Ambassador de Sade
Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy --
despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic.
http://alternet.org/story/27725/
Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts,
we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who
couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real
responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around
his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal
that claimed Scooter Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret
Rome meetings between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian
intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents -- all behind
Sembler's back.
But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson
in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political
donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the
leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before
seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse
claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now
a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this
year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and
the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which
contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During
this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers.
"I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The
abuse took years to overcome.
"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul." She
told AlterNet that she was committed at 12, in 1980, for nothing more
than being caught with a mini-bar-sized liquor bottle, handed out by a
classmate whose mother was a flight attendant. Samantha's mother
suspected more, and a STRAIGHT expert reassured her fears. The small
blonde junior high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the
warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her mother, told by counselors that
her daughter was a liar, was encouraged to trick the girl for her own
good.
Overcome by dread in the lobby, Samantha tried to run but was hauled
into the back by older girls. Inside, as was standard operating
procedure, she began the atonement process that cost over $12,000 a
year: all-day re-education rituals in which flapping the arms
("motivating") and chanting signaled submission to "staying straight."
She was coerced, she says, into confessing to being a "druggie *****"
who went down on truckers for drugs. "You're forced to confess crimes
you never committed." (Some survivors call it extortion.)
Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our Man In Rome -- he
also served under the first Bush as Ambassador to Australia. Were
Monroe's story unique, his STRAIGHT clinics might still be in business.
Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends, closed under a
breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by 1993, ranging from
sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours
while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge
recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a
former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.
Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked
it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media
reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped
punishment. As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP
fundraisers, Sembler has received the honor of living during the George
W. Bush presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the
U.S. ambassador, which has the largest private garden in Rome. One
night in May at "The Magic Kingdom" (as Mel and Betty call it), the
dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the ambassador
entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage -- until Betty complained that
the old friends were stinking up "my house," the Washington Post
reported.
He's come home, but still wafting across national drug policy is the
influence of his STRAIGHT, which has legally changed its identity to
the Drug Free America Foundation (director Calvina Fay denies it's the
same organization but the name change is listed in Florida corporate
filings). Subsidized by tax dollars, it lobbies for severe narcotics
policies and workplace drug testing, with an advisory board that
includes the like of Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife Columba, and Homeland
Security Director of Public Safety Christy McCampbell. A more pressing
issue is that former overseers of Sembler's company, true believers in
the STRAIGHT model, are still running spin-off businesses that treat
teens with the old methods.
Starting out STRAIGHT
The story begins in 1976 when Sembler, who'd made his fortune in
Florida real estate, founded STRAIGHT from the ashes of The Seed -- an
earlier program suspended by the U.S. Senate for tactics reminiscent,
said a senator, of Communist POW camps. But as the Reagan years rolled
into view, and a climate of fear nurtured a Shock and Awe approach to
teens, the Semblers found a new world of acceptance for an
anything-goes treatment business, meting out punishment in privately
run warehouses. Endorsers from Nancy Reagan to George H.W. Bush lent
their names to the program, celebrating a role model weapon in the "war
on drugs."
Nine years before the elder Bush took office, Sembler was a faithful
political supporter, and raising millions beginning in '79 for the
Bushes' clash with Reagan for the Republican nomination. In 1988, as
Bush finally accepted the GOP's nomination for president, Sembler sat
in the front row. With his man in the White House, STRAIGHT would
become a vehicle for purchasing eminence as a Drug War thinker. By
1988, Sembler wasn't just running the Vice President's "Team 100" soft
money campaign and enjoying steak dinners with him -- he was sojourning
in George and Barbara Bush's living room, briefing the candidate on
drug policy. As a token of his friendship, he gave Bush a new tennis
racket, receiving this note in return: "Maybe we can play at Camp David
someday."
And Sembler's success grew and grew as the Clinton era spooled out. The
slickly dressed go-getter smashed records as RNC Finance Chairman from
1997 to 2000, chairing the "Regents" club that accommodated such super
donors as Enron's Ken Lay to fund George W. Bush's campaign machine.
Meanwhile, a coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage had ensued during
STRAIGHT's reign from 1976 to 1993 -- its survivors claimed physical,
sexual and psychological trauma. The Web sites Fornits.com and
TheStraights.com have collected many of their stories. Posts Kelly
Caputo, an '88 alumna: "I don't think I will ever be the same. My every
thought has been violated, confused, degraded and warped."
"My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused," says Dr.
Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus at American University who created
the Drug Policy Foundation to find alternatives to harsh laws. He has
singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War" as among drug
warriors' worst mistakes.
But today, Sembler's trail of purchased political friendships has led
him through the opulent doors of the $83 million "Mel Sembler Building"
in Rome, christened this year with help from a longtime ally in
Congress, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL). Not the palace where Sembler
worked as ambassador, but another of the Eternal City's architectural
treasures, built in 1927 and now dedicated as an annex to the U.S.
Embassy in a $30 million renovation at taxpayer expense. "Narcissus is
now Greek and Roman," said the Washington Post of the monument. No one
could remember any other diplomat receiving such honors, not even
Benjamin Franklin.
"We don't do that, do we?" George W. Bush reportedly told the
congressman, according to Congressman C.W. Bill Young 's (R-Florida)
speech during the ceremony. "We don't name buildings for ambassadors
where they have served."
"Mr. President," the politician replied, "I introduced the bill and you
signed it." Bush may have missed the Sembler Building provision, tucked
as it was into an appropriations bill. But he owed much to the longtime
family friend, whom he thanked on "The Jim Lehrer Report" [RealAudio]
in 2000 for raising $21.3 million at a single dinner in April, a new
record. Asked what favors the money paid for, Bush professed wonderment
at the premise: "I know there's this kind of sentiment now -- I heard
it during the primaries ... [that] if someone contributes to a person's
campaign, there's this great sense of being beholden."
At the Sembler Building, visitors can stroll among the Italian frescoes
of cherubs and heavens, and marvel at the spoils of Bush family
loyalty, and meditate on the human costs that made Sembler's paradise
possible.
STRAIGHT's practices
Melvin Sembler's Jekyll-and-Hyde empire appealed to parents with cheery
pamphlets bearing pictures of happy and reunited families that had put
their horrible pasts behind them.
Even Princess Diana had graced the clinics with a visit, celebrating
STRAIGHT as a humanitarian institution. George H.W. Bush named the
program among his "thousand points of light." But many called it Hell.
Taking in new kids without much discrimination -- many addiction-free
-- STRAIGHT staff assured parents that a variety of troubled teens
could benefit from their brand of discipline.
Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would enter the care of a
"host home" overseen, at night, by the same counselors up in her face
by day. Over the months, patients like Samantha Monroe earned back
basic privileges like speaking or, in the distant future, going to the
bathroom alone, without an ever-present minder's thumb in the belt loop
-- literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT kids, who had
been molded into drug warriors in the heat of humiliation. They'd
learned to play along and join the winning side, becoming the hall
monitors and the muscle that enforced the rules.
From the outset, STRAIGHT's method was on thin ice with regulators. The
underpinnings had long struck critics as more Pyongyang than Pinellas
County. Sembler took his blueprint from another St. Petersburg program,
The Seed, in which his son had enrolled in the 1970s. The Senate was
less impressed than Sembler with The Seed. Senator Sam Ervin, who'd
brought down Richard Nixon, killed the program's federal subsidies for
funding a method "similar to the highly refined 'brainwashing'
techniques employed by the North Koreans." Ervin's 1974 probe into the
rise of treatment abuse articulated an admirable American ideal: that
"if our society is to remain free, one man must not be empowered to
change another's personality and dictate the values, thoughts and
feelings of another." Sembler had other ideals in mind, as hundreds of
STRAIGHT victims would later attest.
Finally, one by one, the 12 clinics, which had once formed a nine-state
empire, went dark. Much of the money was lost in settlements, but jury
verdicts offered a peek into the regularity of the abuses. Florida
patient Karen Norton was awarded $721,000 by a jury after being thrown
against a wall in 1982 by the Semblers' treatment guru of choice: Dr.
Miller Newton, whose unaccredited Ph.D was in public administration,
but was tapped by the Semblers as STRAIGHT National Clinical Director.
He's emblematic of how the creature Sembler built just won't stop
sprouting heads, having personally launched spinoff businesses with
names like KIDS. As a result, Newton has paid out over $12 million to
his victims. Having moved back to Florida, he now calls himself "Friar
Cassian," a priest in the non-Catholic Antiochian Orthodox church.
But just last month, Betty Sembler testified in a case against a
STRAIGHT critic that Miller Newton, the dark cleric of rehab, is "a
very close and dear friend and a valued one," and an "outstanding
individual." Had he committed outrageous acts? "Absolutely not," she
said, adding that it was incomprehensible that ex-STRAIGHT teen Richard
Bradbury was picketing Newton. Thanks to her judgment of character,
Newton has been given a voice in national drug policy, listed as a
participant in a Drug Free America Foundation "International Scientific
and Medical Forum."
From the beginning, critics were shocked to find that the keepers
freely acknowledged many of the tactics -- yet insisted they were
necessary. Mel Sembler even seems to have been emboldened by painful
questions about his clinics. "We've got nothing to hide -- we're saving
lives," he said in 1977 after six directors quit over practices that
included kicking a restrained youth. He remained closely involved in
personnel management. Almost two decades later, recalling how the ACLU
was furious about STRAIGHT's practices, Sembler told Florida Trend
Magazine in 1997 -- "with a grin," the reporter wrote -- that "it just
shows that we must have been doing things right."
And rather than clean up Florida's program, he apparently leaned on
health inspectors in 1989 to go easy on it. Reports of a cover-up
wouldn't emerge for four more years -- long years, for the teenagers
committed to a program that wouldn't lose its license until 1993.
STRAIGHT foe Bradbury, believing he'd been "brainwashed" into becoming
an abusive counselor, brought the clinics to the attention of the state
after years of protest. Inspector Lowell Clary of the Florida
Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services found that reports of
illegally restrained and stomped-on teens had been swept under the rug,
likely with help from Republican state senators, who went unnamed, but
made phone calls urging the clinic stayed open. A "persistent foul
odor" hung over this use of power, said a St. Petersburg Times Op-Ed
applauding the death of STRAIGHT.
"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of Health and
Rehabilitative Services Acting Inspector General Lowell Clary on May
19, 1993, "the team [of inspectors in 1989] received a phone call
informing them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would receive
their license." "If you do anything other than what I tell you on this
issue, I will fire you on the spot," an HRS official was told. Clary
wasn't positive, but evidence suggested that "pressure may have been
generated by Ambassador Sembler and other state senators."
By now, Clinton was in office. Four years earlier, while young
"druggies" were still being restrained to chairs for 12 hours, denied
medication and sent to the hospital with injuries, the 1989 report
would have tarnished President George H.W. Bush's "points of light."
Bush had designated STRAIGHT an American treasure. On that fragile
premise, not one but two STRAIGHT presidents had been named ambassadors
in 1989, the year of the Florida inspection. Sembler got the Australian
assignment. The other post sent co-founder Joseph Zappala to Spain
armed for diplomacy with a high school education. The two were mocked
in People as "too hick to hack it." They'd clowned around during the
nomination process, turning in nearly identical answers on Senate
disclosure forms. In the "languages spoken" box Sembler had written,
humorously, "English (fluent)."
That took real cheek. These two pranksters had been leaders of a group
characterized as a destructive cult by top authorities on cult abuse
ranging from Steve Hassan of the Freedom Of Mind Center to the late Dr.
Margaret Singer of UC Berkeley, an expert on the abuse of American
servicemen in the Korean War whose expert testimony was used to close a
facility in Cincinnati. Bradbury, the whistleblower, concurs, saying
the program modified his personality into something monstrous. Bradbury
attended the St. Petersburg, Florida clinic. "You don't understand what
they did to these kids," Bradbury told AlterNet. "They put stuff up my
butt."
But you wouldn't know from Sembler's State Department biography that
his claim to fame has such a shoddy legal record. The program has the
honor of being described as a "remarkable program" in his bio, and it
credits STRAIGHT with saving 12,000 kids. The ambassador did not return
attempts to contact him during the reporting for this story, and
declined the author's interview requests last year through a U.S.
Embassy spokesman.
In addition to receiving a second Ambassadorship from the second Bush
president, his Governor Jeb Bush named August 8, 2000, "Betty Sembler
Day" for her "work protecting children from the dangers of drugs,"
labeling her "ambassadorable." The next year, at a drug policy
conference in Florida, a writer from the Canadian legalization magazine
Cannibis Culture asked her about the STRAIGHT victims. "They should get
a life," he quotes her as replying. "There's nothing to apologize for.
The [drug] legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing."
The ambassador's wife is an outspoken critic of what she calls "medical
excuse marijuana," and serves on the boards of such mighty
anti-legalization campaigns as the International Task Force On
Strategic Drug Policy, which works with Latin American countries to
lobby for harsh drug laws. Mel himself used his Rome ambassadorial
pulpit for a global conference in 2003, appealing to the "moral
imperatives" of the drug war and urging a "culture of disapproval of
drug abuse." DFAF, founded by the Semblers, receives hundreds of
thousands of dollars in grants from the Small Business Association to
advance workplace drug testing in businesses -- for example, a handout
in 2000 of $314,000. Betty Sembler is president and Melvin has served
as chairman.
STRAIGHT's Spin-offs
Though Sembler's clinics were shuttered, the spirit of STRAIGHT lives
on as a flourishing model for drug rehabilitation. That includes
offshoots run by former STRAIGHT staff, such as the Orlando STRAIGHT
spin-off, SAFE, which was described by 16-year-old Leah Marchessault in
2000 as "something from the Twilight Zone" in a report by Florida's
WAMI TV station.
Leah had gone to visit her sister, in for heroin abuse, only to be told
she herself was a "druggie" -- sound familiar? And when Leah fled, she
was pinned against a wall and assaulted by a pack of nine women members
who forced her to undergo a full-body search. Another girl told WAMI of
being "forced to stand for about an hour and a half, the attention
being focused on me, and about every 10 minutes I was told how I was
full of crap, how I needed to be flushed out."
Despite their cheery names -- SAFE in Orlando, Florida; Kids Helping
Kids of Cincinnati, Ohio; Growing Together of Lake Worth, Florida --
these barely regulated warehouses cry out for oversight. Hungry for
recruits, they appeal to the fears of parents by warning a child will
die on the streets if uncorrected by their methods.
In the TV report, the presence of a spokeswoman named Loretta Parrish
was evidence that SAFE was the child of STRAIGHT -- she'd been the
local STRAIGHT's marketing director until 1992, when the old company
closed under state scrutiny, and SAFE, a new company, almost
immediately sprang up to replace it. A new head for the hydra: Parrish
didn't dispute the visiting sister's horrifying experience, but called
it necessary, as if explaining something something obvious to her since
the '80s.
"Yes we do require that," said Parrish. "And if they don't, then they
have to remove the other child. This is a family treatment program. And
unless the entire family is in treatment, it doesn't work."
"We do not do a strip search that is different from any other treatment
program," she adds, and later described the teens and moms attacking
SAFE as "a coalition of cockroaches." Gov. Jeb Bush even endorsed SAFE
in a letter he wrote as "a valuable tool."
And so with the former STRAIGHT bosses rich in Republican honors, and
insulated in a political Xanadu not unlike the alternate reality field
engulfing the White House, a new generation of teenagers is going under
the hammer, as an old generation of victims finds cold comfort for
their own suffering. If this is the compassionate kind of conservatism,
how harsh the other variety must be.
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.rightard.org/ http://www.thedarkwind.org/
"Sex is only perverted if it implants voracious alien parasites in your
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