GAO chief warns economic disaster looms

GAO chief warns economic disaster looms
By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer
Sat Oct 28, 4:38 PM ET





David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."

But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.

Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.

From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.

What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.

There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.

"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity — maybe Oprah — to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.

Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy — he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.

"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States — basically, the government's chief accountant — he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.

This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.

"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.

Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today — as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September — issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.

Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.

So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.

To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.

Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.

A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.

And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.

But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.

And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.

Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.

Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall — the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs — over time.

By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.

Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.

"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."

Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.

Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps — $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare — and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.

Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders — primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners — have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.

In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.

More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.

A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.

Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.

But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit — the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.

"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.

You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.

"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.

The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.

"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.

But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.

So maybe a solution is at hand.

"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.

But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.

"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."




Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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Republicans who lead by lying

Republicans who lead by lying
Robert Scheer
Wednesday, October 4, 2006





THEY ARE such liars. No, I am not speaking only of the dissembling GOP House leaders led by Speaker Dennis Hastert, who, out of naked political calculation, covered up for one of their own in the sordid teen-stalking case of former Rep. Mark Foley.

Call me old school, but I am still more concerned with the Republicans molesting Lady Liberty while pretending to be guarding the nation's security, an assignment which they have totally botched. The news about the Foley coverup, while important as yet another example of extreme hypocrisy on the part of the Republican virtues police, should not be allowed to obscure the latest evidence of administration deceit as to its egregious ineptness in protecting the nation.

On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, "State of Denial."

"I don't remember a so-called emergency meeting," Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from some sort of post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission. The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent. Surely lying under oath, in what was arguably the most important official investigation in the nation's history, should be treated more seriously than the evasiveness in the Paula Jones case that got President Bill Clinton impeached. Nor is it just Rice who should be challenged, for Tenet seems to have provided Woodward with details concerning the administration's indifference to the terrorist threat that he did not share with the 9/11 Commission.

In his book, Woodward described an encounter between Rice and Tenet, in a near panic about a rising flood of intelligence warnings just presented to him by top aide Cofer Black. Tenet forced an unscheduled meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, because he wanted the Bush administration to take action immediately against al Qaeda to disrupt a possible domestic attack.

"Tenet ... decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away," Woodward reports. "He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action." A mountain of evidence proves that the Bush administration did nothing of the sort.

Now, if Rice truly does not remember that now-confirmed meeting -- which was apparently first reported in the Aug. 4, 2002, Time magazine in an article titled "Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?" -- wouldn't that indicate she didn't take it that seriously? Not remembering confirms her inattention to terror reports at a time the Bush administration was already fixated on "regime change" in Iraq.

Rice is famously sharp and has an awesome memory. Considering the trauma of 9/11 and its effects, it is inconceivable that Rice would not recall such an ominous and prescient briefing by Tenet and Black, especially after the 9/11 Commission forced her to document and review her actions in those crucial months.

It is however, as she stated Monday, "incomprehensible," that she, then the national security adviser to the president and the person most clearly charged with sounding the alarm, to have ignored the threat. But ignore it the administration did, and then later tried to lay the blame on the Clinton administration which, Rice claimed at the 9/11 Commission hearings, lied when it said it had given the incoming White House team an action plan for fighting al Qaeda.

"We were not presented with a plan," Rice infamously argued under questioning from former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, but instead were given a memo with "a series of actionable items" describing how to tackle al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Such weaseling would be funny if the topic were not so serious. But there is no way Rice can squirm out of this one, despite her impressive track record of calculated distortion on everything from Iraq's nonexistent WMDs to the trumped-up ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Can there be any better case for turning over control of at least one branch of Congress to the opposition party so that we might finally have hearings to learn the truth of this matter that is far more important, and sordid, than the Foley affair?

E-mail: rscheer@truthdig.com.

Page B - 9

Chinese computer hackers target US Commerce Department

Chinese computer hackers target US Commerce Department
Friday October 6, 07:41 PM




WASHINGTON (AFP) - Computer hackers based in China have launched sustained attacks on the computers of a US Commerce Department technology export office, a department official said.

The official, who requested anonymity, said the attacks had originated from websites registered with Chinese Internet service providers.

Chinese-based hackers, especially in the Chinese province of Guangdong, have mounted systematic efforts to penetrate US government and industry computer networks in order to access secret information, according to computer security experts.

The experts and some US lawmakers believe the attacks are sanctioned by Chinese government agencies.

The attacks on the Commerce Department have been so persistent that the affected office, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), has been forced to replace hundreds of computers and set up a new computer system.

The bureau's work is sensitive because it supervises US exports of software and technology for commercial and military uses, as well as commodities.

"BIS discovered a targetted effort to gain access to BIS user accounts," said Richard Mills, a Commerce Department spokesman, without commenting on the origin of the attacks.

"They took a series of immediate action steps to ensure that no BIS data is compromised. We have no evidence that any BIS data has been lost or compromised," Mills said.

Department officials are concerned about the hacking attacks because the bureau retains sensitive commercial and economic information on US exporters as well as data related to law enforcement records.

In a bid to ramp up security, the bureau has restricted employees' Internet access to stand alone computers that are not linked to the bureau's network.

In May, the US government, citing a potential security risk, stopped plans by the State Department to install 16,000 computers manufactured by the Chinese firm Lenovo.

The government squashed the deal with Lenovo after US lawmakers raised opposition to the plan on national security grounds.






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Bush cites authority to bypass FEMA law

Bush cites authority to bypass FEMA law
Signing statement is employed again
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff October 6, 2006




WASHINGTON -- President Bush this week asserted that he has the executive authority to disobey a new law in which Congress has set minimum qualifications for future heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Congress passed the law last week as a response to FEMA's poor handling of Hurricane Katrina. The agency's slow response to flood victims exposed the fact that Michael Brown, Bush's choice to lead the agency, had been a politically connected hire with no prior experience in emergency management.

To shield FEMA from cronyism, Congress established new job qualifications for the agency's director in last week's homeland security bill. The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has ``a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and ``not less than five years of executive leadership."

Bush signed the homeland-security bill on Wednesday morning. Then, hours later, he issued a signing statement saying he could ignore the new restrictions. Bush maintains that under his interpretation of the Constitution, the FEMA provision interfered with his power to make personnel decisions.

The law, Bush wrote, ``purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the president may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."

The homeland-security bill contained measures covering a range of topics, including terrorism, disaster preparedness, and illegal immigration. One provision calls for authorizing the construction of a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border.

But Bush's signing statement challenged at least three-dozen laws specified in the bill. Among those he targeted is a provision that empowers the FEMA director to tell Congress about the nation's emergency management needs without White House permission. This law, Bush said, ``purports . . . to limit supervision of an executive branch official in the provision of advice to the Congress." Despite the law, he said, the FEMA director would be required to get clearance from the White House before telling lawmakers anything.

Bush said nothing of his objections when he signed the bill with a flourish in a ceremony Wednesday in Scottsdale, Ariz. At the time, he proclaimed that the bill was ``an important piece of legislation that will highlight our government's highest responsibility, and that's to protect the American people."

The bill, he added, ``will also help our government better respond to emergencies and natural disasters by strengthening the capabilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency."

Bush's remarks at the signing ceremony were quickly e-mailed to reporters, and the White House website highlighted the ceremony. By contrast, the White House minimized attention to the signing statement. When asked by the Globe on Wednesday afternoon if there would be a signing statement, the press office declined to comment, saying only that any such document, if it existed, would be issued in the ``usual way."

The press office posted the signing-statement document on its website around 8 p.m. Wednesday, after most reporters had gone home. The signing statement was not included in news reports yesterday on the bill-signing.

Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, who has been one of the harshest critics of FEMA's performance during Katrina, yesterday rejected Bush's suggestion that he can bypass the new FEMA laws.

Responding to questions from the Globe, Collins said there are numerous precedents for Congress establishing qualifications for executive branch positions, ranging from the solicitor general's post to the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

She also said that Congress has long authorized certain officials from a variety of departments ``to go directly to Congress with recommendations," pointing out that the FEMA director statute was modeled after a law that gives similar independence to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

``I believe it is appropriate to extend this authority to the official tasked with leading the nation's response to disasters," she said.

Georgetown Law School professor Martin Lederman said Congress clearly has the power to set standards for positions such as the FEMA director, so long as the requirements leave a large enough pool of qualified candidates that the White House has ``ample room for choice."

``It's hard to imagine a more modest and reasonable congressional response to the Michael Brown fiasco," said Lederman, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 1994 to 2002.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment about its signing statement.

In the past, the administration has defended the legality of its signing statements. It has also argued that because Congress often lumps many laws into a single package, it is sometimes impractical to veto a large bill on the basis of some parts being flawed .

At a June hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a Bush administration attorney, Michelle Boardman , noted that other US presidents have also used signing statements. She asserted that Bush's statements ``are not an abuse of power."

Bush's use of signing statements has attracted increasing attention over the past year. In December 2005, Bush asserted that he can bypass a statutory ban on torture. In March 2006, the president said he can disobey oversight provisions in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill.

In all, Bush has challenged more than 800 laws enacted since he took office, most of which he said intruded on his constitutional powers as president and commander in chief. By contrast, all previous presidents challenged a combined total of about 600 laws.

At the same time, Bush has virtually abandoned his veto power, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Bush has vetoed just one bill since taking office, the fewest of any president since the 19th century.

Earlier this year, the American Bar Association declared that Bush's use of signing statements was ``contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers."

Last month, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded that Bush's signing statements are ``an integral part" of his ``comprehensive strategy to strengthen and expand executive power" at the expense of the legislative branch.




© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Arrest over Cheney barb triggers lawsuit

Arrest over Cheney barb triggers lawsuit
By Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News
October 3, 2006




A Denver-area man filed a lawsuit today against a member of the Secret Service for causing him to be arrested after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney in Beaver Creek this summer and criticized him for his policies concerning Iraq.
Attorney David Lane said that on June 16, Steve Howards was walking his 7-year-old son to a piano practice, when he saw Cheney surrounded by a group of people in an outdoor mall area, shaking hands and posing for pictures with several people.

According to the lawsuit filed at U.S. District Court in Denver, Howards and his son walked to about two-to-three feet from where Cheney was standing, and said to the vice president, "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," or words to that effect, then walked on.

Ten minutes later, according to Howards' lawsuit, he and his son were walking back through the same area, when they were approached by Secret Service agent Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle Jr., who asked Howards if he had "assaulted" the vice president. Howards denied doing so, but was nonetheless placed in handcuffs and taken to the Eagle County Jail.

The lawsuit states that the Secret Service agent instructed that Howards should be issued a summons for harassment, but that on July 6 the Eagle County District Attorney's Office dismissed all charges against Howards.

The lawsuit filed today alleges that Howards was arrested in retaliation for having exercised his First Amendment right of free speech, and that his arrest violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful seizure.







2006 © The E.W. Scripps Co.

Bush Says Democrats Shouldn't Be Trusted

Bush Says Democrats Shouldn't Be Trusted
Oct 3, 8:59 AM (ET)
By DEB RIECHMANN





STOCKTON, Calif. (AP) - President Bush, on a campaign swing in the West, is telling voters that the Democratic Party is weak-kneed on national security and shouldn't be trusted to hold the reins of Congress.

"If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party, it sounds like - it sounds like - they think the best way to protect the American people is, wait until we're attacked again," Bush said Monday at a $360,000 fundraiser in Reno, Nev., for state Secretary of State Dean Heller's congressional campaign.

"That's not the way it's going to be under my administration. We will stay on the offense," the president said. "We will defeat the enemy overseas so we do not have to face them here at home."

On the home stretch of campaigning for the Nov. 7 elections, Bush is using his fundraising sprint through Nevada, California, Arizona and Colorado to draw a line between Democrats and Republicans, especially when it comes to fighting terrorists.






Bush was speaking Tuesday at a breakfast fundraiser in Stockton, 60 miles east of the San Francisco Bay Area, for Rep. Richard Pombo. Later, he was to attend a fundraiser in El Dorado Hills for Rep. John Doolittle and then raise $1.3 million cash at a Republican National Committee event in the Los Angeles area.

One presidential action was tucked into Bush's Tuesday schedule, perhaps to help the various campaigns defray the cost of getting the president to the political events. Bush was to sign the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Act. Pombo sponsored the House version of the bill, which aims to help landowners restore and manage fish and wildlife habitats on private property.

Bush's first stop on his trip West was an airport hangar in Reno, Nev., where a few hundred people gathered to support Heller, who is running against Democrat Jill Derby.

Republicans have held the seat since it was created 25 years ago to represent more than 100,000 square miles - nearly the entire state except for Las Vegas. Republicans hold an edge of more than 47,000 registered, mostly rural voters, but polls suggest it is a close race.

About 100 protesters chanting "Vote for Change" rallied nearby.

"I think it's an indication of how desperate the Republicans have gotten to try to hang onto a seat that just a year ago was considered a slam dunk for the Republicans," said Pam duPre, executive director of the Washoe County Democratic Party.

As the elections near, Democrats have been stepping up attacks on Bush's policies for fighting terrorists and his strategy in Iraq. They are citing a National Intelligence Estimate, which the president has partly declassified, suggesting that the war in Iraq has helped recruit more terrorists.

Bush disputes the claim, saying that if policymakers in Washington become convinced that fighting terrorists creates terrorists, then America will return to a pre-Sept. 11 mentality of waiting to be attacked.

Hoping to lure Republican supporters to the polls, Bush will be using his fundraising speeches this week to chide Democrats for voting against legislation addressing the CIA's program for detaining and interrogating terrorist suspects and the National Security Agency's surveillance program.

"I want you all to remember when you go to the polls here in Nevada, what political party supported the president to make sure we have the tools necessary to protect the American people and which political party didn't," Bush said at the Heller event.










Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All right reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.




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Pioneer at West Point, lieutenant is first in 'Class of 9/11' to die in Iraq

Sept. 26, 2006, 10:32PM
Pioneer at West Point, lieutenant is first in 'Class of 9/11' to die in Iraq
Officer was the highest-ranking black and Hispanic woman cadet ever
By CARA ANNA
Associated Press





WEST POINT, N.Y. - The first member of West Point's "Class of 9/11" to die in combat was buried at the military academy Tuesday, two weeks after she was killed by a bomb at the head of a convoy in Iraq.

2nd Lt. Emily Perez, 23, was leading a platoon when a roadside bomb exploded Sept. 12 south of Baghdad. She was the first female West Point graduate to die in Iraq and the highest-ranking black and Hispanic woman cadet in the academy's history.

Meghan Venable-Thomas, a senior who was on the track team and in the gospel choir with Perez, described her as "like a little

superwoman, so full of energy and life."

The Class of 2005 at the academy is called the "Class of 9/11" because the 2001 terrorist attacks occurred just weeks into the students' freshman year.

"I think we all hoped it wouldn't happen," James Freeze, class president, said of the first death among the graduates, who numbered exactly 911. Half of the class remains on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perez was a Medical Service Corps officer assigned to the 204th Support Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division in Fort Hood.

Dozens of cadets watched as she was buried in the West Point Cemetery. After accepting the folded American flag from Perez's coffin, her mother leaned over, put her forehead on the casket and whispered.

Perez was fluent in German from growing up overseas. She also played the clarinet and helped start an AIDS ministry at her church. Before leaving for Iraq, she donated bone marrow to a stranger.

"One of the things important to Emily was not the fear of death, but the fear of not living," the Rev. E. Faith Bell said.









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A Death in the Class of 9/11

Thursday, Sep. 28, 2006
A Death in the Class of 9/11
A star graduate from West Point, killed in Iraq, is laid to rest. But what does her death tell us about the price America is paying for freedom in Iraq?
By NATHAN THORNBURGH






The question everyone seems to be asking is: why Emily?

U.S. Army 2nd Lieut. Emily Perez, 23, was buried Tuesday at West Point, on a high bluff overlooking the Hudson River, alongside two centuries of fallen graduates from the United States Military Academy. She was the first combat death from the 2005 graduating class — called "the class of 9/11" because they arrived at the prestigious school just two weeks before the terror attacks. She was also the first female West Point graduate to be killed in Iraq.

She died an ordinary death in Iraq, at least by today's standards: a roadside bomb exploded as she led her platoon in a convoy south of Baghdad on Sept. 12. But what makes this death so difficult in a sea of violence is just how extraordinary this particular soldier was.

I spent a month at West Point reporting for our May 2005 cover story on her fellow cadets in the class of 9/11. I never met Perez in my time there, but I recognize many of her qualities in the friends I made at the academy. They are kids who could have chosen any path in life, but instead turned down elite civilian universities to volunteer for the privations of a military college and an ensuing five-year commitment to the Army.

Even at a school of overachievers, Perez's friends and teachers say that she stood out. She held the second-highest rank in her senior class, and, as Brigade Command Sergeant Major, was the highest-ranking minority woman in the history of West Point. She set school records as a sprinter on the track team, led the school's gospel choir, tutored a number of other students and even helped start a dance squad to cheer on the football and basketball teams. Professors wanted her to be in their classes, soldiers wanted her to lead their cadets, underclassmen wanted to catch a little bit of the unstoppable drive that pushed her to meet and exceed the many challenges the academy throws at its students.

"People often say only good things about someone after they've died, but none of this is hyperbole," says Morten Ender, her faculty advisor in the Sociology Program at West Point. "Emily was amazing."

"She was a star among stars," is how classmate Meagan Belk puts it. "You just never would have imagined this would happen to her."

Yolanda Ramirez-Raphael, her roommate at West Point, says that Perez's accomplishments in life all stemmed from an unshakeable self-confidence. "She didn't worry about whether someone liked her or not," says Ramirez-Raphael. At male-dominated West Point, she says, "women will sometimes try to change their leadership style, but not Emily. She always got right to the point." Perez wasn't bashful about her faith either. Every Sunday morning, she'd wake up by playing gospel CDs as she read the Bible. Her roommate Ramirez-Raphael, always trying to catch up on sleep, says Sunday mornings weren't safe until Perez — and the tambourine she always took to play in the Gospel Choir — were at church.

That faith drove Perez to envision a life of service beyond war. As a teenager in Fort Washington, Md., she set up an AIDS ministry in her church. And although her faculty advisor Ender says she could have been literally anything she wanted to, she was most passionate about global-health issues. "She could have been the next Paul Farmer," says Ender. "That's the commitment, and the talent, that she had."

Roadside bombs are generally believed to be the top killer of U.S. troops in Iraq (according to www.icasualty.org, almost a thousand U.S troops have been killed by the devices so far). The threat has persisted despite a multibillion-dollar U.S. campaign to neutralize it, and more than any element in Iraq has spread the dangers of war evenly from frontline soldiers to support personnel.

Perez understood those risks. She had chosen to go into the highly selective Medical Service Corps and, even though it's not a combat branch, she understood that she'd be in as much danger as anyone. Because of the shortened officer basic training of the medical corps, Ramirez-Raphael says that Perez "knew she would probably be deployed before the huah! infantry set were. She told me, 'I'll be there and back before those guys even get their boots in the sand.'" Ramirez-Raphael says that Perez had already survived several previous convoy attacks in Iraq. After one of those incidents, a mutual friend from West Point happened to be in the Quick Reaction Force that came in to secure the scene. "He told me that Emily held her own [afterwards]," says Ramirez-Raphael.

But there is no holding one's own against a fatal IED attack. It comes in a blast of dust and fire and, in an instant on Sept. 12, all of that exquisite training, and all of that irrepressible vitality, was stilled.

Classmate Paul Lushenko, now an army intelligence officer at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., says that the news of Emily's death hit everyone in the Class of 9/11 hard. "I think that we were under some sort of inability to understand that probably some of our classmates were going to die," he says. "I don't know. You just don't think it's going to happen to you." He brought in a picture of himself with Emily to show his platoon, which is composed of army linguists' — support staff who, like Perez, are not combat personnel. "I wanted to make clear the dangers," he says. "We're all on the front lines in this war."

"We lost one of the greatest accomplishments of the academy," adds Lushenko, who himself is itching to get into the fight in Iraq. "But that motivates me even more to get over there and serve my country."

Leigh Harrell, a fellow classmate of Perez's, emailed me from Baghdad to say that she ran into Perez in Iraq not long ago. "We talked for probably an hour telling each other about the wild experiences we'd already had as platoon leaders in combat," Harrell wrote. "We had some laughs and both talked of how much we were looking forward to going home and seeing our families again."

"There's so much I still wanted to experience with her," says Ramirez-Raphael. "I wanted to have families together, maybe even send our poor little kids to West Point some day."

But it is the question of why — why a roadside bomb that costs a pittance to make killed a young officer with so much left to offer her country — that undoes Ramirez-Raphael. Having buried her friend on Tuesday, the question is still too much on Thursday. "I don't know," she says, "I don't know. I've asked myself that every day since she died, and I cannot tell you."

While I was at West Point, the most impressive thing about cadets like Ramirez-Raphael was the way they were able to safeguard their sense of duty from whatever doubts or insecurities crept in about the mission. In the classroom, I watched Perez's classmates debate the successes and failures of the current U.S. occupation strategy. They learned about the dangers of this particular war, from watching videos of an IED explosion to discussing the fate of West Point graduate Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was forced into retirement for contradicting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's estimates about how many troops would be needed in Iraq. But outside of the classroom, the cadets still mustered on the plain and marched in unison, a physical reminder of their willingness to accept and execute whatever mission they are given. On one of my last days at West Point, I watched from the stands as the class of 9/11 took the art of parading to its farcical zenith. A high wind had blown a tall plumed hat off of one of the lead cadets, forcing the hundreds that followed in box formation to try to step over it without glancing down or altering their parade stride. As you can imagine, this did not work out so well. Cadet after cadet ended up stumbling over a hat that could have easily been picked up and tossed out of the way.

Even the West Point parents in attendance couldn't help but snicker at these proud ranks being decimated by a hat. But watching this, I finally was able to articulate something that I had only vaguely sensed before: This thing that West Pointers do — parading in unyielding formation, shining already gleaming boots, enlisting to sacrifice their lives on some unknown and unloved territory far from home — is not done out of ignorance, but out of faith. They have faith that the American values and resourcefulness do not lend themselves to meaningless death. They have faith that not only is freedom worth fighting for, but that we do not fight for any lesser end.

What do we owe them in return? An honest debate and some tough questions that soldiers by definition cannot outwardly ask or answer. Many of her classmates, like Lushenko, see Perez's death as a reason for more resolve in the fight. And one imagines that Perez, who was not given to second-guessing herself or her mission, would agree. This election season has featured Democrats obsessed with blaming their opponents for getting into the war and Republicans mistaking discussion for sedition. Instead, we should be asking straight questions: Do we have enough troops? Is the war winnable? Should we redeploy to safer bases or should we be a more muscular presence on the streets of Iraq? "Emily was just a problem solver," says one of her fellow cadets. Iraq may have defied solution so far, but we owe her a continued, honest effort.





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