these folks were and then go about our daily lives?”

Obama did not grow up in a religious household, and he became a practicing Christian as an adult. He has written more extensively about his spiritual awakening than almost any other modern president, addressing it in two books before he was elected to the White House and in more than a dozen speeches since.

His faith had been central to his identity as a new kind of Democrat who would bring civility to the country’s political debates by appealing to Republicans through

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POLITICS the shared language of their Judeo-Christian values.

With just one year left in his second term, Obama now holds a different distinction: No modern president has had his faith more routinely questioned and disparaged. Recent polls show that 29 percent of Americans and nearly 45 percent of Republicans say he is a Muslim.

He has repeatedly said in recent months that one of his biggest regrets is that he will leave behind a country that has grown more polarized and distrustful during his two terms in the White House.

“There’s all this goodness and decency and common sense on the ground, and somehow it gets translated into rigid, dogmatic, often mean-spirited politics,” Obama said in a recent interview.

To understand why he so deeply believed that he could close that gap and why he largely has been unable to do so, it is essential to understand his faith and how it shapes his politics. That faith also explains why he has not given up.

In his final year in office, Obama hopes to work with Republicans and evangelical Christians on criminal justice reform. He will make a renewed push on gun control and the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“He’s trying to figure out how to get a lot of these big things he cares about out of the box of political opportunism and into a more humanistic space,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning for the president’s final year in office.

The same impulse drove Obama’s Charleston eulogy. In the days before the funeral, Obama’s speechwriter, Cody Keenan, compiled 19 pages of notes on the families and their church. He reread James Baldwin to help him think about race relations and a Holocaust-era theologian — Dietrich Bonhoeffer — to better understand the nature of tragedy and grace.

Keenan turned in the first draft of the speech at 5 p.m. on the evening before Obama was to speak. Five hours later, the president called him back to the White House. The first two pages were largely intact with the president’s notes and thoughts jotted in the margins. The final two pages had been completely rewritten in long-

PETE SOUZA/WHITE HOUSE

hand on a legal pad.

After eight years of working for Obama, Keenan had become adept at channeling the president’s fluid writing style, his thoughts and even his feelings onto the page. “But, there are times where it’s just impossible,” he said. He started to apologize, but the president stopped him.

“When you’ve been thinking about this stuff for 30 years, you’ll know what you want to say, too,” Obama said.

Eleven years earlier, Obama was thinking about this same subject while drafting a response to Farr Curlin, a Chicago doctor who had written to him about abortion.

It was after 1 a.m. on March 18, 2004. Twenty-four hours earlier, Obama had won the Democratic Senate primary in Illinois — the biggest victory of his political career at that point. Curlin, who began by congratulating him, had written because he was upset by abortion-related language on Obama’s campaign website in which the candidate had promised to fight “right wing ideologues” seeking to “take away women’s rights.”

“You know very well that you will struggle to find a thoughtful person who opposes abortion because he or she wants to take away women’s rights,” Curlin wrote. His opposition to the procedure, he said, was grounded in reason and supported by more than 2,000

years of church teachings.

Curlin didn’t ask Obama to change his stance; he only asked that the president use “fair-minded words” when discussing the issue.

In his late-night reply, Obama defended his belief that a woman should be the final “decision maker” and apologized for the overheated language on such a “profoundly difficult” subject. “It’s very difficult not to fall prey to some of that rhetoric,” he responded, “and it worsens in a long primary battle.”

Curlin saved the email on a hard drive. Obama wouldn’t become a national star for nearly five more months, when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, but Curlin could sense that there was something special about him. He’d seen him speak at the University of Chicago and had been impressed by his intelligence, his evenhanded tone and his message that Americans could have serious disagreements without demonizing their opponents.

“I believe you will win [the Senate election] and may go on to be the President one day,” he wrote in the email.

Obama saved the email exchange as well. Two years later, as he was contemplating a challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, he would make the email the centerpiece of a major speech on faith

President Obama prays with a wounded serviceman and his family during a 2012 visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

“People who want to embrace and live out what the Catholic Church teaches about what it means to be human . . . are feeling much less free to talk in public.”

Farr Curlin, a doctor who exchanged emails with Obama in 2004

KLMNO WEEKLY

and politics at a religious conference in Washington. In the address, Obama condemned Republicans who used faith as “a tool of attack” and criticized liberals who dismissed faith as “inherently irrational or intolerant.”

Americans wanted a “sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives,” he said. They craved assurances that “they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.”

Obama spoke of his Christian awakening as a community organizer in Chicago and ended his address by telling the story of the doctor, whom he never publicly named, and his email.

Obama acknowledged feeling “a pang of shame” when reading Curlin’s note. “It’s people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country,” he said.

As he told the story of the email exchange, Obama added details.

The doctor’s Christian faith, Obama said, had led him to oppose not only abortion, but also samesex marriage, the “idolatry of the free market” and the “quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.” Obama also described the unnamed doctor as supporting his policy initiatives to “help the poor and to lift up our educational system.”

None of this information was in any of the email exchanges between Curlin and Obama, who have never met or spoken. Both men taught at the University of Chicago in the early 2000s.

“Frankly, I was a very minor faculty at the time,” Curlin said in a recent interview, “and I am not sure how he would have learned more about me.”

All of the details Obama attributed to him are generally correct, Curlin said. It appears that Obama, touched by the doctor’s earnestness and intrigued by his intellect, may have read some of Curlin’s academic papers and talked to one of his colleagues about him.

Obama retold the story of the email exchange in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” and again in 2009 in a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. He cited the exchange as proof that faith and spirituality could elevate American political debate, opening hearts and minds. continues on next page

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POLITICS

from previous page

“The ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It’s the belief in things not seen,” Obama said at Notre Dame. “It should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to be wary of too much self-righteousness.”

Today, Curlin takes a different lesson from his exchange with Obama and the president’s two terms in office. When Curlin listened to Obama tell his story, it seemed to him that the thensenator understood the “totalizing nature of Christian discipleship” and the “profound importance” of extending religious freedom not just to individuals, but also to religious institutions.

Some of Obama’s policies since then, especially his move to require religiously affiliated institutions to cover contraceptive services under the Affordable Care Act, demonstrated a different view, Curlin said.

“I remember that was the point that I thought, ‘Why?’ ” Curlin said of the Affordable Care Act decision. “It startled me.”

To him, the move was part of a broader trend that prioritized the desires of some people over the freedom of religious institutions to practicetheirfaithaccordingtocenturies-old teachings and tradition, especially when those teachings were considered “embarrassing” or out of step with modern mores.

“We’re at a point eight years after he was elected where people who want to embrace and live out what the Catholic Church teaches about what it means to be human, including on issues of sexuality and marriage, are feeling much less free to talk in public than they were before,” he said.

Curlin doesn’t blame Obama for that broader societal change, but he thinks his decisions have contributed to it. “Insofar as he’s had policies come up that might either arrest that trend or accelerate it,” Curlin said, “he has chosen unquestionably to accelerate it.”

Obama’s 30 years of thinking about faith and politics had led him to this point: Behind him in the Charleston arena were purplerobed pastors and deacons. In front were thousands of mourners and a casket holding Pinckney’s bullet-ridden body.

“We are here today to remember a man of God who lived by faith,” Obama began.

He extolled the black church as

RICHARD ELLIS/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

For Obama, faith is a means to move from the world as it is to the promise of the world as it ought to be. a refuge in times of trouble and a force for progressive change — the African American community’s “beating heart.”

Then Obama shifted to the material he had written on a legal pad the previous evening. His cadence slowed and his voice deepened, making him sound more like a pastor than a president. He spoke of the killer’s act, designed to provoke “fear and recrimination, violence and suspicion.”

“Oh, but God works in mysterious ways,” Obama said, raising his voice to be heard over the mourners’ shouts of joy.

“God has different ideas,” he continued, as the crowd members rose to their feet.

Then he uttered one of the boldest sentences of his presidency, a sentence that he had improvised in the moment and that captured the essence of his Christian faith.

“He didn’t know he was being used by God,” the president said of the shooter.

Throughout his political career, Obama has described his faith as one that acknowledges doubt and man’s inherently sinful nature.

For Obama, faith is a means to

move from that dire reality — the world as it is — to the promise of the world as it ought to be. This idea of faith as an ennobling struggle runs through virtually all of his most ambitious speeches.

“It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs,” Obama said in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech.

It’s the faith of the soldier “who sees he’s outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace,” he said in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

In Charleston, surrounded by grief-stricken mourners and standing just a few feet from Pinckney’s casket, Obama was no longer using a historical or hypothetical example to illustrate his belief. As he explained it, the Charleston parishioners had demonstrated their faith when they welcomed the killer into their Bible study. The families of the dead had passed God’s test when they faced down despair and found the grace to forgive.

Now it was up to the rest of the country to follow that example, Obama said, by working together

President Obama sings “Amazing Grace’’ during the June funeral in Charleston, S.C., for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine people fatally shot at Emanuel AME Church.

on some of the most intractable problems of his presidency: race, poverty and guns.

In the days leading up to the funeral, Obama often seemed nostalgic for the first months of his presidency, when the country seemed less divided. He confessed that one of his biggest struggles as president had been to figure out ways to close the gulf between the “good impulses of the overwhelming majority of Americans” and the country’s rigid, rabid and dogmatic politics. “The problem is that there’s this big gap between who we are as a people and how our politics expresses itself,” Obama said.

The reasons for the country’s divisions are long and complicated and include a fragmented media, economic uncertainty and rapid social change. Sometimes, Obama has appeared to single out conservative evangelical Christians for special blame, saying in an interview with the New York Review of Books that “it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have blamed Obama for the rift, arguing that he has used his faith to press for progressive change on issues such as immigration reform, accepting Syrian refugees and same-sex marriage, but has dismissed their faith-based opposition as intolerance. “He’s a lecturer. He finger-wags a lot,” said Peter Wehner, who ran the policy idea factory in George W. Bush’s White House and wrote admiringly of Obama’s evangelical outreach in 2008.

In the tragedy of the Charleston shootings, Obama saw a chance to recapture some of the spirit that had animated the early hope of his presidency.

“That’s what I’ve felt this week — an open heart,” he told the mourners in Charleston. “That, more than any particular policy analysis, is what’s called upon right now.”

He looked out at the crowd. “If we can find that grace, anything is possible,” he continued. “If we can tap that grace, everything can change.”

Twice Obama spoke the opening words of the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head. Slowly and hesitantly, he began to sing. n

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POLITICS COMMENTARY

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FACT CHECKER: 2015’s BIGGEST PINOCCHIOS

Their claims to shame BY

G LENN K ESSLER

reasonable compensation owed to car dealers.

“Obama never says the United States is exceptional or great.”

Former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) asserted this bizarre claim. We

I

t’s time for our annual roundup of the biggest Pinocchios of the past year.

The 2016 presidential campaign has dominated our coverage of false claims. In particular, businessman Donald Trump — who has soared to the top of the GOP field — kept us busy. In the space of six months, he earned 11 four-Pinocchio ratings, far more than any other candidate.

This list has no particular order. To keep it simple, we have shortened the quotes.

concluded Giuliani must have muted the sound whenever Obama spoke, because there are many examples of Obama saying exactly that.

“The Keystone pipeline is for oil that bypasses the United States.”

Long before President Obama killed the

Keystone pipeline project, he made a number of dubious claims about it, including that the pipeline would have no benefit for U.S. producers at all. But the crude oil would have traveled to the Gulf Coast, where it would be refined into products such as gasoline and diesel fuel; the State Department said odds were low that all would be exported. Also, about 12 percent of the pipeline’s capacity had been set aside for crude from North Dakota and Montana.

“I watched thousands and thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheer as the World Trade Center fell.”

Donald Trump falsely and repeatedly as-

serted that he saw TV images of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the collapse of the twin towers after the 9/11 attacks. Despite repeated debunking of this claim, Trump continued to assert he was correct, even though he could produce no evidence except a handful of news stories that made brief mentions of alleged celebrations — which never could be confirmed.

“DOMA had to be enacted to stop an antigay marriage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton,

the Democratic front-runner, defended her husband’s signing of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act as a defensive action, to prevent a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

But there is little evidence in the public record that was the case, even though Clinton claimed “there was enough political momentum” at the time to amend the constitution.

“The Mexican government is forcing criminals, drug dealers and rapists into the United States.”

Donald Trump repeatedly defended this

claim, but a range of studies show there is no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. Moreover, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants in prison do not belong in the category that fits Trump’s description: aggravated felons.

“Since Sandy Hook there has been a school shooting, on average, every week.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) made this

claim in June, which indicated 128 school shootings since December 2014. The number came from Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun violence prevention group. But its methodology was deeply flawed, including suicides, accidental discharges and so forth. Official government statistics are much lower.

“Obama plans to admit 250,000 Syrian refugees.”

Donald Trump first said President Obama

planned to admit 200,000 Syrian refugees, a

figure conjured out of thin air. Then it became 250,000. But the real figure is 10,000. The United States is planning to admit 180,000 refugees from all countries in the next two years.

Trump’s false rhetoric inspired other GOP candidates to offer wildly inflated figures, as well.

“With Al Gore, I helped organize the first hearings in the Senate on climate change in 1988.”

Secretary of State John F. Kerry for years

has said he organized the first Senate hearings on climate change with Sens. Al Gore (DTenn.) and Tim Wirth (D-Colo). But that was false. Kerry was not at the pivotal 1988 hearing in the Senate — and neither was Gore, who organized the first hearing in the House in 1981.

On top of that, Kerry described witnessing events that did not happen.

“The science on climate change is not settled, because in 1970s we were worried about ‘global freezing.’ ” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee

(R) cited the “covers” of Time and Newsweek magazines to claim global freezing had been a serious concern 40 years ago. But these were not cover stories, just isolated examples of speculative journalism. It was never a serious concern; researchers found that peerreviewed articles on global cooling were in a distinct minority compared with those concerned with global warming.

“Auto dealer markups cost consumers $26 billion a year.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), pushing

for new regulations of loans made by car dealers, cited a figure based on a misleading and dated report from the Center for Responsible Lending, an advocacy group. But then she also wildly mischaracterized the number, as even the advocacy group conceded that the figure includes

Donald Trump, left, dominated the coverage of false claims this past year, but Hillary Clinton and John F. Kerry had their own four-Pinocchio claims, too.

“A man was put in prison for conspiracy just for having dirt on his land.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) loved to tell the sto-

ry of an elderly man sitting in prison for 10 years after being accused of racketeering and organized crime — just for putting dirt on his land. But just about every aspect of Paul’s recounting was inaccurate and misleading. The man, Robert Lucas, was convicted of mail fraud, conspiracy and environmental violations for his role in developing 67 mobile home lots inside federally protected wetlands, building on wetlands without approval and knowingly selling land with illegal sewage systems that were likely to fail.

“Hands up, don’t shoot.”

This phrase became a rallying cry for protests after the fatal shooting of a black 18-yearold by a white police officer, Darren Wilson.

Witness accounts spread after the shooting that Michael Brown had his hands raised in surrender, mouthing the words “Don’t shoot” before being shot. Democratic lawmakers raised their hands in solidarity on the House floor. But investigations concluded this did not happen — and that Wilson acted out of selfdefense and was justified in killing Brown.

Bushels of bogus sex-trafficking statistics.

No single issue earned more Pinocchios than dubious claims about sex trafficking.

There are not 300,000 children at risk for sexual exploitation. There are not 100,000 children in the sex trade. Human trafficking is not a $9.5 billion business in the United States.

Girls do not become victims of sex trafficking at an average age of 13. The federal government has not arrested hundreds of sex traffickers. These were all false claims made in 2015 by politicians, advocacy groups and government officials. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Binding publishing and philanthropy BY

L YNDSEY L AYTON

I

n a small, two-bedroom apartment in Corona, Calif., Trinity Santos, 5, reads her hardcover copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” again and again. She never tires of the Dr. Seuss classic, sometimes reading it to her 3-year-old brother, Joshua, said their mother, Diane.

Life is a struggle for the Santos family. Diane worked as a waitress before her children were born, and the family of four lives on the $35,000 that her husband earns as a phlebotomist. They don’t have much.

But the children own the four dozen books in a small, homemade bookcase, courtesy of First Book, a nonprofit organization that combines market forces and philanthropy to get new books into the hands of poor children to encourage early reading.

“I didn’t have books at home when I was growing up in the Philippines,” said Diane Santos, 33, who connected with First Book through a local parent education program she attended shortly after Trinity was born. “I learned the most important thing is reading with them, talking to them, introducing new words.”

First Book, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1992, has grown into a sophisticated national enterprise that gave away more than 15 million new books to lowincome children and teens in 2015. But as financial troubles have deepened in households nationwide, First Book has turned to items well beyond books, this year adding winter coats, nonperishable snacks, toothpaste, fleece blankets, underwear and other goods to its charitable arsenal.

“There’s a profound need that is really unprecedented,” said Kyle Zimmer, 55, a onetime corporate lawyer who formed First Book with two friends after she volunteered at a D.C. soup kitchen and realized that many of the children had no books at home.

Even as the economy recovers from the housing collapse of 2008, many families continue to falter. The number of homeless

SEAN SIMMERS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

First Book’s efforts for poor children have transformed an industry children in public schools has doubled since before the recession, reaching a record total of 1.36 million nationwide in the 2013-2014 school year, the most recent one for which data is available.

More than 215,000 teachers, libraries, health clinics, afterschool programs, shelters, faithbased groups and others — more than five times its 40,000 users in 2012 — are now registered to use First Book. Any provider or program is eligible if at least 70 percent of the children served come from low- income families.

First Book’s focus has expanded beyond literacy as teachers and caregivers have made it clear that their students face obstacles that

are getting in the way of reading, Zimmer said.

“If kids need a snack to get through the morning, we want to fix that,” she said. “If absenteeism goes up in the winter because kids don’t have winter coats to go to school, we want to fix that. We’re about equal access to education, and we’re trying to remove barriers.”

To get a sense of demand for items besides books, First Book partnered with a grocery chain this past year and bought a bulk order of heavily discounted fruit snacks and granola bars, items with a long shelf life. Within 24 hours, 10,000 were claimed, she said. Forty-five refurbished notebook computers, at a cost of $150 each, were made

A worker pushes a cart of books for needy children through one of the warehouses used

by First Book.

Kyle Zimmer started First Book with two friends.

available to its network; they were gone in 32 minutes.

Sharlene Scott, an intervention coordinator at an elementary school in Gardena, Calif., spends her own money on school supplies for her students, most of whom are eligible for free lunches. Through First Book, she has cut her bill in half. “It’s been a really awesome thing,” said Scott, whose school also gets enough books from First Book to give two or three free ones to each of its 800 students during the school year.

First Book operates an online book bank, which collects donated books from publishers and gives them away; recipients pay only shipping costs, at about

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

9

NATION 55 cents a book.

For publishers, the book bank solves the dilemma of being stuck with unsold books returned from retailers. Usually, those books are either resold at a lower price to a secondary market — known as “remainders” — are donated or destroyed.

First Book also has been able to commission inexpensive, paperback versions of popular children’s books for resale at rock-bottom prices. In those cases, First Book places a large, nonrefundable order, which saves the publisher marketing costs and removes the risk that it will be stuck with unsold books. Those books, for sale on First Book’s marketplace, join an expanding line of other heavily discounted items such as food, clothing and school supplies.

First Book has warehouses in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, which it supplements with donated warehouse space around the country.

For disadvantaged children, owning a book they select for themselves is “magical,” said Melissa Spradlin, executive director of Book’em, a small nonprofit organization in Nashville that gets books from First Book.

“When you borrow books, they have to be returned, they’ve been used by somebody else, they’re not new and that’s fine — I love libraries,” she said. “But there is a huge difference between owning a book and borrowing a book.

There’s something magical about reading a book as many times as you want because it’s your favorite, sharing it with your family and your siblings. And that’s what First Book makes possible.”

As it has grown, First Book also is influencing children’s publishing, using its market power to encourage the industry to create more books with characters and themes relevant to the racially and ethnically diverse population it serves.

First Book persuaded Penguin Random House to publish a bilingual English-Spanish version of Eric Carle’s classic book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” When First Book purchased 140,000 discounted copies of the book and they sold quickly on the marketplace, Penguin soon introduced the bilingual version in its retail line. “We are trying to do things that move the industry,” Zimmer said. n

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POLICE SHOOTINGS INVESTIGATION

979

people shot and killed in 2015

In 2015, The Washington Post investigated details surround­ ing those who died from police shootings. Here are six impor­ tant takeaways from 12 months of the investigation.

BY K IMBERLY K INDY AND K ENNEDY E LLIOTT

Mental illness played a role in one quarter of incidents.

Many of the deaths of people in the throes of a mental or emotional crisis may be preventable, police and mental-health experts said.

They point to a need for better police training. The Post analysis revealed that more than half of these killings involved police agencies that had not provided officers with state-of-the-art training to de-escalate such encounters.

“This a national crisis,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank. “We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill.”

One quarter of fatal shootings involved a fleeing suspect.

Police chiefs and training experts said more-restrictive rules on when to give chase could reduce these deaths.

For example, many departments discourage officers from pursuing a suspect alone on foot, particularly in dark or dimly lit areas, unless the person presents an immediate threat. Avoiding unnecessary pursuits might also avoid injecting adrenaline and anger into the encounter, police experts said.

Police “are used to giving commands and people obeying,” said Philip M. Stinson, a professor at Bowling Green State University.

“They don’t like it when people don’t listen to them, and things can quickly become violent when people don’t follow their orders.”

Indictments of police officers tripled in 2015, compared with previous years.

Although charges are rarely filed in fatal police shootings, indictments of police officers tripled in 2015, compared with previous years.

Over the past decade, authorities have indicted an average of five officers a year for fatal shootings, a Post analysis found. In 2015, 18 officers were charged, compared with 47 officers between 2005 and 2014.

Half of the 2015 indictments stemmed from shootings that occurred during the year, while the rest date back as far as 2011. In 10 of the 2015 cases, prosecutors had a video record of the shooting, a big increase over previous years.

“Thank God for technology,” said the Rev. Ira Acree, pastor at Greater St. John Bible Church in Chicago, where an officer was charged with first-degree murder in November. “Maybe it’s finally helping us crack the blue code of silence.”

Six percent of the killings were captured by body cameras.

Police-worn body cameras have been championed by police chiefs and politicians as critical to improving transparency. The Post found that 6 percent of the killings were captured by body cameras.

The Post also found that police and local officials often refuse to publicly release video. In more than half of cases with body-cam video, police departments declined Post requests for copies of the footage.

In Burlington, Iowa, Mayor Shane McCampbell has urged

police to release body-cam video of a January shooting that accidentally killed a local mother of two. If the videos “are going to be a secret, no one is being held accountable,” McCampbell said.

“And that was the point.”

In three-quarters of the fatal shootings, police were under attack or defending someone who was.

The officers were often lauded as heroes.

The Post found that 28 percent of those who died were shooting at officers or someone else. Sixteen percent were attacking with other weapons or physical force, and 31 percent were pointing a gun.

“You have to make life-ordeath decisions,” said Mary Jane Norman, who credits Indianapolis police with saving her life in February when they shot and killed her mentally ill son, Kent, as he held a butcher knife to her throat. “A moment’s pause could cause the death of an innocent victim or themselves.”

One in 10 people shot and killed by police were unarmed.

Fatal shootings of unarmed civilians sparked much of the national debate over police use of deadly force.

The Post found that 9 percent of shootings involved an unarmed victim. The unarmed victims were disproportionately black. In a Post analysis looking at population-adjusted rates, unarmed black men were six times as likely as unarmed whites to die from police gunfire.

Overall, more than half of those killed in 2015 had guns, 16 percent had knives and 5 percent attempted to hit officers with their vehicles. Three percent had toy weapons, typically replica guns that are indistinguishable from the real thing. n

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WORLD

Building a port to prosperity P AUL S CHEMM in Berbera, Somalia BY

B

y the afternoon, more goats than cars are to be found on the unpaved, sunblasted streets of Berbera, a sleepy port town on the Horn of Africa.

Yet this port is on the brink of a major expansion that not only could transform it into a regional transportation hub but also could fund the ambitions of a peaceful, orderly swath of Somalia to build its own state.

While Somalia descended into chaos after its government collapsed in 1991 and was racked by famine, clan warfare, piracy and later the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab insurgency, the northern half split off and formed its own country.

Although no nation officially recognizes it, Somaliland has its own police, army, flag and currency, and for the past 24 years has held regular elections for parliament and a president.

Somaliland has survived on money sent from its diaspora and livestock sales to Arab countries. It has a relatively weak government with a tiny budget that rules in consensus with the local clans.

Many in the country, however, feel that model has run its course.

With high unemployment and a great deal of outward migration, Somaliland needs more income to survive and develop, they say — and the answer is to link its future to the far stronger economy next door, Ethiopia.

The position of the international community, including the United States, is to help Somalia get back on its feet and reassert control over Somaliland. The people here, however, say that will never happen — many remember the bombing campaign carried out by Mogadishu in 1988 that flattened Somaliland’s capital of Hargeisa when the region tried to secede.

“I’ll never forgive them for the bombing,” said Hassan Mohammed, a gray-bearded retired civil servant, as he stood in the center of town before a monument of a downed MiG-17 fighter that took

PAUL SCHEMM FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Somaliland pins its economic hopes on a harbor that would handle commerce for Ethiopia part in the bombing.

For the 70 percent of Somaliland’s population of 3.5 million born since 1991, the idea of being ruled by a country rife with piracy and Islamist insurgency is a nonstarter.

For them, Mogadishu is something that happens on the news. It is a long way from the vibrant cafes of Hargeisa, where WiFi is plentiful and money changers sit behind stacks of currency in the main market with no guards in sight.

“Somaliland has achieved what it has achieved with limited assistance from the international community, in stark contrast with the billions poured into Mogadishu,” said Mahmoud Jama, the Somaliland ambassador to Ethiopia.

“We think the international community has been flogging a dead horse for a long time, as far as Mogadishu is concerned.”

Landlocked Ethiopia has been looking to diversify its access to the sea for a while. About 90 per-

cent of its trade goes through Djibouti, a tiny country with a huge port that rakes in around $1.5 billion in port fees from Ethiopia every year. Somaliland’s plan is to divert 30 percent of that trade through Berbera.

“They need access to a port, that’s something we know, and we are trying to leverage it,” said Sharmarke Jama, the trade and economic adviser to Somaliland’s foreign ministry. “It’s not just the road to the port, it’s the whole relationship.”

A memorandum of understanding on customs and transit was signed by Somaliland and Ethiopia a year ago, and its implementation is expected soon — even as negotiations have bogged down over which international company will provide the money and expertise to expand the port.

French ports company Bolloré has been in talks to expand and run the port for years, but different factions in the Somaliland government are now pushing oth-

A monument was made of a downed Somali MiG-17 that took part in bombing the capital city, Hargeisa, during the 1988 suppression of Somaliland’s first attempted secession from Somalia.

er candidates, including the Dubai-based DP World.

The man responsible for running Berbera Port for the past 20 years, Ali Omer, said that it is too early to bring on a foreign partner — better to wait and negotiate from a position of strength.

Trade through the port has been increasing by 20 percent to 30 percent annually for the past few years.

“The idea is to start handling cargo with Ethiopia now, put the cargo through the road for the next year or so, and everything will be fine and then negotiate,” he said in his expansive office at the port.

But a lot has to happen to Berbera Port, which now handles less than 5 percent of Ethiopia’s trade, before the ships arrive. And the road to the border through Somaliland’s desert scrublands is a pitted stretch of asphalt cut in several places by sandy river beds. It looks ill-prepared for major truck traffic.

This kind of infrastructure is expensive, with estimates to refurbish the 180-mile road running about $300 million — Somaliland’s current annual budget — while the port expansion would be at least another $200 million.

Somaliland doesn’t have the kind of money for such projects and, unlike other developing countries, doesn’t have access to international financial institutions to borrow. Its largest foreign donor is Britain, its former colonial power, whose aid agency, the Department for International Development, is advising it on how to develop Berbera Port and the Berbera corridor for truck traffic to and from Ethiopia.

Mohammed Farah, of Somaliland’s Association for Peace and Development think tank, said the only way the port and corridor project will succeed is if the central government starts acting more like a true state.

“Without challenging the clan system, you cannot have economic development,” he said.

Until that happens, Somaliland’s economy will probably limp along, with its unrecognized status keeping away most international investors. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Vietnam leans toward an old foe S IMON D ENYER Hanoi BY

T

o win friends and open new markets for Chinese companies, Beijing is offering its Asian neighbors tens of billions of dollars in loans and investment. But in Vietnam, the effort is falling flat.

China’s aggressive assertion of its maritime territorial claims has alienated many here, and President Xi Jinping’s grand vision of a new Silk Road with China at its center is greeted with scorn and suspicion rather than excitement.

The relationship has turned so bad that Vietnam’s Communist Party is tilting more and more toward an old enemy, the United States. And when Xi paid a state visit to Vietnam in November, you could almost feel the chill.

Xi was feted with a 21-gun salute and granted a rare invitation to address the country’s National Assembly. His 20-minute speech to his “comrades” in Vietnam was full of poetic references to the two nations’ shared destinies, to how brothers can even “break gold” if their hearts are united.

But Xi’s exhortations were met with stony silence and only a smattering of applause at the end. Boredom, indifference and even hostility were written on the faces of his audience.

“The atmosphere was very tense,” said one Vietnamese official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

China wants to help its fellow Asiancountriesbuildtheinfrastructure their economies desperately need, under the banner of re-creating ancient Silk Road trade routes andpartlychanneledthroughanew Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.Vietnamneedsthemoneybut fears a hidden agenda.

“We are quite suspicious because we don’t know the real objective,” said Tran Truong Thuy, an expert at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, a Foreign Ministry think tank. “Behind its Maritime Silk Road, China can advance its sovereignty propaganda.”

In the run-up to Xi’s visit, activ-

QUINN RYAN MATTINGLY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Chinese offers conjure fears of a hidden agenda and prompt improved relations with the U.S. ists staged several small but rare protests against him, watched but not always disbanded by local police. Eight Vietnamese nongovernmental organizations and 1,700 activists signed an online petition against his trip, while a Facebook campaign gathered thousands more to the cause.

In a subtle snub, Xi’s visit was timed to coincide with a visit by the Japanese defense minister, with Hanoi inviting a Japanese warship to dock at Vietnam’s strategic Cam Ranh Bay. The contrast between Xi’s visit and President Bill Clinton’s 2000 trip to Vietnam was stark: Then, tens of thousands of young people waited late into the night to welcome the first U.S. leader to visit since the Vietnam War ended. For Xi, there were no cheering crowds.

On the streets of Hanoi, a series of concrete pillars and a half-built elevated railway hint at one of the reasons China faces so much public distrust here.

A Chinese-built urban rail project is running three years behind schedule and 57 percent over budget. Several accidents, including scaffolding collapses and falling objects, have killed or injured passersby, while Vietnam’s trans-

port minister has complained that the terms of the Chinese loan forced him to buy Chinese trains.

“Chinese contractors are very bad,” Minister Dinh La Thang said, according to local media outlets. “I wanted to replace them many times, but I could not because of the loan agreement’s obligations.”

China has a reputation for transferring outdated technology to Vietnam, producing low-quality workmanship, ignoring environmental standards and importing its own workers. Chinese companies often win contracts by bidding at unrealistically low rates, experts said, only to end up charging more.

The most dramatic recent break in the relationship between Beijing and Hanoi came in May 2014, when China towed a $1 billion oil rig close to the Paracel Islands, in South China Sea waters that Vietnam considers part of its exclusive economic zone.

Coming at a time when relations between the two countries were on an upswing, “the oil rig incident was a shock to Vietnam,” the Vietnamese official said. “Mutual trust has not really recovered.”

Deadly riots broke out in Vietnam in which Chinese and Taiwanese factories were attacked.

A model car is seen for Hanoi’s urban railway, a Chinesebuilt project that is behind schedule and over budget.

There was a call for an emergency meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee to discuss forming an alliance with the United States — a radical strategic change for a country whose disdain for military partnerships is a central foreign policy tenet, said Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the University of New South Wales. President Obama’s top adviser for Asia, Evan Medeiros, was even invited to Vietnam that July to discuss deepening ties.

In the end, China withdrew the oilriginJuly2014,amonthaheadof schedule, and the emergency meeting of the Central Committee was never held. Nevertheless, an improving relationship with the United States received further impetus.

In the past 12 months, eight of Vietnam’s 16 Politburo members have visited Washington, while half a dozen Cabinet-level U.S. officials have traveled the other way.

Capping an unprecedented level of engagement, Obama received Vietnamese Communist Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong in the Oval Office in July and is expected to visit Vietnam this year.

But the clearest indication of rapprochement between Hanoi and Washington has been Vietnam’s inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a U.S.-led 12-nation regional trade deal that excludes China. That deal, Vietnam hopes, will help reduce its economic dependence on China, with which it runs a large and growing trade deficit.

Vietnam knows it needs good relations with China: History and geography dictate that it cannot afford to make Beijing an enemy.

Vietnam will not turn its back on Chinese investment, but it will pick carefully, and it certainly does not trust China’s intentions.

“The Chinese government and the media are not very smart,” said a leading Chinese professional in Hanoi, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. Beijing’s propaganda machine has bombarded the world with talk of Xi’s grand regional plans, “without thinking about how that might make others feel,” he said. n

BY CRAIG WHITLOCK in Fort Stewart, Ga.

T

Scandals undermine Army’s battle against sexual assault

o mark the end of Sexual Assault Awareness Month in April, the 188th Infantry Brigade held a potluck lun­ cheon here at the largest Army installation east of the Mississippi River. The deputy commander remind­ ed his soldiers they were all “responsible for bringing an end to sexual assault and harassment,” according to the brigade’s Facebook account. ¶ What most of the soldiers didn’t know was that the deputy commander, Lt. Col. Michael D. Kepner II, was himself facing court­martial on charges that he had sexually harassed and assaulted a female lieutenant on his staff. ¶ Despite repeated complaints from the victim and other officers, Kep­ ner’s chain of command violated Army rules and allowed him to stay in a leader­ ship post for at least eight months while he was under criminal investigation, internal Army emails and memos show.

He later pleaded guilty to some of the charges and is serving time in a military prison. ¶ For the past two years, the

Pentagon has acknowledged having a severe problem with sexual assault in the ranks. Military leaders have prom­ ised Congress, the White House and their own troops that they are redou­ bling efforts to protect victims and pun­ ish offenders. ¶ But those pledges have been undermined by a string of previ­ ously undisclosed cases in which sol­ diers entrusted with key roles in the campaign against sexual assault and ha­ rassment have, in turn, been accused of committing those very offenses, accord­ ing to a Washington Post investigation.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

13

COVER STORY The Army Reserve’s 80th Training Command summoned about 350 personnel to an Orlando hotel in 2013 for a four-day conference on sexualassault prevention. One session highlighted how excessive drinking is often at the root of sex crimes committed by those in uniform.

Soon after the conference began, sheriff’s deputies were called to the hotel to investigate a report that a female guest had been raped by one of the participants — an inebriated soldier she had met at the hotel pool.

The two-star general in charge couldn’t believe it when aides told him what had happened. Maj. Gen. William H. Gerety “turned beet red and said, you are f--king shitting me,” according to an Army inspector general’s report obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act. In a separate case in Florida, the Pentagon in October removed the leader of a military training institute dedicated to the prevention of discrimination and sexual misconduct.

Seven female employees told investigators that the commandant, Army Col. Morris “Reese” Turner, had inappropriately hugged them, rubbed their shoulders or touched them without consent, documents show. Turner acknowledged to investigators that he was a “touchyfeely” person but denied wrongdoing.

The Army concluded that he had committed assault when he touched two of the seven women, and it reprimanded him for creating “a hostile and ineffective work environment,” records show.

Overall, the Defense Department received 6,131 reports of sexual assault in 2014, a figure that has more than doubled since 2007.

According to Pentagon officials, the increase is actually a sign of progress. They say troops are more likely to report assaults than in the past because they have more faith in the military to properly investigate such crimes.

That assertion, however, has been undercut by a rash of scandals.

In March, a sexual-assault-prevention officer for an Army battalion at Fort Hood, Tex., pleaded guilty to acting as a pimp by luring cashstrapped young female soldiers into a prostitution ring.

In 2014, the Army disciplined its former top sex-crimes prosecutor after receiving a complaint that he had kissed and groped a female officer — while attending a conference on sexual assault.

Other branches of the armed forces haven’t been immune.

Members of Congress publicly excoriated the Air Force two years ago after the officer in charge of its sexual-assault-prevention programs was arrested outside a bar for allegedly grabbing a woman’s buttocks. The officer was acquitted in civilian court, but he received a reprimand from the Air Force and was removed from his job.

Still, the Army has a particularly spotty record on putting the right people in such sensitive roles. In 2014, the service fired or reassigned 588 people from their jobs as victim counselors, military recruiters and “positions of trust” after background checks revealed a history of sex

KLMNO WEEKLY

start to gain experience, they typically rotate to new assignments within a year or two as part of the military’s “revolving-door mentality,” he said.

The system shows that the military “doesn’t really take sexual assault seriously and just plugs somebody in without vetting them,” said Christensen, a retired colonel who served as the Air Force’s chief prosecutor. “You keep churning people through the program and eventually you’re going to end up with people who are bad.”

U.S. ARMY

“IT WAS RARE TO HAVE A CONVERSATION WITHOUT HIM TURNING IT SEXUAL.” A statement to investigators from a female lieutenant about Lt. Col. Michael D. Kepner II

crimes, child abuse, drunken driving and other offenses.

Army leaders declined interview requests for this article.

In a statement, Lt. Col. Ben Garrett, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said the service “has refined and enhanced its screening and selection processes to ensure that only the most qualified people are assigned to provide support and assistance to the victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment.”

“When these individuals engage in misconduct or fail to meet the Army’s exacting standards for these critical positions,” he added, “the Army takes appropriate action to hold them accountable.”

Don Christensen, president of Protect our Defenders, a victim-advocacy group, said the armed forces have hamstrung themselves by filling sexual-assault-prevention jobs with poorly trained personnel. Just as people

‘Sir, no!’

Commanders at Fort Stewart — home to the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division — received a series of blunt warnings that they were mishandling the case of Kepner, the lieutenant colonel accused of sexual assault.

Kepner was placed under criminal investigation in September 2014 after a lieutenant under his command reported that he had sexually harassed her over several months and repeatedly pressured her to have sex.

The harassment turned physical, culminating in two back-to-back incidents in which he grabbed her by the neck and pushed her against a wall, according to charging documents.

Agents from the Army Criminal Investigation Command confronted Kepner. He acknowledged that he had put his hands on the female officer’s shoulders, pressed her against the wall andsaid,“Thisiswhatallthosehornylieutenants want to do to you” and “Let’s do it on this desk,” according to the agents’ investigative reports.

Kepner played down his remarks as “playful banter.” He told agents that he stopped after the female officer said, “Sir, no!”

Kepner and his military attorney declined to comment for this article.

Under Army policy, criminal suspects must be removed from leadership positions and lose their security clearances until their cases are resolved. A few days after Kepner was placed under investigation, he was relieved as commander of the 83rd Chemical Battalion.

But instead of sidelining him, Kepner’s superiors placed him in a more important post. He became deputy commander of a larger unit: the 188th Infantry Brigade. He also kept his security clearance.

Records show that Army brass assured Kepner’s victim that he would be restricted to “making coffee and paper airplanes” in his new role as the deputy brigade commander. In fact, he frequently served as the brigade’s acting commander and led the unit in training exercises, according to the documents.

After a five-month investigation, Kepner was formally charged with sexual assault, violating a protective order and other crimes.

A separate disciplinary investigation concluded that Kepner had sexually harassed the lieutenant “on an almost daily basis.” That investigation found he had also harassed a second female lieutenant in the same unit.

“It was rare to have a conversation without him turning it sexual,” the second lieutenant told investigators in a statement. “His comments were so frequent, it was almost predictable.” continues on next page

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY after she was assaulted, she said, she hesitated to file a complaint because she didn’t think anyone would take her seriously. She said senior brass treated her like “a whiny” junior officer.

“My goal from the beginning was just to get him away from soldiers and out of a position of command authority,” she said. “There’s no system for senior officers to get investigated. It’s all senior officers trying to protect themselves.”

from previous page

Other evidence surfaced. A major told investigators that Kepner had once undermined a sexual-assault-prevention class at Fort Stewart.

After instructors presented a case study about a sergeant who sexually assaulted a drunk female soldier, Kepner took his battalion aside to offer a different view, according to the major’s statement.

Kepner told his soldiers that there was “another side” to the story: The married sergeant had actually been trying to protect the drunk soldier by giving her a ride home.

In Kepner’s retelling, the sergeant “gave in to temptation” after the woman subjected him to sexual advances. Kepner asserted that the sergeant’s actions were understandable because he was just a “man being a man,” the documents show.

Despite the sexual-harassment findings and the criminal charges against Kepner, the Army allowed him to continue as deputy brigade commander — alarming some Fort Stewart officials.

“I am concerned about the message it sends to the victim and Soldiers in the unit that he is still in a leadership position, not to mention the impact if the media caught wind,” Lt. Col. William J. Anderson, the officer in charge of Fort Stewart’s sexual-assault-prevention programs, wrote in a Feb. 18 email to Col. Vernon Miranda, the 3rd Infantry Division’s chief of staff. Miranda did not respond to requests for comment.

The warning went unheeded. Two months later, Kepner spoke at the luncheon to commemorate Sexual Assault Awareness Month, according to the brigade’s Facebook account. (The Army recently deleted the Facebook postings after The Post inquired about them.)

Meanwhile, Kepner’s primary victim and her advocates were growing even more exasperated.

On May 27, the victim filed a congressional complaint with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a member of the Armed Services Committee.

“This is fundamentally wrong,” the victim wrote. “I’ve been patient and have tried to trust the system, but my patience has run out.”

She accused senior Army officials of “protecting” Kepner and added: “This is why women in the military do not report sexual assault.”

Kepner was finally removed as deputy brigade commander after the congressional complaint.

During his court-martial in September, he pleaded guilty to assaulting the lieutenant — albeit not sexually — as part of a deal with prosecutors. He was sentenced to four months in prison.

He has not been discharged from the Army but probably will be forced to retire after 22 years of service, including four deployments to Iraq.

“I made a mistake. I screwed up,” he testified at trial. “I apologize for what I thought was a consensual relationship. I didn’t mean to terrorize anyone.”

Capt. Christopher Cusmano, an Army lawyer who served as a legal advocate for the victim, said he still cannot understand why the Army

U.S. ARMY

“IMPROPERLY DIRECTED AN INVESTIGATION OF AN ALLEGED SEXUAL ASSAULT.” An Army inspector general’s report criticizing Maj. Gen. William H. Gerety for bungling an investigation into an alleged rape by one of his soldiers

allowed Kepner to stay in a leadership post for so long. He said it was appalling that Kepner gave public remarks to promote Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

“What’s happened in this case has just blown me away left and right,” he said.

Senior officers at Fort Stewart declined interview requests.

In a statement, Lt. Col. Amanda Azubuike, a spokeswoman for the 3rd Infantry Division, said Fort Stewart leaders “take incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault very seriously and are deeply concerned and disturbed by what the victim had to go through.”

In an interview, the victim said she was pleased with Kepner’s conviction but unhappy that he wasn’t automatically kicked out of the Army. The Post generally does not identify victims of alleged sex crimes.

The lieutenant said she put up with the harassment for months to protect her career. Even

From bad to worse Maj. Gen. William Gerety was trying to do the right thing. Concerned with perceptions that the military was struggling to cope with sexualassault cases, the head of the Army Reserve’s 80th Training Command organized a four-day symposium on the topic for hundreds of soldiers in September 2013.

The conference was held at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando. On the first full day, Gerety’s staff informed him that one of his enlisted soldiers had been accused of raping a civilian woman the night before.

Gerety was furious. But instead of properly demonstrating how to handle such a case, the commander bungled the investigation, according to a report by the Army’s inspector general.

Under Army regulations, sex-crime reports must be immediately referred as a lawenforcement matter to the Army Criminal Investigation Command. Nevertheless, several of Gerety’s staffers testified to the inspector general that there was confusion over how to proceed.

The alleged victim had already told deputies from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department that she did not want to press charges. She said she had been sexually battered as a teen and “nothing was done about it,” according to the deputies’ report.

Meanwhile, the accused soldier told deputies that the encounter was consensual. There were no witnesses and no physical evidence; the soldier and the alleged victim both said he was too drunk to ejaculate.

Although there wasn’t much to go on, Gerety and his staff were obligated to report the case immediately to Army criminal investigators.

One of Gerety’s aides testified that they failed to do so because the general told them there was no need. Because the alleged victim did not want to press charges, according to the aide, Gerety told his staff that “technically, no crime has been committed” — an incorrect assumption under the law.

Another staff member came to the opposite conclusion. He told the inspector general that, under the Defense Department’s definition of sexual assault, if someone is intoxicated and cannot give consent, then it is automatically a crime to have sex with that person. But that wasn’t right either.

Yet another aide told the inspector general — also incorrectly — that the victim had “recanted” her story and, therefore, there was no sexual assault.

Others said they urged Gerety to refer the case to the Army’s criminal investigators in accordance with regulations. Instead, he appointed a military nurse to conduct a commander’s inqui-

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

15

COVER STORY ry — a less serious step.

Five days later, a junior officer contacted Army investigators anyway, and they took over. After six months, agents concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” to press charges, primarily because the alleged victim did not want to cooperate.

After a separate inquiry, the Army inspector general determined that Gerety had mishandledthecaseandthathisversionofevents — his attorney said the general had ordered his staff to notify criminal investigators immediately — was “not supported by the facts.”

Gerety, who has since retired from the Army, did not respond to requests for comment.

The inspector general also gave a heavy dose of blame to managers of the 80th Training Command’s sexual-assault-prevention program.

The managers, whose names were redacted from the inspector general’s report, “did not fully understand what constituted a sexual assault” and “made incorrect conclusions that a sexual assault did not occur.”

In an interview, the accused soldier said he was innocent of rape. He said he has since received a formal reprimand from the Army for adultery; although he is single, the alleged victim was married.

Asked what he was thinking to get drunk and have sex with a stranger at a sexualassault-prevention conference, the soldier replied, “That’s a fair question.”

“It was a stupid situation to put myself in,” he said. “I don’t have a statement or answer for any of that.”

The Post is not naming the soldier because he was not charged with a crime.

He remains in the Army Reserve.

‘The do’s and don’ts’ Army Col. Morris Turner had just finished a tour of duty in Baghdad in 2014 when he learned that his new assignment would be at a military base on the Florida coast.

“I knew nothing about this job,” Turner told the Florida Today newspaper. “I said, ‘Where is this?’ And I Googled and saw this little island. I said, ‘Good location.’ ” A field artillery officer, Turner had been selected to lead the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute at Patrick Air Force Base, near Cocoa Beach.

The institute has a staff of about 140 people who specialize in human relations.

They train other Defense Department personnel on ways to prevent discrimination, sexual harassment and similar problems.

Among other things, the institute produces training videos on how to cope with “realistic workplace scenarios.” One video depicts a fictional boss named Miguel who can’t keep his hands to himself. Subordinates wince as he squeezes their shoulders, pinches their cheeks and caresses their hair.

When Turner took command of the institute, some female employees came to fear that their new boss had a similar habit. After

MATTHEW JURGENS/U.S. AIR FORCE

“I FELT LIKE I HAD TO HOLD MY BREATH THE ENTIRE TIME I WAS AROUND HIM.” A female officer, about Army Col. Morris Turner, who was the head of an agency that trains defense personnel on ways to prevent sexual harassment

a few months, the women confided in one another that Turner had rubbed their shoulders or touched them in ways that made them physically uncomfortable, according to interviews with three staff members and records compiled by Army investigators.

At the urging of her colleagues, a noncommissioned officer who worked closely with Turner filed a complaint against him with the sexual assault response coordinator’s office at Patrick Air Force Base on Dec. 10, 2014.

She accused Turner of giving her unwanted shoulder massages, touching her buttocks and making sexist remarks. In a handwritten statement given to investigators, she said she was worried that Turner would retaliate against her for reporting his behavior.

In an interview with The Post, the noncommissioned officer said the unwanted touching was a constant source of mental strain. “I don’t know how else to describe it, other than I

KLMNO WEEKLY

felt like I had to hold my breath the entire time I was around him,” she said.

Turner, she asserted, clearly knew that the shoulder rubs were making her uncomfortable.

“He’d say, ‘Does it bother you?’ I’d say, ‘Just stop.’

And at that point, he’d just dig his thumbs in all that much harder.”

The allegations triggered a rapid and intensive response by Army and Air Force criminal investigators. Over the next few weeks, they interviewed dozens of employees.

Seven women told investigators that Turner had hugged or touched them without their consent, documents show. Some said they viewed the contact as harmless, although perhaps not a smart thing for a commander to do, especially at an institute focused on stopping sexual harassment.

Others described the touching as clearly inappropriate, prompting investigators to label the incidents as suspected “abusive sexual contact,” according to the documents.

Turner told investigators that he recalled hugging or touching three of the seven women but said the contact was entirely benign. He said it was “in his ‘nature’ to communicate using his hands and touching the person he is talking to,” according to the investigators’ report.

In an interview with The Post, Turner described himself as an exuberant person and characterized his leadership style as that of a coach — a backslapper trying to make a tangible personal connection.

“I was in shock, complete shock, that anyone would perceive my genuine caring style as inappropriate,” he said.

“I know the do’s and don’ts,” he added. “None of the touching I ever did in my entire career has gone past that threshold.”

Turner questioned the motives of the women who told investigators that he had touched them. He said the institute was a dysfunctional workplace filled with malcontents who resented his efforts to turn things around.

His defense attorney, Gary Myers, accused the Army of grossly overreacting to spurious charges because the service was afraid of being perceived as soft on sexual misconduct.

“This whole thing is garbage,” Myers said.

Army criminal investigators, he added, “would find that the pope engaged in sexual harassment by touching people.”

In the end, Army lawyers in Washington concluded that Turner had committed assault by placing his hands on two noncommissioned officers without their consent but that there was no basis to charge him with abusive sexual contact.

In June, he receivedawritten reprimandfrom the Army for creating a “hostile” workplace culture and fostering an “environment of intimidation and reprisal.”

The Army, however, agreed not to include the reprimand in Turner’s official personnel file, which effectively frees him to resume his military career.

He was removed as commander of the institute in October and is awaiting a new assignment with the Army. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BY

MONEY

B RUCE H OROVITZ

I’

m too young to be old.

At 62, that was my gut — not my brain — reacting, when my employer of the past 20 years, USA Today, pinged me with an email in the middle of a busy work day early in the spring that urged me to trot downstairs to pick up something it called a voluntary “EROP” packet.

My gut wanted EROP to stand for Exceptional Rewards for Outstanding People. But my brain knew it stood for a foreboding Early Retirement Opportunity Program. Or, minus the corporate doublespeak: Your days are numbered, bub.

My brain, in fact, had been preparing for this day for years — much as my gut didn’t want to.

I had a great gig for two decades. But with the publishing business imploding, my days as a USA Today marketing reporter — with a six-figure salary — had become about as sustainable as a popsicle on the sun.

Cost-cutting pressure these days is not limited to any one industry, as those in the energy and banking industries know too well. Just about anyone 50 or over stands a decent chance of being bitten by the buyout beast. What happened to me and more than 80 USA Today colleagues could be sprung on you.

So it’s your brain — not your gut — that needs to pay attention. Way before the “voluntary retirement” message hits your inbox, there are steps you need to take to be ready.

Some are about planning financially. Others are about taking stock of your talents and passions.

Then there’s what I call the proctology moment, only because it’s so uncomfortable. Every employed person — particularly those 50 and older — should stand in front of a mirror and ask themselves: With your current skills, would your employer still hire you?

“If the answer is no, your job is in serious risk,” says Alan Johnson, managing partner of the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates.

If you are 50 or older and answered yes, you’re either a terrific employee — or terrifically delusional. Most folks facing buyouts won’t answer the question honestly — even to themselves. “This is the biggest weakness most people have: being honest with them-

BE READY FOR THAT BUYOUT You’re never too young to consider the ramifications of early retirement

ANDREW J. NILSEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

selves,” Johnson says.

That’s even more important now. About the only thing new in the world of buyouts — commonly called severance packages — is that the value of the offers continues to shrink.

WorldatWork, a nonprofit human resources specialist, recently surveyed nearly 6,000 corporate managers nationally on changes to the formulas in their company severance packages.

About 42 percent said that they had no formula. But of those that did, getting paid two weeks’ salary for each year of service fell to 16 percent in 2014 vs. 21 percent in 2011. In the same period, getting just one week’s salary for each year jumped to 24 percent from 20 percent, while getting a generous one month’s salary per year fell from 5 percent to 2 percent.

“They’ve gotten much skinnier in recent years,” Johnson says. “It’s no longer like winning the lottery.”

Not that you can feel comfortable even turning down a meager offer to skedaddle. The USA Today buyout email succeeded in raising the neck hairs — and heartbeats — of long-time employees such as me, by adding the warning: “Regardless of the acceptance level of the Early Retirement Opportunity Program, we cannot rule out other actions that we may need to take in the future because of economicandbusinessconditions.”

In other words, take this now or risk getting canned later.

At the moment I got that message, I was at my desk, listening to a lengthy Starbucks annual investors meeting that it was my job to cover. Although I had ignored a previous buyout offer, I knew I couldn’t keep wearing blinders. I tossed off my headset and raced downstairs.

A woman maybe half my age — whom I had never seen before – smiled weakly as she handed me a brown envelope whose contents were destined to change my life.

It felt as cold as the backside of a snow shovel.

I hustled back to my desk to continue covering the Starbucks meeting. I felt a bit dizzy, as if I were starring in some episode of “The Twilight Zone” about a short, balding guy who arrives at work only to find out that, poof, his job of two decades no longer exists.

Thankfully, my wife, Evelyne, and I already had swallowed the best preventive medicine: careful

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17

MONEY — if not painful — financial planning.

Truth be told, we had been planning for this for years. In 2008, our cushy pension balloon popped.

That’s when Gannett, publisher of USA Today, announced that it was “freezing” the company’s pension program. So we ramped-up our 401(k) contributions.

Then the furloughs began. The first year, it was for just one week.

The next year, it was two. We doubled our mortgage payments, with plans to own our home within eight years. Talk about good timing — the home became ours in November.

With the help of my savvy financial adviser, we had also figured out a way, over time, to stuff four years’ worth of Virginia college expenses into two 529 college savings plans.

Wisely, we had initiated these plans at the births of each of our two now-teenage daughters.

Because of the ages of our girls, life insurance was critical, too.

That’s why, in 2010, I sought and found a new policy outside the company — at a better price. I knew the company policy would be toast if I lost my job.

Of course, we paid a price for all of this.

We took fewer and shorter trips to my wife’s native home, Switzerland. And fewer trips to the beach.

Fewer shopping trips to the mall.

Heck, fewer trips to our favorite Ledo Pizza. The money saved had to come from somewhere.

But it was this reality-based financial planning that let me make a logical, not emotional, decision to accept the buyout. It wasn’t easy.

But because we were financially prepared, I could look the buyout brute in the eye without blinking.

Unfortunately, most folks don’t plan for that possibility, says Jean Setzfand, senior vice president of programs at AARP, who oversees financial education programming. “Accepting a buyout should be a long-term plan that you’ve been thinking about for some period of time,” she says. “When the buyout package comes, don’t let your emotions be the main driver.”

After all, the real question for most of us isn’t at what age you want to retire, but at what income?

So beyond financial planning, it’s no less critical to plan ahead in terms of job skills, too.

“Regardless of your age, you should always be managing your career,” says Bram Lowsky, group

Formula for determining cash compensation paid for serverance by organizations.

No formula Two weeks per year of service One week per year of service Other

42% 24% 16% 5% 2003 2005

2007 2009

2011

2014

Source: WorldatWork

executive vice president of the Americas at the global career consulting firm Right Management.

“You should constantly be updating your résumé and thinking about your career path.”

Not that I did. Far from it. Long before the buyout, I didn’t work hard enough to upgrade my technology skills at work. Bad move.

Even if those skills would not have protected me against the buyout, they certainly would have made me more immediately valuable back out in the job market.

I also never undertook a job search, in earnest, until the buyout papers arrived.

And I didn’t even try to negotiate the terms of the buyout with my employer — which I’ve since learned was beyond dumb. If the buyout comes knocking at your pod, don’t just take it — negotiate.

“Everything is a negotiation,” AARP’s Setzfand says. “You hurt yourself by not asking, but most people don’t.”

Which brings up another buyout oops: I didn’t have my attorney look at it. I signed one of the most important legal documents of my life and no legal eyes looked at it except my employer’s.

“Never sign a buyout agreement until you fully understand it and have shown it to a lawyer,” Setzfand says.

One important thing I did do right before accepting the buyout: I reached out to faithful friends for support. I needed their help to look forward — not backward.

“You have to take care of yourself emotionally, physically and psychologically,” Lowsky says. “It’s much harder to find a new job when that is not in alignment.”

I looked up a former journalism professor, now 83, who first taught me how to think big-picture more than 40 years ago at Colorado State University. He told me to take the buyout if I could afford to, then offered this sage advice: “Whatever you do next, be sure it makes you happy.”

Happy?

As he uttered those words, I was feeling more like Grumpy. When you’re figuring out whether to pull the plug on a 35-year career in big-time journalism, “happy” is hardly a word that is top of mind.

But it’s now nearly seven months since my buyout, and I’m finding a rhythm. The happy stuff is starting to take root. I have cobbled together enough interesting freelance writing and marketing consultation gigs that I know I can at least feed my family. Yes, I miss the fat salary, the newsroom banter and the phone calls that get returned in a nanosecond — but not the mind-numbing stress of a workplace in distress.

When your buyout comes knocking, it ultimately will be defined by how well you’ve prepared for it. I’m not the only one who is too young to be old.

So are you. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

7 things to ask before signing When that buyout offer comes, don’t just take it. Negotiate. Your employer wants you to take it — and expects you to negotiate. Ask for: More money. My buyout package offered 11/2 weeks pay for each of my 20 years of credited service. I should have pushed for the more typical two weeks’ pay offered to USA Today employees with 25 years or more. Some employers offer three or even four weeks’ pay per year.

More time. I should have asked to stay a bit longer — even a few more weeks would have extended my income. It was negotiable, and others took full advantage.

Longer health coverage. The best buyout packages will let you remain on the company’s health plan until you reach the Medicare age of 65. Others pay some or all of the cost of COBRA temporary coverage that typically lasts 18 months. Mine offered to let me retain the company plan for about seven months before COBRA. This was not a concern for me, because we are covered by my wife’s employer.

Better 401(k) match. Contributions to my 401(k) were not permitted after my last day of work. But, at least, I could have requested permission to fully fund my 401(k) for the calendar year — and get the full company match — before leaving.

Better math. While I was credited with 20 years at Gannett, USA Today’s parent company, I actually had 20 years and 8 months. The buyout formula — like most buyout calculations — gave no credit for those 8 months.

I should have asked for my years to be rounded up to 21.

Better sweeteners. It doesn’t hurt to ask for perks such as life insurance continuation or job placement assistance. I did not.

Work after work. Gannett does not permit employees who accepted the buyout to do contract, freelance or consulting work for the company after leaving. Many companies do. It’s certainly worth asking before signing. n

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— Bruce Horovitz

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BOOKS

The Pacific as a portal to the future N ON-FICTION

S PACIFIC Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers

By Simon Winchester Harper. 492 pp. $28.99

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REVIEWED BY

J OHN P OMFRET

imon Winchester is a master at uncovering the collusion between overlooked events and individuals as they’ve bent the arc of history. He’s a genius at mining the connections between disparate fields: science and politics in his “The Man Who Loved China,” and insanity and genius in “The Professor and the Madman,” to name just two examples from his dozen-book athenaeum.

Unfortunately, his latest work, “Pacific,” fails to link the items in its laundry list of a subtitle: “Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers.” The result is that the reader is presented with tasty appetizers but not quite a full meal.

Winchester brings his telltale writerly vibe to the effort. He’s a great storyteller and an intrepid explorer. He has spent decades traipsing the Pacific. He kayaked in a lake that formed in the core of the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo after its eruption in 1991, paddling so close to the boiling water in the center that his boat began to melt.

He threw a luncheon on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. He doesn’t tell the reader whether he ever made it back on Cathay Pacific Airlines; in 1992, he was banned from the cozy confines of its planes after penning an off-color remark about its flight attendants. Still, he gained passage on a veritable fleet of vessels — from cargo ships to dinghies — across the ocean’s vast expanse.

The 12 essays that make up this book are the better for his travels.

At root, Winchester’s argument is that while the Mediterranean and the Atlantic provide a portal to the past, the Pacific is a window to the future. And at its best, “Pacific” gives the reader a sense of the vastness of the ocean and its challenges. But that’s also its hitch, because Winchester fails to make the necessary connections among these dilemmas to turn “Pacific”

MICHAEL A. MARIANT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pacific Gas and Electric’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in Avila Beach, Calif. Simon Winchester asks: How would Americans feel if Chinese ships began patrolling off the California coast?

into a great book.

Winchester tells the story of nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific atolls and the awful odyssey forced upon the native peoples there. He recounts the tale of the region’s tiger economies through the story of Sony and the transistor radio — the granddaddy of the Walkman and the whole idea of portable, personal sound. The security nightmare of North Korea is captured via the seizing of the USS Pueblo by the North Korean navy in 1968. The retreat of Western empire from Asia is teased out in the sinking of the RMS Queen Elizabeth after a suspicious fire in Hong Kong harbor in January 1972. Australia, global warming, scientific research into the Pacific’s deep-sea hydrothermal vents and the disquieting die-off of its coral are also reconnoitered.

At times, Winchester takes controversial positions seemingly for the sake of being, well, controversial. He suggests in his chapter on

North Korea that if the United States had not moved to block the invasion of the peninsula by the Soviet-backed forces of Kim Il Sung in 1950, North Korea would have collapsed by now. He does not mention an alternative historical what-if: that Joseph Stalin might have used the takeover of the Korean Peninsula to back an assault on Japan. In one of his best chapters, on China and the South China Sea, Winchester brilliantly links the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the U.S. withdrawal from its bases in the Philippines and China’s move to fill the vacuum, first with legislation claiming the South China Sea and then with dredging equipment, lots of concrete and a naval development program the likes of which the world has rarely seen. But then he lapses into the oft-repeated bromide about China: how, unlike Western powers, its empire was never expansionist.

Near the end of the book, Win-

chester asks a question: How would Americans feel if Chinese ships began patrolling the seas around Hawaii or off the California coast? He notes that “the planet is witnessing a sudden and wholesale redistribution of world power, one that is unprecedented in its speed.” And then he makes a suggestion. Why not allow the Asians “their turn, to direct the future of the ocean where East and West so obviously meet?” But Winchester is arguing with himself, because, if anything, “Pacific” demands the opposite conclusion: that the fate of the world’s greatest ocean will hinge not on one people but many, and on the unavoidably messy process of managing competition and cooperation as all nations using its waters navigate the future. n John Pomfret, a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, is completing a book on the United States and China.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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BOOKS

A colorful tale turns otherworldly FICTION

D

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REVIEWED BY

her efforts to save Ashley while avoiding the Nazi and his many sinister followers.

It’s a hectic chase, and along the way Bibi encounters such unlikely characters as Dr. Solange St. Croix, Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack and Chubb Coy; the first two were once Bibi’s teachers, and Coy is a gunwielding former detective. They all intend harm to Bibi. On the brighter side, we meet Bibi’s boyfriend, a Navy SEAL named Paxton Thorpe, who’s off pursuing terrorists but sees in his dreams the dangers that afflict Bibi and intends to fly to her aid.

Koontz’s increasingly bizarre story is enhanced by his colorful prose. A woman’s “blue eyes were two jewels of hatred.” A woman smiles at a naive man “the way a fox smiled at a tender rabbit.”

The confusion reaches a peak when we find ourselves reading about two Bibis, one in a coma in a hospital bed and the other out pursuing evildoers. This development is variously attributed to her exceptional brain waves and to the duality that novelists share with their characters. When the wideawake Bibi finally confronts her Nazi nemesis, the two of them exchange mumbo-jumbo about what’s real and what’s imaginary.

Bibi is given to such musings as “There was the known world and the supernatural world that shadowed it, and the veil that had been deteriorating between them now began to dissolve entirely.”

By then, my view of the novel had progressed from an admiring “What lovely writing!” to a weary “What pretentious hokum!”

There’s much to treasure in magical writing, but “Ashley Bell” is hardly an example of the style at its best. Still, one reader’s hokum is another reader’s happiness. I imagine that countless Koontz fans will delight in Bibi’s strange adventures, and I’d be the last to begrudge them their pleasures. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

WEEKLY

A determined genius on the rise

P ATRICK A NDERSON

ean Koontz has published more than 60 novels that have sold an estimated 450 million copies worldwide. If you’re among his legion of fans, you’ll probably greet his new book, “Ashley Bell,” with open arms.

If, however, you don’t know his work, let me offer two observations. First, Koontz’s prose can be exceptionally fine. Second, the man has long since moved beyond realism. He began his career writing science fiction, and his work abounds with magic, miracles and the supernatural. His most famous character, Odd Thomas, is a short-order cook who talks to the dead. How you react to “Ashley Bell” may well depend on your tolerance for events that crowd the outer limits of probability.

Koontz’s heroine, brave, beautiful Bibi Blair, is a talented writer of 22 who lives near the ocean in Newport Beach, Calif., and is suddenly afflicted with incurable brain cancer. Then, in a seeming miracle, the cancer goes away. At this point, Bibi’s loving parents insist that she meet with a woman called Calida Butterfly, a “diviner” who supposedly can uncover “hidden knowledge by supernatural means.”

Butterfly uses “the occult art of Scrabblemancy” to discover why Bibi’s life has been spared. She has Bibi select Scrabble tiles at random, and they form words that command Bibi, in exchange for her good fortune, to save the life of someone named Ashley Bell. Who Ashley is, where she is (Bibi is convinced she’s female) and why her life is threatened are all unknown, but Bibi gamely sets out to find and save her.

Bibi soon receives a phone call from a neo-Nazi psychopath who announces that he intends to kill both Ashley and Bibi. She learns that this fellow, when a teenager, raped and murdered his mother and has since “fancied himself the heir of Hitler.” Rather than flee this madman, Bibi vows to destroy him. Much of the novel recounts

KLMNO

N ON-FICTION

O ASHLEY BELL

By Dean Koontz Bantam.

560 pp. $28

YOUNG ORSON The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to ‘Citizen Kane’

By Patrick McGilligan Harper. 820 pp. $40

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REVIEWED BY

C HARLES M ATTHEWS

rson Welles was born 100 years ago, died 30 years ago and released his most celebrated film, “Citizen Kane,” almost 75 years ago. There is not likely to be a more fitting observance of those anniversaries than Patrick McGilligan’s “Young Orson,” the story of Welles’s early life, through the creation of the movie that was to become his lasting monument. As monuments tend to do, it cast a shadow over the remaining years of his life.

At age 25, Welles was not exceptionally young to be making his debut as a film director. As McGilligan points out, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and John Ford had all made movies by the time they reached that age. But he arrived in Hollywood bearing the label of “Boy Wonder,” having made his professional stage debut at age 16 with the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where he played, in heavy makeup, characters much older than he was. Over the next decade, he would make his Broadway debut, tour in repertory with Katharine Cornell, start his own theater company, astonish New York with his productions of “Macbeth” with an all-black cast and a moderndress “Julius Caesar,” and deliver his Halloween 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.”

He was, in a word, precocious.

How he got that way is both the theme and the riddle of McGilligan’s book. The word most often bandied about is “genius,” which Welles once said “was whispered into my ear . . . while I was still mewling in my crib . . . so it never occurred to me that I wasn’t until middle age.” And there were always plenty of people to whisper it, including his parents, Beatrice and Dick Welles, a prosperous Midwestern couple.

Welles’s parents catered to his every interest, particularly in the arts. Dick was a bon vivant who cultivated the friendship of Chicago’s newspapermen, giving him access to visiting celebrities, and Beatrice threw dinner parties that

included famous actors and musicians. Beatrice died when Orson was just 9, but Dick continued to lavish attention on the boy, with the help of a somewhat enigmatic family friend, Maurice Bernstein.

As McGilligan puts it, they “were Orson’s first producers, surrounding the boy with the finest stagecraft money could buy.”

Orson was 15 when Dick Welles died. Bernstein, who became Orson’s guardian, was, in McGilligan’s words, “a sophisticated man of ideas who could also be a bumbler and a buttinski,” but he and Orson were undeniably close.

Welles also had another surrogate parent in Roger Hill, the headmaster at the Todd School in Woodstock, Ill., who was so impressed with the boy that he gave him free rein in the school’s theater: At age 15, Welles co-wrote and co-directed a musical revue with Hill, “designed the costumes, the lighting, and the sets [and] played the lead role.”

In short, Welles had no lack of mentors and patrons in his early career, and he would continue to gather them. The attention McGilligan devotes to their stories, and to others who were in Welles’s orbit, suggests that one reason Welles struggled to find success in his later career is that no one came along to provide the stability and direction those early mentors gave him.

To spend more than 700 pages telling the story of only a third of one man’s life may seem excessive, but McGilligan justifies it with detailed portraits of the people who made Welles what he became.

Although he spent much of his later career abroad, Welles remained very much a product of Midwestern cities and towns. The ambition, ego, ruthlessness and recklessness of Charles Foster Kane are particularly American, and they’reascharacteristicofWellesas of his creation. n Matthews is a writer and editor in Northern California.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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OPINIONS

We must work together to balance privacy, security MICHAEL MCCAUL AND MARK WARNER Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, is a member of the Senate’s Banking, Budget and Intelligence committees.

Last month, it was revealed that the Paris attackers used hard­to­monitor, encrypted applications to coordinate their acts of terrorism, a reminder that we face an enemy that is difficult to find and adapting quickly.

No longer do terrorists plot using couriers and caves.

Today they use social media to radicalize and recruit. And when individuals show interest in their cause, they move their communications to encrypted applications and other secure platforms to evade detection.

This presents an extraordinary security challenge for the United States and our allies. Because extremists are “going dark,” law enforcement officials warn that we are “going blind” in our efforts to track them.

For instance, the Islamic State has made communications security a key element of its training and propaganda.

Followers have distributed a 32page manual with tips for jihadist aspirants to conceal their messages through end-to-end encryption, secure apps and other tradecraft.

But the problem isn’t limited to terrorists. Similar tactics are also used by drug traffickers and child predators to avoid getting caught, creating a much broader public safety crisis.

Frustratingly, there are no easy answers. The same tools that terrorists and criminals are using to hide their nefarious activities are those that everyday Americans rely on to safely shop online, communicate with friends and family, and run their businesses.

Encryption is a bedrock of global commerce, and it has helped enhance individual privacy immeasurably. It is also integral to our cybersecurity efforts — protecting individuals, U.S. businesses, intellectual property and our nation’s critical infrastructure.

As a result, digital innovations

present us with a paradox. We are no longer simply weighing the costs and benefits of “privacy vs. security” but rather “security vs. security.”

Some have proposed mandating “back doors” into encrypted platforms so that such messages can be accessed by law enforcement with a lawful warrant. Yet such a law could weaken Internet privacy for everyone and could have the unintended consequence of making our information systems more vulnerable to attack.

Moreover, in our globalized world, a U.S.-only solution would probably have only a limited impact and could encourage offenders to simply use technology developed overseas instead. But at the same time, doing nothing puts American lives at risk and makes it easier for terrorists and criminals to escape justice.

Solving this problem requires establishing a dialogue that takes fuller account of technological limitations, investigative tools and legal needs.

That is why we are proposing a national commission on security and technology challenges in the

BERTRAND GUAY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

A makeshift memorial to the victims of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris. Today’s terrorists use encrypted technology to avoid detection.

digital age.

We cannot wait for the next attack before we outline our options, nor should we legislate out of fear. Instead, Congress must be proactive and should officially convene a body of experts representing all of the interests at stake so we can evaluate and improve America’s security posture as technology — and our adversaries — evolve.

Leaders here in Washington have failed to do this, and the relevant parties have not been brought together in an open, transparent manner. As a result, Americans have heard a lot of bluster and not enough substance. Complex issues have been reduced to simple talking points and vague demands.

We want that to change, which is why we are seeking the brightest minds from the technology sector, the legal world, computer science and cryptography, academia, civil liberties and privacy advocates, law enforcement and intelligence to collaboratively explore the intersection of technology and security.

This would not be a group of

politicians debating one another.

We believe the individuals most capable of finding creative ways to protect our security — both public and private — are the stakeholders themselves.

Nor would the commission be like other blue-ribbon panels — soon forgotten. Rather, it would be charged with generating much-needed data and developing a range of actionable recommendations that can protect privacy and public safety.

The threats we face are very real. As we saw in Garland, Tex., in May, the first sign of a hatched plot might be an Internet hashtag, tweeted mere minutes before an attack. In that case, the attacker allegedly was in touch with an overseas terrorist while he was plotting, but authorities have been unable to access the secure messages they exchanged.

We must find more ways to stop terrorist attacks during the planning phase — not while they are underway. And as we work together on these vital challenges, we must never lose sight of our Constitution and America’s core democratic values. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Grand juries have become twisted ARI MELBER is MSNBC’s chief legal correspondent.

There’s a legitimate debate about whether the Cleveland police officer who killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy holding a toy pellet gun, should be charged with any crime.

There is really no legal debate, however, that the Ohio prosecutor handling the case, Tim McGinty, turned the grand jury process upside down.

McGinty, who led a year-long inquiry into the shooting, announced Monday that a Cuyahoga County grand jury voted against charging the officers and was candid about helping lead them there: “The grand jury declined to bring criminal charges,” he said. “That was also my recommendation, after reviewing the facts and the law.”

Grand juries are built to be a tool of prosecutors. They don’t hear from both sides in a case, like a trial jury would. They hear only from the prosecutor, who decides what evidence and testimony is presented.

That’s why the old saying goes that a grand jury will “indict a ham sandwich” if a prosecutor tells them to — because the prosecutor calls the shots.

The Rice case strongly suggests that the opposite is also true — grand juries will let the sandwich walk, if that’s what the prosecutor

wants. In this case, McGinty used the grand jury as more of a sounding board for an exoneration of the potential defendants, rather than as a review of possible charges against them.

His 70-page report reads like defense counsel brief, not a neutral assessment of potential charges. (It even has headings like “The incident conforms to the Cleveland Police Department’s active shooter policy.”)

This approach — using the grand jury to review arguments on behalf of potential police defendants, not to prosecute them — fits the model of several recent inquiries of police shootings.

Just the other week, Texas prosecutors announced that a grand jury declined to charge any Waller County jail officials in the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-yearold woman who was arrested after a routine traffic stop caught

on video and was later found dead in her cell. Jail staff said they discovered her hanging by a plastic bag, an apparent suicide.

Her family maintains that the circumstances are suspicious.

Prosecutors convened the grand jury to consider potential charges against the jail staff but then said they already concluded that her death was a suicide.

Which makes no sense.

If Bland killed herself, there is no crime to charge. The grand jury should have no charges to bring, and nothing to review.

If prosecutors believed she was killed, then they should have presented those charges to the grand jury. But the Texas prosecutors gave away their game by saying, essentially, that they asked jurors to consider potential charges for a crime they say didn’t happen. If that sounds hard to follow, it is, because the prosecutors are obfuscating on purpose.

Prosecutors in these cases hide behind the grand jury process, one that is supposedly independent, while pushing grand jurors toward their decision, all the while claiming that juries might have reached different conclusions.

You can’t follow the logic because there is none.

If that feels like too sweeping a

critique, consider more of McGinty’s own words on Monday: “Justice would not be achieved by bringing charges that would violate the ethical canons of our profession because we know these charges could not be sustained.”

In other words, McGinty not only decided against charges — a judgment call — but felt that such charges are so egregiously wrong that filing them against the officers would violate his ethical duties.

The facts of those cases differ greatly, but each time, prosecutors invoked the grand jury process to sign off on — and, in effect, clear — their own decision not to charge officers.

Our founders put grand juries in the Constitution so that citizens could check overzealous prosecutors. As the Supreme Court noted in 1992, the purpose of a grand jury is to confirm that there is some “basis for bringing a criminal charge.”

In that 8-to-1 decision, the court explained, “It has always been thought sufficient to hear only the prosecutor’s side” before jurors give a green light for a prosecutor’s proposed charges. It is a historical oddity that today some prosecutors are using grand juries to present the defense’s side and avoid any charges at all. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Time to renegotiate social contract E.J. DIONNE JR. writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog.

There is an irony to the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders: The senator from Vermont is often cast as exotic because he calls himself a “democratic socialist.” Yet the most important issue in politics throughout the Western democracies is whether the economic and social world that social democrats built can survive the coming decades.

Let’s deal first with the tyranny of labels. “Socialist” has long been an unacceptable word in the United States, yet our country once had a vibrant socialist movement. Socialists had a major impact on the mainstream conversation. Reforming liberals, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, co-opted many of their best ideas.

Moreover, the vast majority of “democratic socialists” are now properly described more modestly as “social democrats” because most on the left believe in a successful private sector. But they also favor a government that achieves broad public objectives, from a clean environment to wide access to education, and regulates and redistributes in ways that strengthen the bargaining power of those who don’t own much capital.

When Sanders defined his own brand of socialism this past year in a speech at Georgetown University, he made clear he’s in this camp. “The next time you

hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” he said. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”

Honestly, Bernie, you’re really a social democrat.

But there is great honor in this.

The bargain between government and the market that allowed the United States and the other Western democracies to share growing prosperity from the end of World War II until recent years was essentially a social democratic achievement.

As economist J. Bradford DeLong argued in a recent essay on Talking Points Memo, these economies were “relatively egalitarian places when viewed in historical perspective (for nativeborn white guys, at least).” The chance to influence politics was “widely distributed throughout the

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population” while “the claims of wealth to drive political directions” were “kept within bounds.”

Yet the headline on DeLong’s piece — “The Melting Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy” — raises the question we need to debate far more explicitly in the presidential campaign: Was the great social democratic experiment an aberration in history? Are all the wealthy societies destined to become far more unequal, as they were in the late 19th century, because of globalization and technological change? Or can governments find new ways of ensuring a degree of justice and fairness?

These questions have absorbed my former colleague Steven Weisman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics for some years now. His new book, “The Great Tradeoff: Controlling Moral Conflicts in the Era of Globalization,” provides an excellent text for the discussion we need. Weisman painstakingly avoids dogmatism and is careful in laying out the often-agonizing choices we face.

For example: Globalization has “elevated the living standards of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people worldwide” but also “has helped suppress the incomes of low-skilled middleclass workers in rich countries.”

Where do our loyalties lie? How do we balance obligations to our fellow citizens in the communities and countries in which we live against the interests of those far away? And how do the vast disparities of wealth that the system creates constrain the very process of democratic deliberation over what to do about it?

Weisman is more sympathetic to globalization than are many on the left. Still, Weisman does not let advocates of the market off the hook. “The global economic system,” he writes, “should be one in which opportunities are more equal, the distribution of rewards is fairer, and the preservation of communities is more respected.”

How to achieve these goals is what politics needs to be about.

The presidential campaign would be more edifying (and more relevant to the problems so many American face) if it focused on the need to renegotiate a social contract that once provided broadly inclusive prosperity but is now in grave jeopardy.

You don’t need to be a democratic socialist to believe this. On the contrary, the survival of democratic capitalism depends on facing the difficulties the system is having in delivering on the promises it was once able to keep. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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FIVE MYTHS

Gluten BY

A LESSIO F ASANO

Many have a pretty poor understanding of what gluten is and how it fits into a healthy diet. An ancient and complex protein, gluten is a major component of wheat. It helps bread to rise and gives it a char­ acteristic chewy texture. Similar proteins called secalin and hordein are found in barley and rye. We lump the three together as the only proteins we can’t digest and call this gluten. For people with celiac disease, a lifelong disorder, these proteins wreak havoc on the small intestine. For the rest of us, it’s a different story.

1

Our bodies are not meant to process gluten, so no one should eat it.

It is true that our bodies do not have the proper enzymes to break down the complex proteins found in gluten. The immune system spots gluten as an invader and goes into battle mode to get rid of it. But here’s the key: In most people, the immune system is able to “clean up” the gluten invasion, and then it’s back to business as usual.

For the roughly 1 percent of humans with celiac disease, the immune system can’t handle the cleanup. It goes into overdrive, producing autoantibodies that attack the tissue in the small intestine, causing inflammation and tissue destruction. This leads to malabsorption of nutrients, which causes myriad symptoms, gastrointestinal and otherwise, in people with this autoimmune disorder.

Other people affected by wheat allergy or non-celiac gluten sensitivity may also find that their bodies react inappropriately after they eat gluten-containing grains.

But studies show that the vast majority of us tolerate gluten without any problem.

2

Cutting gluten from your diet is beneficial, even if you don’t have celiac disease.

For most of us, a gluten-free diet is not a naturally healthier diet. If you give up glutencontaining cookies, cakes and

beer, and replace them with gluten-free cookies, cakes and beer, you will not lose weight or feel better. But while avoiding gluten itself won’t help, giving up many of the processed foods that contain it will. If you stop eating fried foods, highly processed foods and foods high in sugar, and replace them with fresh fruits, vegetables, olive oil, and protein from lean meat, eggs, seafood, nuts and beans (essentially, the Mediterranean diet), you will definitely feel better, unless you have an unidentified underlying condition. People who do undertake a gluten-free diet should work with a registered dietitian to make sure they’re getting all the vitamins and micronutrients they need.

3

Gluten sensitivity doesn’t really exist.

About five or six years ago, we began to see a new phenomenon in our clinic: people who reacted poorly to gluten but had none of the diagnostic or histological markers for celiac disease. Eventually, our group published a paper calling the condition “non-celiac gluten sensitivity” or “gluten sensitivity.”

As celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow to Novak Djokovic have espoused the “benefits” of going gluten-free, though, there’s been some resistance to the idea of gluten sensitivity. And until recently, the terms “celiac disease” and “gluten sensitivity” had been used interchangeably in medical

WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION USING ISTOCK PHOTOS

literature, as Amy Brown noted in a 2012 article in Expert Review in Gastroenterology & Hepatology.

But although many of the symptoms are similar, the two conditions are very different metabolically. In non-celiac gluten sensitivity, we don’t see the same intestinal inflammation that we see in people with celiac disease. Also, some people with gluten sensitivity can tolerate small amounts of gluten, which is never the case with celiac disease.

4

People with celiac disease can eat a little gluten.

We now know this is not true, since we have pretty solid evidence that traces of gluten can be as harmful as large amounts, even if the clinical consequences don’t materialize until years later.

People with celiac disease must avoid gluten at all costs. While eliminating the “big items” (pizza, pasta, cookies, beer, bagels, etc.) is painful but relatively easy, avoiding the traces of gluten found in many processed foods (gluten is a cheap and efficient filler) can be much more difficult.

It takes only a tiny crumb of bread to set the autoimmune machinery into motion, creating the intestinal damage that leads to symptoms and nutrient malabsorption.

What makes this clinical chameleon even trickier is that you can have celiac disease (the intestinal inflammation and malabsorption) and not exhibit any symptoms, gastrointestinal or otherwise, for a long time.

Meanwhile, damage to your intestine continues and could lead to the development of related conditions and, in extremely rare cases, intestinal lymphoma. The only way to identify these asymptomatic patients is through blood tests and an intestinal biopsy.

5

If you have celiac disease as a child, you will outgrow it.

In the 1990s, researchers determined that celiac disease is not a food allergy or an intolerance, but a gluten-triggered autoimmune disease and, therefore, a condition patients cannot outgrow. Another milestone was when we determined people can develop celiac disease at any time in their lives, even into old age. Now we know it is a permanent condition, and the best medical intervention we have is a gluten-free diet. n

Fasano is the founder and director of the Center for Celiac Research & Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the author of “Gluten Freedom.”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 2016

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2016 January-February

48 HOURS IN THE METHOW

Inside

Fit tipsm’s fitness challenge

nd onderlaigh Wintryriaw tly l scenes shine br Ae

Win your gy

In the January–February edition of Foothills Magazine, we celebrate winter with our cover article on 48 hours in the Methow. It’s not only a beautiful winter getaway, but there’s plenty to see and do in this nearby winter wonderland.

And if you’d like to see winter from a unique perspective, this edition includes a pictorial feature from Wenatchee World photo editor Don Seabrook shooting from a helicopter above the North Cascades last February.

Back on the ground, we have fitness tips for the new year from four individuals who each won their gym’s fitness challenge.

Whether you’re considering losing some weight or just becoming more fit, there’s great advice here to get in shape in the new year.

And in this edition, we shine the spotlight on Wenatchee High School principal Eric Anderson, plus feature a delicious salmon recipe from Damian Browne, former executive chef at Sleeping Lady Resort in Leavenworth.

Our fast five feature profiles five local cafes and diners, popular with tourists but truly enjoyed by locals this time of the year.

On the wine beat, we feature one of the newest wineries to open in our region. Siren Song opened their chateau-style winery in July of this year in Lake Chelan. Owners Kevin and Holly Brown have crafted an experience that includes wine, food, events, music and fun.

Pick up a copy of Foothills at locations throughout the valley--find the complete list of locations on our website at ncwfoothills.com.

Or if you’d prefer to receive Foothills in the mail, you can subscribe to all six editions published annually for just $14.99.

Subscribe online at wenatcheeworld.com/subscribe/foothills/ or call 509-663-5161 to begin your subscription.

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