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Robert: For years, Don and I have spoken back and forth via e mail. We met on an AOL forum when Bill Clinton was president. Don served as a high ranking officer in the Air Force and retired to work as an executive for a company. Anyway Don has a guest column in the paper and I hope you all enjoy his words as much as I do.

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As the only woman in her bomb-disposal unit in Afghanistan, Army Sergeant Rebekah Havrilla said she had learned to endure sexual harassment from her team leader and contempt from the captain who commanded the unit.
Enlarge image Former U.S. Army Sergeant Rebekah Havrilla

Former U.S. Army Sergeant Rebekah Havrilla testifies about being sexually assaulted while in the military during a hearing March 13, 2013 in Washington, D.C. Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Enlarge image Service Women’s Action Network Director Anu Bhagwati

Service Women’s Action Network Executive Director Anu Bhagwati, also a former Marine captain and company commander, said that "today's military justice system is not professional." Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images

So when another service member raped her, she said, reporting the crime to her commanding officer was unthinkable.

“There was no way I was going to go to my commander,” Havrilla, who served in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007, said in an interview. “He made it clear he didn’t like women.”

The reluctance of most victims to report crimes of sexual assault in the U.S. military goes to the heart of the uproar over such attacks, which President Barack Obama denounced last week as “shameful and disgraceful.”

Now a growing number of lawmakers, led by women in the House of Representatives and Senate, are demanding a change that military leaders have long considered anathema: letting independent military prosecutors, instead of commanding officers, pursue sexual assaults and other major crimes.

“Our system is broken,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat and chief sponsor of a measure to wrest such cases away from military supervisors. “This is the only way we can provide the unbiased justice that our victims need.”


...Kissing, Biting

“I dealt with an abusive team leader for six months in Afghanistan,” she said in an interview. The sergeant first class “tried to pull me into his bed a couple of times, would slap my butt when I walked by if no one was around and one time tried to kiss and bite the back of my neck and put his hand in my shirt.”

The captain in command of the unit told other soldiers that he didn’t think women belonged there and seldom talked to her, Havrilla said.

About a week before she was due to return home, Havrilla said, she stopped by the room of an enlisted man who worked with a bomb dog to drop off some equipment she had borrowed.

“He grabbed me and threw me back on the bed,” she said. “I physically tried to leave and he physically restrained me. I told him ‘no’ repeatedly.”

She eventually relented, she said, to avoid what she feared would be a beating.

“It’s hard to explain what goes through your head, but you do a risk assessment,” Havrilla said. “I didn’t want to get hurt. I wanted to get out of Afghanistan as much in one piece as I could.”
‘Restricted’ Report

With no faith in the chain of command, Havrilla said, she filed only a “restricted” report, a move that entitled her to counseling without triggering an investigation or charges. After leaving active duty, she filed a second restricted report in February 2009, after running into her rapist at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where she was doing training for the Army Reserves.

Later that year, after a friend notified her that graphic pictures of her rape were posted online, Havrilla said she filed an unrestricted report. An investigation was conducted, though no charges resulted. ....

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A mother and two daughters were allegedly killed by male relatives in southern Egypt who believed they'd had affairs, the latest apparent example of so-called "honor killings" in which women are slain for violating traditional morals in the conservative region, a security official said Friday. Police believe the 10 men stormed the house of the women, strangling them and beating them with sharp tools, the official said, based on the alleged confession of one of the suspects. The men wrapped the women's bodies in blankets, weighted them with stones and throw them in the river Nile, the official added.
He said one of the men, arrested on Thursday, gave a detailed account of the killings and said they were intended to protect the family's honor.

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The New York State Sheriffs' Association and five individual sheriffs are asking U.S. District Judge William Skretny to add their position to the record. They support gun rights advocates seeking to block enforcement of new bullet limits for magazines and the tighter definition of assault weapons.

The sheriffs agree with the New York affiliate of the National Rifle Association that the law, passed after the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, is unconstitutional because it will prevent citizens from keeping commonly used firearms for home defense.

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The sheriffs argued that several provisions are also "fatally vague," measures that "law enforcement officers are inherently unable to fairly and uniformly enforce." They urged the court to clarify "laws that will inevitably require enforcement, via confiscation, incarceration, or both, against otherwise law-abiding individuals attempting to exercise fundamental rights."

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"The lack of guidelines in these provisions will inevitably lead to 'erratic arrests and convictions' that the due process clause was meant to prevent," they wrote.

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ICYMI: EPA Playing Politics with FOIA Fee Waivers

May 20, 2013

Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sens. David Vitter, Chuck Grassley, and James Inhofe sent a letter to EPA's Acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe regarding the Agency's practice of frequently granting fee waivers for Freedom of Information Act requests to national environmental groups, but rarely granting them to conservative think tanks, States and local entities. Click here to read Rep. Issa, Sen. Vitter, Sen. Grassley, and Sen. Inhofe's letter. Scroll down for news articles on the investigation.


Reuters
Republicans see IRS scandal parallel in EPA info requests
By Valerie Volcovici | May 17, 2013



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican lawmakers on Friday began an investigation into whether the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency greatly favored left-leaning environmentalists over conservative groups when granting fee waivers for requests to access information.



The lawmakers drew a comparison between the actions they say the EPA has taken with the Internal Revenue Service, which is embroiled in controversy over its targeting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny.



Republican Senators David Vitter of Louisiana, Charles Grassley of Iowa and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Representative Darrell Issa of California, raised the issue in a letter to the acting administrator of the EPA.



The four lawmakers serve as the top Republicans on the environment, judiciary and House oversight and government reform committees, respectively.

They asked why 92 percent of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) fee waivers were granted to "environmental allies," while just 8 percent were granted to conservative think tanks. The disparity came to light this week in a report by a conservative research group.



Agencies can waive fees for requested information if they determine the information contributes to the public understanding of governmental activities.



"This disparate treatment is unacceptable, especially in light of the recent controversy over abusive tactics at the Internal Revenue Service, which singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny," the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Bob Perciasepe, the EPA's acting administrator.

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True the Vote is not only suing the IRS, but also taking action against the IRS employees who participated in the harassment of the voter education and election monitoring organization. Those employees could personally be held liable to pay damages that would be established in litigation.


True the Votes’ lead counsel, Cleta Mitchell, explained in an email to The Daily Caller that she does not know whether the employees, if found to be liable in the lawsuit True the Vote filed against the IRS and its employees Tuesday, would pay out of pocket or take other avenues such as accessing union funds or homeowners insurance. Either way, she noted, the group will pursue its action.


“[T]heir unlawful actions caused my clients to have to come up with the money to deal with their demands…out of their own personal finances… They didn’t seem to worry / care about that,” Mitchell wrote to TheDC. “Government employees never do care about the costs to private citizens of their burdensome demands….”


Founder and president of True the Vote Catherine Engelbrecht explained in a conference call Thursday morning that in July of 2010 her organization filed an application for tax exemption. The request has been in limbo since then.
“During that time we have been subjected to multiple rounds of questions, all told I would say in excess of several hundred questions and thousands of documents provided back to the IRS,” she said. “With no real end in sight.”
After her organization’s most recent round of questions following the November 2012 elections, Engelbrecht said that she and Mitchell began discussing other legal options.


“That ultimately led us to a place where we felt like we had no other options but to file suit against the IRS and to ask the courts to now get involved to grant our long-awaited tax exempt status,” she said adding she also hoped to reveal the IRS employees’ involvement in her organization’s plight.


True the Vote filed a lawsuit against the IRS and some of its employees on Tuesday.

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Noonan: A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall

The IRS's leaders refuse to account for the agency's corruption and abuse.

"I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."


These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.


So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?


We learned the people who ran and run the IRS are not going to help Congress find out what happened in the IRS. We know we haven't gotten near the bottom of the political corruption of that agency. We do not know who ordered the targeting of conservative groups and individuals, or why, or exactly when it began. We don't know who executed the orders or directives. We do not know the full scope or extent of the scandal. We don't know, for instance, how many applicants for tax-exempt status were abused.


We know the IRS commissioner wasn't telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: "There's absolutely no targeting." We have learned the Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting. It was part of a spin operation in which she'd planted the question with a friend. We know the tax-exempt bureau Ms. Lerner ran did not simply make mistakes because it was overwhelmed with requests—the targeting began before a surge in applications. And Ms. Lerner did not learn about the targeting in 2012—the IRS audit timeline shows she was briefed in June 2011. She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office. But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: "Everything comes from the top."


We know that Lois Lerner this week announced she'd done nothing wrong, and then took the Fifth.
And we know Jay Leno, grown interestingly fearless, said of the new IRS commissioner, "They're called 'acting commissioner' because you have to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."


But the most important IRS story came not from the hearings but from Mike Huckabee's program on Fox News Channel. He interviewed and told the story of Catherine Engelbrecht—a nice woman, a citizen, an American. She and her husband live in Richmond, Texas. They have a small manufacturing business. In the past few years she became interested in public policy and founded two groups, King Street Patriots, and True the Vote.


In July 2010 she sent applications to the IRS for tax-exempt status. What followed was not the harassment, intrusiveness and delay we're now used to hearing of. The US government came down on her with full force.



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IRS officials have complained that the law is murky, it's difficult to define what the tax exemption law really means. But they don't have any problem defining it. They defined it with a vengeance.


Second, it is important to remember that there has never been an investigation of what happened in the IRS. There was an internal IRS audit, not an investigation, carried out by an inspector general, who was careful this week to note to the House what he'd done was not an investigation. He was tasked to come to conclusions on whether there had been wrongdoing at the agency. It was not his job to find out exactly why it happened, how and when the scandal began, who was involved, and how they operated.


A dead serious investigation is needed. The IRS has colorfully demonstrated that it cannot investigate itself. The Obama administration wants the FBI—which answers to Eric Holder's Justice Department—to investigate, but that would not be credible. The investigators of the IRS must be independent of the administration, or their conclusions will not be trustworthy.


An independent counsel, with all the powers of that office, is what we need.

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