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From the Los Angeles Times

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Hearing set to begin into Ft. Hood shootings

The procedure, which will last several weeks and be open to the public, is intended to help the Army decide whether it can court-martial Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused in 13 deaths.

By Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau

October 11, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Alma Nemelka said her nephew was the first to die. He was standing at the rear of the Soldier Readiness Center at Ft. Hood, Texas, when an Army officer burst in shouting, " Allahu akbar! '' Pfc. Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19 and soon to be deployed to the Middle East, was shot in the head.

On Tuesday, the man accused of killing Nemelka and 12 others, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan of the Army Medical Corps, will appear for his first broad military hearing into the November attack. Hasan, a U.S.-born Muslim and Army psychiatrist, was shot during the incident and is paralyzed from the waist down.

The hearing, formally called an Article 32 proceeding, is expected to span four to six weeks. Akin to a grand jury hearing but open to the public, it is designed to help the top Army commander at Ft. Hood determine whether there is enough evidence to court-martial Hasan, 40, who could face a death sentence.

But nearly a year after the shootings rocked the army base in central Texas and ignited outrage in Washington, fundamental questions linger. Was Hasan another "workplace" violent offender? Or was he a radicalized extremist whom the military should have removed from its ranks?

More significant, was he a tool of radical Islamic leaders abroad who reportedly were in contact with him and spurred him on, and who immediately applauded the shootings?

Here in Washington, the Senate Homeland Security Committee is close to wrapping up its investigation into failures in the military and federal law enforcement that allowed the shooter to slip through the system.

After initially issuing subpoenas for information, the committee has held hours of private briefings with military investigators and FBI agents to piece together Hasan's military career and examine what the Army and law enforcement knew, or should have known, about his intentions.

The panel's report, targeted for release in the midst of the Ft. Hood legal hearing, is expected to call for major changes in the way the Department of Defense polices its own.

"Our investigation into whether our government could have done anything to prevent the Ft. Hood murders, based on what was known about Hasan, has been difficult but it is coming to an end," committee Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said. The final report, he said, "will reveal new information."

In 2001, Hasan attended a mosque in the Falls Church, Va., area, where the imam was U.S.-born Anwar Awlaki — who has been targeted for death by the U.S. and is believed to be in Yemen. In the months before the Ft. Hood shooting, Hasan reportedly sent Awlaki more than a dozen e-mails, some asking when jihad was appropriate.

"I can't wait to join you," he allegedly told Awlaki in those e-mails.

U.S. authorities intercepted the e-mails but reportedly considered the correspondence part of Hasan's research on post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Hasan also was closely reading Awlaki's writings on the Internet. In one posting, Awlaki blogged about the need to fight "government armies in the Muslim world," and proclaimed, "Blessed are those who fight against" American soldiers.

After the shootings, Awlaki praised Hasan. "Nidal Hasan is a hero," he said. "He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people."

Hasan spent several days in a coma after being wounded during the Nov. 5 incident. He was hospitalized at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, then taken to a specially built, $400,000 jail cell in Bell County near Ft. Hood. There, he has been preparing for the Article 32 hearing, where he is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.

With scores of witnesses prepared to identify Hasan as the shooter, his lawyer, retired Army Col. John Galligan, faces a difficult task. Galligan declined to outline what defense he might use, but noted that he is not required to put on any evidence or testimony. But the last 10 days of the hearing have been set aside for a defense if he chooses to mount one.

Last week, Galligan objected to a mental exam for Hasan, saying it should occur after the Article 32 hearing. The attorney also objected to the composition of the three-person "sanity board." But the Associated Press reported that Col. Morgan Lamb, a Ft. Hood brigade commander overseeing Hasan's case, ordered that the evaluation be done before the hearing.

Hasan has spent much of his time learning how to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He still receives an Army paycheck because he remains innocent until proven guilty, but his local bank refuses to accept his money. For now, Galligan is holding onto the checks.

Galligan has asked for more time to prepare Hasan's defense but cannot get the Army to postpone the hearing. He said the Pentagon has withheld key documents, including internal records showing that they were aware of Hasan's behavior and activities. And, he said, the Army is intent on convicting Hasan at any cost.

"He's not charged with any terrorism offenses, but that's how he's being displayed," said Galligan, who suggested Hasan may have been under the spell of others. "I've never seen a man railroaded like this guy."

The families of his victims disagree.

"There is no way I think this man is insane," said Sheryll Pearson of Bolingbrook, Ill. Her son Pfc. Michael Pearson, 22, was also killed that day. "He had a plan, and he carried it out. That is not insanity."

In West Jordan, Utah, Alma Nemelka is watching the case closely and hoping for the death penalty.

"He knew what he was doing — he wasn't crazy," she said. "It was purely premeditated the way he walked in the door and my nephew was the first one to get shot."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hood-hearing-20101011,0,6629676,print.story

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OPINION

Undocumented workers: essential but unwanted

Undocumented workers are cast by the hysterical as enemies of the state, but they are essential to the U.S. economy. We use them for their labor but decry their presence. We're all complicit.

Gregory Rodriguez

October 11, 2010

If Meg Whitman loses the gubernatorial race because her actions didn't jive with her words on illegal immigration, she could become a sacrificial lamb for the rest of us. Her sin is our sin. Because where illegal immigration is concerned, we are all hypocrites.

At the second gubernatorial debate held in Fresno two weekends ago, Democratic nominee Jerry Brown had a field day with Whitman's less than elegant response to the revelation that she had employed a maid, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, who was an illegal immigrant. When Diaz Santillan confessed that she was undocumented, Whitman fired her but stopped short of reporting her to immigration authorities. Brown's point was that Whitman's position — crack down on employers of illegal immigrants — didn't allow for any wiggle room. In one scathing exchange, Brown told Whitman, "You have blamed her, blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions, but you don't take accountability."

But is Whitman all that different from the rest of us?

When it comes to illegal immigration, nobody seems to take responsibility, and we are all, through action or inaction, complicit.

It should be no surprise that illegal immigration is one of the primary means by which the U.S. economy gains access to low-skilled, low-cost labor. As the share of low-skilled native-born Americans falls — in 1960 half of U.S.-born working-age adults had not completed high school, compared with 8% today — employers have become ever more dependent on illegal immigration as a steady source of cheap labor.

Some sectors are more dependent than others. According to a 2009 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 40% of the nation's brickmasons, 37% of drywall installers, 28% of dishwashers, 27% of maids and housekeepers, and 21% of parking-lot attendants are undocumented. In California, those percentages are likely to be higher. A 2006 survey by the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that a majority of California's farmworkers have no papers.

So whatever your feelings about illegal immigration, if you eat vegetables, enjoy restaurants, reside in a house built in the last 30 years or ever let a valet park your car, the chances are you're implicated in the hypocritical politics that allows 7 million to 8 million people to work illegally in the country.

Why don't these immigrants come here legally? Because the U.S. grants only about 150,000 visas annually for temporary low-skilled laborers, a paltry percentage of the number of such workers that the economy easily absorbs yearly.

This charade — closing our eyes to illegal labor (or even scapegoating illegal immigrants, a la Arizona) while refusing to make our immigration system responsive to our economic needs — is nothing new. In the post- World War II years, even as one arm of the government (the U.S. Department of Labor) was actively recruiting Mexican guest laborers, another (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) was throwing them out. By 1976, the comptroller general of the U.S. explained in a report that "the border is a revolving door.... We repatriate undocumented workers on a massive scale ... and significant numbers promptly reenter."

That duplicitous exchange got even more dishonest in the 1980s after President Reagan recast illegal immigration as a national security issue even as he signed a major amnesty for those already in the country. That heralded in the current era of hysterical rhetoric, border walls and beefed-up enforcement. Fifteen years later, a heightened fear of unsecured borders after 9/11 made it even more difficult to reconcile the need for labor with political rhetoric. Once illegal immigrants had been cast as enemies and threats to the state, how could one effectively argue for the nation's need for their labor?

And the more we blamed those awful illegals for coming to this country, the less willing we became to claim any responsibility for their being here, or for treating them decently. As illegal immigrants were increasingly cast as a threat, Americans cast themselves as victims.

We all participate in illegal immigration, not least by refusing to face the paradox. And it has terrible costs, including "stateless" young people who can't go to college and get ahead and a shadow population that is easily and often exploited. Illegal immigration is morally corrosive to all those who participate in it. The enormous power imbalance between immigrants without papers and everyone else poisons our sense of fairness and responsibility.

Brown and Whitman will continue their bickering, and voters will side with one or the other. But the larger truth is that contemporary illegal immigration has turned us all into a nation of hypocrites.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez-column-illegal-immigr20101011,0,4099806,print.column

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From the New York Times

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In Rough Slum, Brazil's Police Try Soft Touch

RIO DE JANEIRO — Leonardo Bento longed for vengeance after a policeman killed his brother five years ago. So when he heard that the new “peace police” force in the City of God slum was offering free karate classes, Mr. Bento signed up, hoping he would at least get to beat up the karate instructor.

But the unexpected happened. Eduardo da Silva, the police instructor, won him over with humor and a handshake. “I began to realize that the policeman in front of me was just a human being and not the monster I had imagined in my head,” Mr. Bento, 22, said.

Years of hate and mistrust are thawing in some of Rio's most violent slums. Pushed to alleviate security concerns before the city's double-billing on the international stage — the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games -- Rio officials have embarked on an ambitious plan to wrest control of the slums, or favelas, from ruthless drug gangs who ruled for years with big guns and abject terror.

The peace officers are central to that effort, flooding in after the military police clear the streets in gun battles that can last weeks. Their job is part traditional policing, part social work. They devote themselves to winning over residents scarred by decades of violence — some at the hands of the police. And the tips fed to them from those who support their efforts, officers say, help them keep the relative peace.

For decades, City of God — whose brutal past was immortalized in a 2002 film -- was one of the city's most fearsome neighborhoods, so dangerous that even the police rarely dared to enter.

Those days seem long gone. Drug dealing remains, and in at least one area, outsiders can enter only with permission from local youths who patrol the streets.

Still, the men with the big guns are gone, or at least have been driven underground. And life is returning to the streets.

Children now play outside without fear of stray bullets. They skip rope and play table tennis with paddles made from floor tiles. Soccer matches, formerly violent affairs, have become more civil, with officers sometimes joining in the games.

But almost two years after the new police units first arrived, many residents in this community of 120,000 people still struggle to accept that the 315 police officers working 12-hour shifts around them are no longer the enemy. Others welcome the calm but distrust it, worrying that the police force — formally called “police pacification units” — will leave once the Olympics end.

“Nobody likes us here,” Officer Luis Pizarro said during a recent night patrol. “It can be frustrating sometimes.”

Officer Pizarro and two others patrolled along a narrow river choked with garbage and reeking of human and animal waste. Families gathered around makeshift fires. Women danced the samba as men drank cachaça, the Brazilian sugarcane liquor. Almost no one waved at or greeted the officers, who walked through an alleyway littered with multicolored paper used to package crack and cocaine.

“There goes the Elite Squad,” said one man from a doorway, chuckling as the three officers passed by.

The hostility is not hard to understand. For decades, government officials refused to take responsibility for the slums, and as drug gangs built caches of weapons it became harder for the police to enter without a firefight. Residents resented the police for abandoning them, and reviled them for the brutality that marked their bloody raids.

Without a daily police presence, city services suffered, and doctors and other professionals began to shun the slums for safety reasons. Drug gang leaders became judge and jury.

“People did not have the courage” to retake the slums, said José Mariano Beltrame, who took over as Rio's secretary of public security in 2007. “People preferred to throw the dust under the carpet to avoid facing the problem.”

The favelas have rarely surrendered without a fight. At least eight people died in City of God in 2008 in the initial raids by the police. Such battles are expected to become more widespread as the police move into new neighborhoods. So far, they have installed 12 pacification units, covering 35 communities. But Mr. Beltrame plans to establish units in 160 communities by 2014, including in favelas like Rocinha and Complexo do Alemão, which are larger than City of God.

On a recent Sunday night, a few dozen young men walked freely in Rocinha with rifles and machine guns. One carried a small rocket launcher.

Many gang leaders from slums where the police have taken over are fleeing to Complexo do Alemão, the police said. Mr. Beltrame said he probably did not have the manpower to occupy either slum this year, calling it a “complex operation.” He said he could not guarantee that people would not die.

Even with violent challenges ahead, many Rio residents are rooting for the program. Dilma Rousseff, the leading candidate to be Brazil's next president, has proposed expanding the model to other cities. Millions of dollars in donations from companies like Coca-Cola and a billionaire businessman, Eike Batista, are also pouring in, paying for things like police equipment.

Mr. Beltrame said his main goal was to rid the streets of “weapons of war,” not necessarily to end drug dealing. He is also working, he said, to diminish police corruption. Many of the peace officers are purposely recruited right out of the police academy, before they are tempted to accept drug money to supplement relatively low wages.

In City of God, drug gang leaders have been arrested, killed or fled, but some of their family members remain, waiting for the police to leave. In Carate, the part of the slum patrolled by youths involved in the drug trade, residents say they feel caught between the police and the gangs.

“I am scared even to say ‘good afternoon' to the police here,” said Beatriz Soares, who fears that drug traffickers might be watching.

But her family fears the police as well. When a policeman came to her door one day, she said her 3-year-old son “asked him if he was going to kill him.”

Still, it is clear that the police presence has changed lives for the better throughout City of God. School attendance has increased, with one high school showing a 90 percent rise in attendance since the community police arrived, a school official said. Earth-moving trucks are dredging the narrow, sewage-filled river, and garbage trucks pass through three times a week.

The police have also made more than 200 arrests since they retook City of God, and crime has fallen: 6 homicides last year compared with 34 in 2008.

Residents are mainly grateful, though some say something intangible has been lost, a certain edgy free-spiritedness.

In the past, gang members often subsidized drug-fueled funk parties to recruit dealers.

The police are now strictly controlling the dances — limiting alcohol consumption among minors and censoring misogynistic lyrics that glorify drug gangs.

Mr. Beltrame said the peace police program is guaranteed only through 2014, but that its success would make it hard for future politicians to dismantle.

Capt. José Luiz de Medeiros, who leads the police unit in City of God, said he was building a force for the long term, and working hard to win the residents' trust. About a dozen officers recently visited a new day care center, spinning pacifiers around their fingers while children played with their radios and clambered around their legs and holstered guns.

Some of the officers have been pulled off patrol duty to teach guitar and piano classes and English. Officer da Silva, the karate instructor, is one of those who now teaches full-time.

Mr. Bento, who joined the class after his brother died, said he had considered going into drug trafficking to gain access to guns. But since meeting Officer da Silva, he has changed his mind and now tries to help other residents conquer their fear of the police.

Officer da Silva said he understood the people's wariness. “It is impossible for them to forget their past,” he said. “All I can do is make sure I am open to them.”

To make his point, he comes to City of God unarmed and without a bulletproof vest.

“Force does not bring about peace,” he said. “It can instill respect, but not trust.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/world/americas/11brazil.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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British Inquest Into 2005 London Attacks Opens

An inquest into the deaths of 52 people killed by four suicide bombers in attacks in London on July 7, 2005 began at the Royal Courts of Justice Monday.

Justice Heather C. Hallett, the coroner, will preside without a jury over hearings into the attacks on three Underground trains and a bus. The inquest is expected to last at until least March next year.

The inquiry will examine the issue of preventability — notably whether the British domestic security service, MI5, could have done more to stop the attacks — and will examine forensics, pathology and the emergency services' response.

The process started Monday with a silent tribute to the victims. Hugo Keith, counsel to the inquest, then read out the names of all those who died. “It is the saddest of duties to open their inquests,” Mr. Keith said, according to The Associated Press. He described the attacks as “acts of mindless savagery which could only outline the sheer inhumanity of the perpetrators.”

The hearing has been delayed because of criminal investigations and questions over what exactly it should cover.

It will hear a range of witnesses, including police officers and members of the security services — who are likely to be granted anonymity in public — and survivors of the attacks. The inquest is a fact-finding exercise and not a method of determining guilt, as would be the case with a criminal trial. Some relatives of victims will be represented and will be able to question witnesses.

Some victims' families still want a broader inquiry.

“It is disgraceful that there has never been a public, judicial examination of all the facts which is truly independent of the government, the police and the security service,” Clifford Tibber, a lawyer representing the families of six of the victims, was quoted as saying by Reuters. “These inquests represent the first opportunity for a public examination of the facts and to consider, if there were failings, what lessons have been learned.”

There have already been reports into the bombings by a Parliamentary committee, which found that MI5 should not be blamed.

The attacks took place on trains near the Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square subway stations, and on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, near King's Cross. In addition to the deaths, about 700 people were injured when the four al-Qaeda-backed suicide bombers detonated their devices.

The inquest will open with speeches and will include evidence-gathering trips to the scenes of the attacks. It will also look into the backgrounds of the four convicted British attackers — Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Jermaine Lindsay — and what the security services knew about them before they struck.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/world/europe/12britain.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Despite Army Efforts, Soldier Suicides Continue

FORT HOOD, Tex. — At 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday in August, Specialist Armando G. Aguilar Jr. found himself at the end of his short life. He was standing, drunk and weepy, in the parking lot of a Valero station outside Waco, Tex. He had jumped out of his moving pickup. There was a police officer talking to him in frantic tones. Specialist Aguilar held a pistol pointed at his head.

This moment had been a long time coming, his family said. He had twice tried to commit suicide with pills since returning from a tough tour in Iraq a year earlier, where his job was to drive an armored vehicle to search for bombs.

Army doctors had put him on medications for depression, insomnia, nightmares and panic attacks. Specialist Aguilar was seeing an Army therapist every week. But he had been getting worse in the days before his death, his parents said, seeing shadowy figures that were not there, hallucinating that he heard loud noises outside his trailer home.

“He wanted help — he was out there asking for help,” said his father, Armando Aguilar Sr. “He just snapped. He couldn't control what he was doing no more.”

Specialist Aguilar was one of 20 soldiers connected to Fort Hood who are believed to have committed suicide this year. The Army has confirmed 14 of those, and is completing the official investigations of six other soldiers who appear to have taken their own lives — four of them in one week in September. The deaths have made this the worst year at the sprawling fort since the military began keeping track in 2003.

The spate of suicides in Texas reflects a chilling reality: nearly 20 months after the Army began strengthening its suicide prevention program and working to remove the stigma attached to seeking psychological counseling, the suicide rate among active service members remains high and shows little sign of improvement. Through August, at least 125 active members of the Army had ended their own lives, exceeding the morbid pace of last year, when there were a record 162 suicides.

“If the test for success is our numbers and our rate, then clearly we have not been successful,” said Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of a special task force established to reduce suicides.

Colonel Philbrick said that more soldiers were seeking help for psychological problems than ever before — it was the leading reason for hospitalization in the military last year — but that the number needing help had also grown at a rapid pace, a natural consequence of nine years of combat deployments. So even though the Army now has 3,800 therapists and psychiatrists, two-thirds more than it did three years ago, there is still a significant shortage, he said.

Advocates for veterans say the shortage of therapists means that Army doctors tend to rely more on medication than therapy. They also say the Army screens too few soldiers for mental problems after deployments, placing the burden on the soldier to seek help rather than on officers to actively find the damaged psyches in their corps.

“The military still blames the soldier, saying it's financial stress or family stress, and it is still waiting for the service member to come forward,” said Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

In July, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the Army, ordered that all soldiers returning from combat be evaluated by a mental health professional, either face to face or by video conference.

General Chiarelli and other top commanders have argued that the roots of the rise in military suicides are complex and that blame cannot be laid solely on repeated deployments. The majority of soldiers who have committed suicide — about 80 percent — have had only one deployment or none at all. Another factor is that after years of war, the Army is now attracting recruits already inclined toward risky behavior and thus more prone to suicide, according to a 15-month Army review of suicides released in July.

A close examination of some of the suicides at Fort Hood shows that they are as individual as fingerprints. Some of the soldiers who committed suicide were receiving treatment but took their lives anyway. Others were reluctant to seek help for fear of being labeled cowards or malingerers.

The commanders at the base have tried hard to change the never-show-weakness culture of the Army. They have trained more than 700 noncommissioned officers and chaplains to spot suicidal soldiers and refer them to counselors. Since April, more than 17,000 soldiers have participated in an exercise in which actors play out scenarios involving suicidal people.

Beyond the role playing, the base's commanders have also employed a comedian who talks about the suicide of his brother and have compelled all soldiers to watch two training films about suicide — “Shoulder to Shoulder” and “I Will Never Quit on Life.” A former commander of the base, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, even established a holistic “Resiliency Campus,” where soldiers can do things like take tai chi and yoga classes, get massages or see family counselors.

One of the those who received the training was Josh Roum, a recently retired sergeant who still works on the base. On Sept. 25, Mr. Roum came home after spending the night with a friend and found his new roommate, Sgt. Timothy Ryan Rinella, sprawled in a hallway. A veteran of four deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sergeant Rinella, who was 29, had shot himself in the head with Mr. Roum's pistol.

Mr. Roum said Sergeant Rinella showed none of the classic signs of being suicidal. He had talked about plans to rebuild an old car and had bragged about his four children. “He seemed like he had a level head on his shoulders,” Mr. Roum said. “It was like a total shocker to me.”

Sergeant Rinella had sought counseling from an Army psychologist for panic attacks, even though he feared that a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder would ruin his career, his wife, Sarah Rinella, said via e-mail. He believed that the counselors would relay what he said in private up the chain of command.

The deployments had been hard on the marriage, Ms. Rinella said. Sergeant Rinella left for Iraq just 13 days after their wedding and spent more than half of their eight-year marriage abroad. He missed the birth of his first son.

“How are you supposed to have a family life with that many deployments?” Mr. Roum asked.

The day Sergeant Rinella killed himself, he was facing another separation from his family, Mr. Roum said. A few days earlier, his wife had moved with the children to Richmond, Va., to take care of an ailing parent.

Several of the soldiers who recently committed suicide had faced marital problems. Sgt. First Class Eugene E. Giger was informed by his wife, Yolanda Giger, last October that she was filing for divorce. He was still in Iraq, doing his third tour abroad in six years.

“It did cause a chasm between the two of them,” said Helen Giger, the sergeant's mother. “He felt bad because his kids were growing up without him being there.”

On June 15, two days after his 43rd birthday, Sergeant Giger hanged himself in his apartment in Killeen. His parents said their son had always been a taciturn man and had given close relatives no hint that he was depressed. Nor did he mention panic attacks, nightmares or other emotional disorders.

But his former wife said in a telephone interview that she had tried to warn his superiors that he was deeply troubled after his deployments, despite having served most of his time abroad in a relatively safe desk job as a personnel officer. “I made outcries to everyone, and no one listened,” she said, declining to say to whom she had spoken for fear of losing Army benefits.

Others did seek help. Master Sgt. Baldemar Gonzalez, 39, an airborne combat veteran in the Persian Gulf and Iraq, began seeing a therapist at Fort Hood a year ago and received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He suffered nightmares, insomnia and flashbacks, said his wife, Christina Barrientes. He had planned to go to school for engineering on the G.I. Bill when his enlistment ended this year.

Army psychiatrists prescribed antidepressants, sleeping pills and a tranquilizer — a cocktail of five drugs, she said. He started taking them in mid-March, and his personality changed. Always an athletic, outgoing man, he became listless and quiet, sleeping much of the day and avoiding his friends.

On Sept. 25, he dropped his daughter off at a football game at her high school, then returned home and told his wife he was going to work on some homework in the kitchen. She found him upstairs later in the day, dead in their bedroom closet, having apparently hanged himself.

“I blame the medication,” Ms. Barrientes said. “You go and try to get help and all they do is put you on medication.”

Specialist Aguilar, who shot himself in the Valero parking lot, also had plans to go back to school once his enlistment was over in November. A guitarist and songwriter from a working-class family, he had enlisted partly because the Army would pay for music school after his military service, his family and friends said.

But by the time he came back from Iraq in July 2009, his nerves were on edge, his relatives said. He had become severely depressed in Iraq after a good friend in his unit, Pvt. Eugene Kanakole, shot and killed himself in a latrine. Specialist Aguilar had also lived through several terrifying explosions — including five in one night — while working as a combat engineer, friends said. Army doctors prescribed antidepressants even before he left the war zone.

Once he returned to Texas, he frequently drank too much and twice nearly overdosed on sleeping pills and painkillers. His medical records show that Army psychiatrists diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and he had been seeing a therapist every week for months. At the time of his death, he was taking two antidepressants, a sleeping pill and a drug used to treat alcoholics.

He married a young woman from Waco early this year, but the elation of the honeymoon did not last long. They fought often over his behavior, and they began seeing a marriage counselor within months, friends said. The night before he died he drove to Waco to visit his in-laws. He took a gun belonging to a close friend who was out of town.

The police say Specialist Aguilar ran into the yard of his father-in-law's house and fired shots around 3:15 a.m., then took off in his pickup truck. His mother, Amelia Aguilar, said his wife had told her they had been drinking and had a fight.

A local police officer spotted Specialist Aguilar's truck and followed him to the Valero station in Hewitt, just south of Waco. He tumbled out of the moving truck, letting the vehicle roll into a ditch, then put the gun to his head. The officer, Sgt. Robert Dillard, drew his own gun and started to plead with Specialist Aguilar not to fire, according to the police report.

He pulled the trigger anyway. He was 26 years old.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/us/11suicides.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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EDITORIAL

Two Words: Wasteful and Ineffective

New York State will spend an extraordinary $170 million this year on 21 juvenile facilities. The system has more than 2,000 employees to oversee fewer than 700 children.

This would be monumentally wasteful under any condition. The fact is that these facilities are disastrously mismanaged, and as many as 80 percent of the young men who serve time end up committing more crimes within a few years of their release.

New York should close down as many of these facilities as possible, preserving only the few it needs to hold genuinely dangerous young offenders. Low-risk youths — those found guilty of crimes like shoplifting, trespassing and petty theft — should be sent to community-based programs that do a much better job of rehabilitation and are far less expensive to manage. These treatment programs can cost as little as $15,000 a year, compared with the estimated $220,000 to house a child in a state facility.

To make that rational choice, Gov. David Paterson and whoever succeeds him will have to finally stand up to the labor unions that have pressed to keep these facilities open, no matter the cost to the state or its children.

Decades of research show that keeping young offenders locked up far from their families is a sure way of turning them into career criminals. Preliminary data collected by the New York City juvenile justice system suggests that recidivism for children handled through the city's largest community-based program could be lower than 20 percent. Instead of locking up a child, the Juvenile Justice Initiative provides intensive counseling and services to the family, with the goal of helping parents better manage the child's behavior.

That program and similar ones run by nonprofit groups have helped the city cut the number of youths it sends upstate by more than 60 percent since 2002. With other communities making similar choices, the number of children in state facilities has dropped from more than 2,300 in 2000 to about 680 today. Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the state's Office of Children and Family Services, has closed more than a dozen unneeded facilities over the last three years. It has not been easy. The politically powerful unions that represent juvenile facility workers are fighting to keep facilities open no matter what the cost to children or the state.

The unions' biggest, and most counterproductive, triumph was a 2006 law that requires the state to give a full year's notice to workers before shutting down a juvenile facility. In January the state ordered the closure of the Tryon boys' facility in upstate Fulton County. The facility — which gained national notoriety after a mentally ill 15-year-old boy died there in 2006 — has been empty of children since June. It still has a staff of 80 people working there and will only officially shut down in January.

Faced with a ballooning budget deficit, Governor Paterson has ordered reductions in the state work force by the close of the year. He can save money and cut unnecessary jobs by ordering the shutdown of a half-dozen more juvenile facilities that are standing half empty, but fully staffed. That is just a start.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/opinion/11mon1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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