Your Duty: 2014-07-20

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Air Force Academy training aircraft lands off course

48 minutes ago

By Andrea Sinclair

The (Colorado Springs, Colo.) Gazette

Published: July 23, 2014

No injuries were reported after a T-53A aircraft conducting flight training operations landed off course Wednesday on Air Force Academy grounds.

Academy spokesman Warthen Meade said the aircraft landed about 9 a.m. on the north part of the military installation near Interstate 25 with a student and an instructor on board. Neither person was injured.

The T-35A is a single-engine aircraft used by the Air Force Academy for pilot training. The civilian equivalent is the Cirrus SR-20.

Air Force Academy officials said the incident remains under investigation.

Fort Bragg brigade 1 of 3 units to deploy to Afghanistan

Another Fort Bragg brigade will deploy to Afghanistan this fall.

The Department of Defense announced today that the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade would deploy later this year.

The brigade, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, will send about 1,725 soldiers to Afghanistan.

It was one of three units identified for an upcoming deployment by the Pentagon. The others were the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, which will send about 1,000 soldiers, and the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, which will send about 900 soldiers.

A length for the deployments was not announced. The 82nd Airborne soldiers will join about a thousand paratroopers with the division's 1st and 2nd Brigade Combat Teams already in Afghanistan.

They will provide helicopter support to coalition troops throughout the country.

A deployment of a smaller group of 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade soldiers had already been announced. Those soldiers, about 70 in all, are leaving Fort Bragg for Afghanistan early Thursday.

Their numbers are included in the 1,725 figure, according to officials.

"The Pegasus Brigade is prepared to conduct aviation operations during this critical transition point in the war in Afghanistan," said Col. Mike Musiol, the brigade commander. "Through a robust training schedule, our aviation task forces have meticulously trained to meet the challenging environment of Afghanistan and support coalition forces on the ground."

Those soldiers are part of Company C, 3rd General Support Aviation Battalion.

They were originally set to deploy last Saturday, but their departure was delayed because of weather that prevented a commercial airliner from reaching Fort Bragg.

The deployment will mark the third time the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade has been sent to Afghanistan and the sixth deployment to either Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002.

"While we continue to focus on the deployment and mission ahead, the support to our families will remain a top priority," Musiol said. "With our past experience in (Operation Enduring Freedom), there is no doubt the 82nd CAB is the right organization to take this forward as we drawdown our footprint across Afghanistan."

The 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade was last in Afghanistan in 2012.

After it deploys, it will likely serve alongside several other Fort Bragg units.

The 18th Airborne Corps is serving as the core of several key commands in Afghanistan and the 1st Theater Sustainment Command is leading efforts to retrograde equipment from the country as the war winds down.

Fort Bragg special operations soldiers, including part of the 3rd Special Forces Group, are also deployed, as are about 3,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division.

Retired military K9s, handlers help lobby Congress to change dogs' retirement rules

WASHINGTON — You want to get something done in Congress, bring a dog.

At least it couldn’t hurt. As she looked into a hearing room packed with reporters, supporters and four canines on Wednesday, Rep. Dina Titus was reminded of a similar lesson she learned in her statehouse days. (Basically, if you want to have your bill passed, just show up with a dog, the Nevada Democrat remembered.)

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., saw dog power in even more profound ways.

“Dogs are magical creatures, because they can make a rusty, cranky old curmudgeon like Don Young seem almost lovable,” she said. “So, hats off to the dogs.”

Young, the Alaska Republican who pointed out he was “the only dog musher in the whole Congress,” and others were on hand to help efforts by the American Humane Association to change rules under which military dogs move to civilian life.

Robin Ganzert, president and chief executive of the American Humane Association, said that former military dogs are not guaranteed to be retired in America and might not be reunited with their former handlers. Her group wants the Department of Defense to mandate that all military working dogs be retired on U.S. soil so that they are given military transport back from their war zones. And it wants to ensure that the dogs’ former handlers are provided first opportunity to adopt them.

The group also wants dogs that are working for contractors to be given the same benefits as those that are formally part of the military.

Three former handlers of military dogs Ryky, Cila and Thor spoke in halting, emotional ways about the bonds they had with their animals — and how they jumped through major hoops to be reunited with them after their service ended.

The dogs that took over a hearing room of the House Budget Committee had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, sniffing for explosives, helping rescue fallen soldiers, enduring multiple tours. They carry some of the same post-traumatic issues as returning soldiers.

“We had some challenging times in Iraq, but we both made it out safely,” Army veteran Jason Bos said of his companion, Cila, who served with him on almost 100 missions. “Now Cila is a couch potato. She’s retired. She can eat what she wants. She can get fat … just be like a regular retired person.”

While the American Humane Association is rounding up support in Congress, Ganzert said the Department of Defense could handle the changes administratively, without the need for legislation.

DOD to provide space for 5,000 more migrant children until next year

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military will provide housing space for up to an additional 5,000 unaccompanied Central American children who have illegally come across the border, Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said Wednesday.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel signed the authorization last week at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Hagel’s order also extends the housing assistance mission to Jan. 31, 2015. In May, the Pentagon committed to providing space to up to 3,600 children for 120 days. There are 2,500 children being housed at Fort Sill, Okla., Naval Base Ventura County, Calif., and Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, according to Warren.

The Defense Department has not selected the bases where the additional 5,000 might be placed.

“We have not determined where these additional 5,000 spaces will come from. We are conducting assessments now to determine where we can best handle this influx of capacity ... There’s a fairly extensive list of possible locations,” Warren said.

DOD has not yet authorized space to be provided at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., Warren said. JBLM has been rumored to be a fourth potential housing location that the Pentagon is considering.

DOD is not directly involved in caring for the children. The department is merely providing unused space on military bases to be used by HHS. The Pentagon will be reimbursed by DHHS for any expenses incurred in the housing assistance mission, according to officials.

The Obama administration has said that it intends to repatriate the unaccompanied children to their home countries eventually.

On Capitol Hill Wednesday, House Republicans moved to slash President Barack Obama’s emergency spending request for the U.S.-Mexican border, speed young migrants back home to Central America, and send National Guard troops.

The proposals Wednesday amounted to a rebuke of Obama’s proposed solution to the crisis on the border. They put the House on a collision course with the Democratic-run Senate, and increased the likelihood that congressional efforts to address the crisis on the border, where unaccompanied young people have been showing up by the tens of thousands, will end in stalemate. There is little time to resolve it because Congress’ annual August recess is just around the corner.

More than 57,000 minors have arrived since October, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

A 2008 law guarantees them judicial hearings, which in practice allows them to stay in this country for years — before any deportation can be carried out — because of major backlogs in the immigration court system.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

harper.jon@stripes.com

Twitter: @JHarperStripes

Germans withholding evidence in AFN murder case pending death penalty decision

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — German authorities will withhold key evidence in the strangulation death of an AFN broadcaster — including the victim’s throat — unless the U.S. military gives assurances it will not seek the death penalty for the airman accused of the murder.

The U.S. military charged Staff Sgt. Sean Oliver in March with murder in the death of Petty Officer 2nd Class Dmitry Chepusov. German police stopped Oliver on Dec. 14 in Kaiserslautern for driving erratically and found Chepusov’s lifeless body in the passenger seat of Oliver’s car.

After conducting an autopsy, German authorities concluded that Chepusov, a 31-year-old sailor assigned to the American Forces Network at Ramstein Air Base, died of “force to the neck.”

Although German authorities initially cooperated with U.S. military investigators, they withheld the throat and other evidence when they turned Chepusov’s body over to U.S. authorities.

At issue is the death penalty, which Germany abolished in 1949. Like other countries that have outlawed capital punishment, Germany will not cooperate with any other state in the prosecution of a capital case.

The NATO Status of Forces Agreement gives the U.S. military primary jurisdiction over Oliver since the alleged crime was against another military member, said Juan Melendez, a spokesman for the 86th Airlift Wing at Ramstein.

Before handing over all of the evidence to U.S. investigators, the Germans sought — and initially received — assurances from the Americans that the death penalty was not on the table, according to Achim Nunenmann, senior prosecutor for the city of Kaiserslautern.

Before the handover, however, the Americans told Kaiserslautern prosecutors that Oliver could face execution after all.

That prompted the Germans to hold back some of the physical evidence, Nunenmann said.

Under the law, the Germans must do all they can to refrain from cooperating with the guest military, in this case, the U.S., on anything that would lead to a death sentence, said Dieter Deiseroth, a legal expert on the SOFA and a judge at Germany’s federal administrative court.

Based on the constitution and corresponding case law, German authorities can only cooperate “when we know that it will not come to a death penalty,” said Udo Gehring, lead prosecutor in Kaiserslautern. “This is not a matter of interpretation ... it is a clear point of law.”

Air Force prosecutors would not speculate on how missing evidence might affect the strength of their case against Oliver.

Army Maj. Dori Mitchell Franco, the armed forces regional medical examiner who conducted a second autopsy six days after Chepusov’s death, told an Article 32 hearing Friday that without being able to examine the missing tissue, she could not definitively determine the cause of death, although injuries appeared to be “consistent” with strangulation. The missing portion included the hyoid bone, a small U-shaped bone in the neck that can be fractured during strangulation.

The U.S. military has yet to decide whether to seek a death sentence for Oliver, who is alleged to have murdered Chepusov “with premeditation” by strangling him with his hands, according to Oliver’s charge sheet. The Uniform Code of Military Justice says the death penalty can be applied if the murder was premeditated.

Nunenmann, the Kaiserslautern senior prosecutor, said his office is willing to cooperate – if the U.S. military takes the death penalty off the table.

“If they want the exhibit (physical evidence), they need to do something,” he said.

Investigating officer Air Force Lt. Col. Christopher Leavey, who presided over Oliver’s Article 32, a pretrial hearing, is expected to recommend specific charges against Oliver and whether the death penalty should be sought. The final decision is up to the convening authority, 3rd Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Darryl L. Roberson.

The death penalty is a rare outcome in military trials, especially in the Air Force. No military member has been executed since 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged for raping an 11-year-old Austrian girl seven years earlier and attempting to drown her. Andrew Witt, convicted of killing a fellow airman and his wife at Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia in 2004, is the only airman on death row at Fort Leavenworth’s prison.

There are five other servicemembers on death row, all soldiers, all enlisted — except for former Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was sentenced to death for a 2009 rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 30 at Fort Hood, Texas.

Chepusov’s brother, Dennis Bushmitch, 43, said his family opposes the death penalty for Oliver and is asking the German authorities to provide full cooperation.

“We are urging the Americans not to pursue the death penalty,” Bushmitch said.

He and younger brother Andrey Chepusov attended Oliver’s Article 32 hearing at Ramstein Air Base. “We ask the German government to fully cooperate … and release any evidence that they’re still holding back, which is important to the case, because justice needs to be served.”

During the Article 32, Air Force Maj. Shane McCammon, defense counsel for Oliver, noted that Franco, the Army medical examiner, first reported Chepusov’s cause of death as undetermined, only later revising her findings after consulting with fellow medical examiners at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.

“This is an unusual situation, to not have any of that tissue in this area,” Franco said.

McCammon asked whether Franco was able to collect any DNA evidence, either from under the victim’s fingernails or from his neck area. Franco said she was not because the body had been washed before she received it, a week after his death. The victim’s hands were blackened with fingerprint ink.

She said she didn’t know whether the Germans had collected any DNA evidence during their autopsy.

In addition to the victim’s throat, Franco said, the Germans also kept Chepusov’s tongue.

“I’ve been told there were political motivations for retaining” the evidence, Franco testified.

Germany has long been one of the most outspoken critics of the death penalty in Europe, opposing it on ethical, moral and legal grounds.

It outlawed the death penalty after the Nuremberg trials, where the widespread use of the death penalty by Nazi courts within Germany and in occupied territories came to light. Article 102 of Germany’s constitution says simply: “The death penalty is abolished.”

Most European countries have a commitment not to assist human rights violations, including executions, said James Connell III, an attorney at the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief Defense Counsel.

Connell cited the case involving Jens Soering, a German citizen accused of killing two people in Virginia in 1985. Germany fought Soering’s extradition to the United States on the basis that the defendant might be executed if convicted, Connell said. The government of Britain, where Soering had been arrested on check fraud charges, extradited him only after obtaining assurances from Virginia that it would not, in fact, charge him with capital murder.

Stars and Stripes reporter John Vandiver contributed to this report.

svan.jennifer@stripes.com

kloeckner.marcus@stripes.com

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Do we know anything about Flight MH17?

The downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 highlights a fact long known to those watching the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine: You can’t expect reliable information about it from officials or media, whether Russian, Ukrainian or Western. As a result, relatives of people killed on the plane must now subsist on a familiar diet of rumors and falsehoods — often incredibly callous ones.

On Friday, Anton Geraschenko, an aide to Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, wrote the following on Facebook (original spelling and syntax preserved):

“Just now I have received information that terrorists — death-hunters were collecting not only cash money and jewelry of the crashed Boing died passengers but also the credit cards of the victims. Currently they might as well try to use them in Ukraine or pass them on to Russia. My humble request to the relatives of the victims to freeze their credit cards, so that they won’t loose their assets to terrorists!”

Mainstream Ukrainian media immediately picked up the allegation and spread it as straight news. “The Russian mercenaries are openly looting the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing: taking not just cash and jewelry but credit cards from the dead passengers,” Censor.net reported, quoting Geraschenko only in the next paragraph.

Foreign media picked up the thread. The Wire’s item, headlined “Looters Stole Cash, Credit Cards, and Jewelry from Flight MH17 Crash Victims,” quoted Gerashchenko along with a secondhand account “from a photojournalist at the site” and a story in the New York Daily News. That story, in turn, cited a USA Today story written by a reporter at the site. The USA Today article, the only firsthand report in this chain of insinuation, didn’t claim that bodies had been looted. In fact, it described “credit cards and photographs carefully lined up next to each other on the wet grass.”

The looting story having acquired the contours of a fact, however, the Dutch Banking Union felt compelled to point out that Dutch credit cards, like those in most European countries, cannot be used without a PIN. They are equipped with security chips. In the event someone does manage to use a victim’s card, the Dutch bankers promised to reimburse the victim’s next of kin. As yet, there have been no reports suggesting such compensation is necessary.

Did separatists actually steal victims’ credit cards, cash and jewelry? I don’t know. I am none the wiser for having read numerous news reports on the subject in several languages.

I know nothing for sure about how flight MH17 was brought down. I suspect it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched by the pro-Russia rebels who hold the territory where the plane crashed. They previously had shot down a few Ukrainian planes in the vicinity and had bragged about it. Unlike the rebels, Ukraine has no need of anti-aircraft weapons. The rebels have no air force. I have no idea, however, where the missiles might have come from. Ukrainian officials and media insist that they were supplied by Russia. They have published a video of a Buk missile launcher being driven somewhere, which proves nothing at all. The Russian defense ministry, of course, has denied any involvement. Both stories are understandable; neither is trustworthy.

The media exist precisely to inform people in convoluted situations such as this. Yet even the relatively few reporters who have managed to get to the site are unable to get a clear picture of what’s happening. They have no access to anyone with knowledge who doesn’t also have an interest in lying. Ukraine wants Western help in crushing the pro-Russia separatists and in imposing sanctions on Russia for supporting the rebellion. Russia wants to avoid blame and sanctions without giving up on the rebels, who do Russia’s bidding by keeping Ukraine unstable. The rebels themselves see obfuscation as their only chance to avoid condemnation for shooting down the plane.

Though modern conflicts are awash in media attention, what readers and viewers get is often an incomprehensible garble. Failure to ascertain the truth is another real-time tragedy.

Bloomberg View contributor Leonid Bershidsky is a Moscow-based writer.

Air Force launching satellites to spy on other satellites

WASHINGTON — The Air Force is about to put a new advanced satellite into space to spy on other countries’ satellites.

On Wednesday, a Delta IV rocket will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla., and place two Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program satellites into orbit. They will be the first GSSAP satellites ever launched.

“This neighborhood watch twosome … will be on the lookout for nefarious capability other nations might try to place in that critical orbital regime,” Gen. William Shelton, the head of Air Force Space Command, told reporters at the Pentagon.

Because of its enhanced maneuvering capabilities, the GSSAP satellite can get the best possible vantage point for collecting images of other satellites, according to Shelton.

He said the imagery capabilities on the new satellites are “a big leap forward” compared with the ones the U.S. has been using to monitor objects circling the earth.

“Today the way we track threats in geosynchronous orbit is by basically points of light, and as we take a picture of the sky and dwell on that part of the sky, [we know] things that are moving are satellites, things that are stationary are stars … Through our points of light and various other means, we make inferences on what a particular [foreign] satellite can do,” Shelton explained.

But the GSSAP “gives us an ability … to look at literal images of objects in geosynchronous orbit … A picture is worth a thousand inferences because we can see literally what that [foreign] satellite looks like, and you can effectively reverse-engineer and understand what the capabilities are … to a much greater extent than you can today,” Shelton said.

The launch comes at a time when China is rapidly improving its space and anti-satellite capabilities. Pentagon planners worry that in a future conflict, Beijing might shoot down or disable American military satellites that are critical for communications, intelligence-gathering, and targeting.

“There are myriad counter-space threats that we are seeing on the near horizon,” Shelton said. “We’re going to have to adjust our spacecraft constellations to survive in a very different environment from what we’ve had in the past,” and we need “much better situational awareness of what’s going on; hence GSSAP.”

Shelton was asked specifically whether he was worried about space-based weapons or electromagnetic pulse weapons being used against U.S. military satellites.

“All of the above,” he replied.

Shelton declined to go into detail about what capabilities the Pentagon is developing to thwart enemy anti-satellite weapons.

harper.jon@stripes.com

Twitter: @JHarperStripes

Senate moves to rein in career colleges popular among troops

WASHINGTON — Troops should think twice before enrolling in one of the country’s largest for-profit university chains as it faces the government-supervised sale of its campuses and charges it preyed on the military, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., warned Monday.

Corinthian Colleges is being forced by the U.S. Department of Education to sell off 85 nationwide subsidiary campuses, including WyoTech college locations popular with servicemembers. Its other 12 campuses are slated to close.

Durbin said the career colleges have been aggressively recruiting servicemembers and spouses who use military tuition assistance. Last week, the Senate gave some support to his proposal to rein in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding flowing to the companies via tuition assistance.

“Before signing up for class and student debt, every student should know Corinthian schools are going out of business,” Durbin said in a released statement Monday. “While my bill would bring much needed long-term reform to the for-profit college industry, it can’t prevent students from enrolling in a failed for-profit college tomorrow.”

Career colleges such as those run by Corinthian are prohibited by law from getting more than 90 percent of revenue from the federal government. But tuition payments made through the new 9/11 GI Bill, military tuition assistance, and MyCAA funding for spouses are not counted toward the legal limit on federal aid, according to Durbin’s office.

The Senate version of next year’s defense spending bill, which passed committee last week, would close the loophole by requiring all military-related tuition assistance to be counted toward the federal cap.

Corinthian Colleges thrust regulatory concerns into the national spotlight last year when it disclosed a probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that sent stock prices tumbling.

In June, the Department of Education froze federal payments to the company, citing claims of falsified job placement data as well as grades and attendance tampering.

The California attorney general is also suing Corinthian Colleges and its subsidiaries WyoTech, Everest and Heald colleges for “deceptive and false advertisements” and allegedly lying to investors about how many graduates found employment.

Corinthian Colleges targeted veterans returning from combat and internal company documents described its core demographic as isolated individuals with low self-esteem, who have few people who care for them and are worried about the future, according to the attorney general.

The state also claims that federal funds “account for almost all” of the company’s annual revenue.

Corinthian Colleges spokesman Kent Jenkins said it denies allegations it used predatory tactics or misleading marketing.

He said about 80 percent of the company’s budget comes from the federal government, while about 7 percent of students originate from the military.

“We take very strong issue with many of the things asserted in the California attorney general’s suit,” he said. “We are contesting that suit vigorously and we think the suit lacks merit.”

The company signed an agreement with the Department of Education this month on relinquishing its campuses that is aimed at allowing about 72,000 students to continue schooling and complete their educations even if new owners take over, according to a copy published by the SEC.

Jenkins said all campuses at WyoTech, a college that focuses on automotive trades and attracts most of the company’s military students, and Heald are planned to remain open while Corinthian searches out buyers. The Everest campuses are slated to close.

Instruction “has been uninterrupted and it will be uninterrupted,” Jenkins said. “All students are getting a disclosure. They understand these campuses are up for sale.”

tritten.travis@stripes.com

Twitter: @Travis_Tritten

‘Generation Kill’ NCO charged with sexual abuse of minor

By Jennifer Hlad

Stars and Stripes

Published: July 22, 2014

The man who served as sergeant major of 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, at the beginning of the war in Iraq, has been charged with sexual abuse, molestation of a child and sexual conduct with a minor in Yuma, Ariz.

John Joseph Sixta, 54, was arrested July 1 and remains in custody in Yuma, officials said. Sixta is facing similar charges in Riverside, Calif., the Yuma Sun reported.

Sixta was portrayed as an over-the-top stickler for grooming standards in the HBO miniseries “Generation Kill,” insisting that Marines tuck in their shirts and shave their mustaches.

After retiring from the Marine Corps, Sixta worked as a military free fall instructor for the Army’s B Company, 1st Special Warfare Training Group at Yuma Proving Ground.

Yuma police said Sixta is accused of molesting a 12-year-old girl in early January. The girl reported the incident to her mother, who called the police.

hlad.jennifer@stripes.com

Twitter: @jhlad

Monday, July 21, 2014

Train with bodies from Malaysia Airlines flight leaves rebel town

HRABOVE, Ukraine — Pro-Moscow separatists released a train packed with bodies from the downed Malaysia Airlines plane and agreed to hand over its black boxes Monday, bowing to heavy international pressure four days after the jet plunged into rebel-held eastern Ukraine.

With body parts decaying in sweltering heat and signs that evidence at the crash site was mishandled, anger in Western capitals has mounted at the rebels and their allies in Moscow. Their reluctant cooperation will soothe mourning families and help investigators, but may do little to reconcile the East-West powers struggling over Ukraine's future.

Russia's Defense Ministry said it saw no evidence a missile was fired and denied involvement in the downing of Flight 17 — and suggested the Ukrainian military was at fault. President Vladimir Putin spoke out but showed no sign of abandoning the separatists as fighting flared anew near the site of the crash.

President Barack Obama accused the rebels of tampering with evidence and insulting victims' families, warning of new sanctions. Europeans will consider their own sanctions Tuesday.

The bodies of the 298 victims, most from the Netherlands, have become a part of the conflict in Ukraine because they could hold evidence of what brought the plane down on July 17 as it was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Grief turned to anger as families begged to get the bodies of their loved ones back, while the separatists held on to the remains.

"Bodies are just lying there for three days in the hot sun. There are people who have this on their conscience," said Silene Fredriksz-Hoogzand, whose son, Bryce, and his girlfriend Daisy Oehlers died on their way to a vacation in Bali, in an interview with The Associated Press in the Netherlands. "When I am in my bed at night, I see my son lying on the ground. ... They have to come home, not only those two. Everybody has to come home."

International forensics experts finally gained access to the crash site Monday - an emotional experience for the head of the Dutch National Forensic Investigations Team, Peter Van Vliet. Seeing the wreckage gave him goosebumps, he said.

The team stumbled across remains that had not yet been removed and inspected the perished passengers' luggage.

In Torez, a rebel-held town 9 miles from the crash site, inspectors bowed heads and clasped hands before climbing aboard refrigerated train cars holding the collected bodies. Armed rebels surrounded them, while commuters boarded other trains nearby.

The smell of decay was overwhelming. Workers wore masks, while passersby twisted their faces in horror at the odor. Temperatures hit 84 degrees F, and a train engineer told the AP that a power outage had hit the refrigeration system temporarily overnight.

The rebels in Torez did not appear too conciliatory as the tense day wore on. They repeatedly tried to block reporters from access to the visiting experts, growing more aggressive throughout.

Late Monday, trucks arrived at the Torez station with plastic bags apparently filled with body parts, as well as piles of luggage - suitcases, backpacks, a purse with a Louis Vuitton label.

Ukrainian authorities said the total number of bodies recovered was 282.

Dutch investigators demanded the separatists transfer the bodies immediately, and the rebels complied after several hours.

With a long whistle and puff of smoke, the train bearing the bodies pulled slowly out of the station. Rebels holding automatic rifles walked alongside as it chugged away, a cluster of children on bicycles looking on.

It was headed through troubled territory, its destination not 100 percent clear.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told reporters the train was heading for the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, controlled by rebels, and then on to Kharkiv, site of a crisis center controlled by the Ukrainian government. He said Ukrainian authorities have agreed to let the bodies be transferred from there to the Netherlands for identification, but gave no time frame.

Malaysia's prime minister said the rebels agreed to hand over both black boxes from Flight 17 to Malaysian investigators in Ukraine later Monday.

A team of international observers at the sprawling crash site described strange behavior by workers.

"When we were leaving, we observed workers there hacking into the fuselage with gas-powered equipment," OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw told reporters in Donetsk.

He said there was no security perimeter Monday at one of the bigger debris fields, and monitors saw that one of the largest pieces of the plane "had somewhat been split or moved apart."

In Washington, Obama asked, "What exactly are they trying to hide?"

"This is an insult to those who have lost loved ones. This is the kind of behavior that has no place in the community of nations," he said.

On Sunday, the U.S. said there was "powerful" evidence that the rebels had shot down the plane with a Russian surface-to-air missile, including video of a rocket launcher, one surface-to-air missile missing, being driven away from the likely launch site; imagery showing the firing; phone calls claiming credit for the missile strike and phone recordings said to reveal a cover-up at the crash site.

The Russian Defense Ministry offered its own evidence Monday, showing photos it said proved that Ukrainian surface-to-air systems were operating in the area before the crash — nine times alone the day the plane was brought down.

Russian officials also said they had evidence a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet had flown "between 3 to 5 kilometers (2 to 3 miles)" from the Malaysia Airlines jet.

"(The plane) is armed with air-to-air R-60 rockets, which can hit a target from a distance of up to 12 kilometers (7 miles) and guaranteed within 5 kilometers (3 miles)," said the chief of Russia's General staff, Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartopolov.

Defense ministry officials insisted Russia had not given the rebels any surface-to-air missiles — and said they have no evidence that any missiles were launched at all. They asked the U.S. to share any satellite images of the launch.

Putin accused others of exploiting the downing of the plane for "mercenary objectives." He said Kiev authorities had reignited the fighting after a unilateral cease-fire expired without progress on peace talks.

At the U.N., the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution demanding international access to the crash site and an end to military activities around the area, following intense pressure on a reluctant Russia to support the measure.

Fighting in eastern Ukraine began in mid-April after Russia annexed Ukraine's southern Crimean Peninsula a month earlier.

Battles erupted again Monday between the separatists and government troops in the eastern rebel-held city of Donetsk, 30 miles to the west of the crash site, according to city authorities. An AP reporter heard several explosions and saw smoke rising from the direction of the city airport.

David McHugh in Kiev, Laura Mills and Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow, Lucian Kim in Donetsk, Ukraine, Alexandra Olson at the United Nations and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.

Army intelligence system pulled from key test

WASHINGTON — Army officials have withdrawn their intelligence network from a major testing exercise this fall because of software glitches, in the latest setback for the troubled system.

The decision, laid out in a July 15 memorandum obtained by The Associated Press, stands in contrast to the Army's upbeat public statements about the Distributed Common Ground System.

DCGS-A (pronounced Dee-Sigs-Ay) is a network of software, sensors and databases that is intended to allow troops to process and integrate intelligence from a variety of sources, from electronic intercepts to overhead imagery to spy reports, but has been prone to crashes.

A series of independent government reports in recent years have pointed to flaws in the system, which so far has cost taxpayers about $5 billion, records show. The Army says it is working to fix the problems in a new version to be completed next year. An Army spokesman did not have an immediate comment on the memo.

The general who signed the memo, Army vice chief of staff John Campbell, told Congress last year that DCGS-A "has saved lives" and had been significantly improved after independent reports found fault with it. In a recent interview with the AP, senior Army officials also defended the system, but would not allow their names to be used.

In the memo he signed, Campbell agreed with a proposal by the army's testing command to withdraw DCGS-A from an army field testing exercise in October and November in Texas and New Mexico because of "continued significant software incident reports," and "overall network operational readiness issues." Troops who used DCGS-A in training earlier this year reported that it was prone to crashing, records show.

Campbell has been nominated to be the next commander in Afghanistan, where units will be expected to use DCGS-A to gather and sort through an array of intelligence reports, biometric information, overhead imagery, communications intercepts and other data.

Some members of Congress have grown skeptical of the system, which has been in place in Afghanistan and elsewhere for several years. The Senate appropriations committee last week zeroed out an Army request for $48 million to replace some DCGS-A equipment in Afghanistan, committee records show.

The Army's chief of staff, Gen. Raymond Odierno, praised DCGS-A at a congressional hearing last year during a heated exchange with one of the system's chief critics, Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a former Marine.

"I'm tired of somebody telling me I don't care about our soldiers, that we don't respond," Odierno said. "A company commander today with DCGS-A has 20 times the capability I had as a division commander in 2003."

McDonald must clean house at VA, experts say

WASHINGTON — Bob McDonald, President Barack Obama’s pick to head up the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs, faces such a hidebound bureaucracy that experts say the way forward is clear: He must clean house.

“McDonald has to walk in and kind of dismantle all of those structures that would keep the culture in the same place,” according to Todd Henshaw, the director of executive leadership programs at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. “If you’ve been in an organization that’s failed across the board the way the VA has, the writing is on the wall and probably a lot of the senior people have to go … He’s going to need some people coming in from the outside” with “some experience and some success leading organizations through turnarounds and transformations.”

James Clawson, a professor with the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, agrees.

McDonald needs to do a “clean 100 percent sweep of senior management,” he said in an email. “You can’t get to ‘B’ with the horses who got you to ‘A.’ ”

McDonald’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.

Public outrage, political pressure and media scrutiny have mounted with revelations of gross misconduct and mismanagement at the department’s hospitals, and veterans groups are fuming after accusations that long wait times for patient care, which VA employees covered up, led to the deaths of numerous veterans.

The VA system has also been plagued by a massive claims backlog which has kept veterans from receiving the benefits they’ve earned.

McDonald, a former Army paratrooper, was tapped by President Barack Obama to take over the VA due to a belief that his management experience, including a stint as president and CEO of business giant Procter & Gamble, makes him an ideal candidate to cure the department’s ills.

There is legislation making its way through Congress that would give the VA chief broader authority to fire people, and Henshaw believes turning it into law is a critical step in rooting out bureaucrats.

Professor J.P. Eggers at the New York University Stern School of Business, said the new leadership also needs to evaluate middle managers to figure out whom to empower and whom to sideline.

“I would thoroughly expect that there would be a number of interviews [and] conversations to try and identify … the ones who are too far gone to save in terms of their commitment to the existing status quo, versus the ones who have the potential for leadership, who have the reputation within the organization, and will have the willingness to push for change; and finding ways to get those people as involved as possible in identifying problems [and] identifying solutions,” he said.

Clawson said McDonald needs to start implementing changes as quickly as possible, although transforming the system will be a multi-year process.

“No. 1, the public expects it,” he said. “No. 2, you’ve got patients in line who are waiting for it. No. 3, the longer you wait to make the changes the more difficult they become, because the residual culture will continue to eat away at your strategy.

“In the first six months, if [McDonald] can’t describe the charter for the organization, how we’re going to go about it, the speed at which we’re going to produce, and a willingness to get rid of the old folks and bring in new folks … he’s going to be sunk before he leaves the dock.”

Experts also emphasized the importance of putting the right diagnostic systems in place and having clear metrics to identify problems and track progress.

McDonald needs to make “heavy investment in IT infrastructure to get good current data,” Clawson said, and he should have outside auditors confirm the information he’s getting from insiders.

Henshaw thinks all veterans being served by the VA should be given online customer satisfaction surveys with questions that McDonald and his team develop.

“All of that information could be aggregated and distinguished by region, by hospital, by doctor, [and] by program. I mean, we’re in the big-data century, right? So he would have access to all the customer service data he would want … Part of being customer-focused is hearing the voice of the customer,” Henshaw said.

Steven Spear, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management who has consulted for major health care providers, including the Boston area VA, said the VA’s information systems need to measure things “as close to real time as possible” because speed is of the essence when trying to tackle problems in the health care field.

More than private sector leaders, McDonald will have to be politically savvy, according to leadership experts.

“You have huge visibility, and you have a bully pulpit,” Spear said. “The real question for this guy is … whether he uses his position in a way that he’s persuasive internally, he’s persuasive externally, he’s persuasive to Congress and the other stakeholders, he’s persuasive to folks … in the press, and so on and so forth … The same situation can be managed well or less well.”

“A very deep challenge for a leader at the VA or any other organization like it is constantly shifting … political winds that can pop in with the best of intentions. That to me is the biggest challenge of running this kind of a system,” said Hal Gregersen, the executive director of the MIT Sloan Leadership Center.

Henshaw warned that it will probably take five years or more to transform the VA, but McDonald might get fed up and not stick around that long if his reform efforts are thwarted by outside players.

“As CEO of Procter & Gamble … he was always kind of running his own business, even though he had to keep stakeholders happy … That’s very different than leading a government bureaucracy like the VA, where Congress has oversight,” Henshaw said. “I imagine that he’s going to get very frustrated by Washington, by Congress, by legislation, by budgets. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he left when the president left [in January 2017] just because he felt like he wasn’t being as impactful as he thought he could be.”

harper.jon@stripes.com

Twitter: @JHarperStripes

Sunday, July 20, 2014

At veteran homeless center, sketches of war, regret and mistakes

Two hundred miles southeast of Denver, in a meander of the Arkansas River, is an old military base called Fort Lyon. It was once a prison, once a hospital, once an asylum, but for the past 10 months it has been a refuge for people — especially veterans — struggling with homelessness, and in many cases addiction and mental illness.

They are distorted shadows of the soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen they once were. They were found living under bridges, sleeping in doorways or close to death in hospitals. They are here because they chose a long and complicated journey back to life.

For up to two years they can get counseling and job training and take community-college classes as part of a residential pilot program run through the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and funded by the state. If anyone wants to quit, a bus will take them back to Denver. A handful have left, but so far 160 have stuck it out.

Because I've illustrated and written about troops in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the wounded and bereaved in the aftermath of those conflicts, I was invited to embed at Fort Lyon last month. I spent three days and two nights sketching veterans while they told me about their lives. Their stories — about war, abuse, death — were sometimes unbelievable, sometimes clearly embellished, and at other times all too believable and gutting. Many of the veterans pointed to a moment when they made a small error in judgment — tried a recreational drug, sampled an injured spouse's pills, forged a prescription — and that wrong turn proved difficult to reverse. These are hard men and women. Some of them cried as they talked.

Here are a few of the dozen live sketches I did at Fort Lyon, along with the veterans' stories in their own words.

Spc. Joshua Aaron Smart, Army medic, age 32

I sketched Josh in one of the communal areas, but as he was leaving for a class he showed me his room and welcomed me to stay behind and draw it. I was struck by the mattress on the floor and the clothes laid out for a quick change. He told me that his night terrors started after he came off the drugs and alcohol. He was a mix of hopeful and downcast, saying at one point: "I think I am getting better. I hope I am getting better. I am not."

Pvt. Michael Zarnes, Army, age 26

I drew Mike in his dormitory room, which was spotless and orderly — his possessions sorted and stacked, his bed made with tight corners. I sat on the bed and directed him to a chair facing the window, so there would be light on his face. He remained utterly still while I sketched, and he spoke easily about his return from Iraq and fall into alcoholism. His fluid narrative sounded rehearsed — as if he'd told his story many times before or gone over it dozens of times in his head.

Sgt. 1st Class Marc Smith, Army, age 39

I drew Marc in the Fort Lyon chapel. I don't recall how we ended up there, but it was a quiet place where he felt at ease. I was impressed with his self-awareness. He is not proud of himself or the grip that alcohol and drugs have had on him. And he is anxious to reunite with his kids. Yet he seemed to have made peace with it all. He spoke confidently, never searching for words. It was almost impossible to visualize him as the addicted, homeless man he described himself as having been.

Rebels to give MH17 black boxes to aviation group

HRABOVE, Ukraine -- A separatist leader in eastern Ukraine says rebels have recovered the black boxes for the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

Alexander Borodai said Sunday that the devices would be handed over to the International Civil Aviation Organization.

He also said the bodies recovered from the crash site in eastern Ukraine would remain in refrigerated containers at a train station in the town of Torez until the arrival of an international aviation delegation.

The plane was shot down Thursday over disputed territory, killing 298 passengers and crew.

International monitors and Ukrainian officials say armed rebels forced emergency workers to hand over all 196 bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines crash site and have loaded them onto refrigerated trains.

Iryna Gudyma, a spokeswoman for monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said some of the bodies were put on trains at Torez, 9 miles from the crash site.

Associated Press journalists saw the rebels putting bagged bodies onto trucks at the crash site Saturday in eastern Ukraine and driving them away. On Sunday, AP journalists saw no bodies at the crash site and emergency workers were searching the sprawling area only for body parts.

Ukrainian spokeswoman Nataliya Bystro said Sunday that the emergency workers had been laboring under duress and were forced to give the bodies to the armed rebels.

"Where they took the bodies - we don't know," Bystro told The Associated Press.

Alexander Pilyushny, an emergency worker combing the site for body parts on Sunday morning, told the AP it took the rebels several hours on Saturday to take away the bodies.

Pilyushny said he and others had no choice but than to give the bodies to the rebels because "they are armed, and we are not."

"The rebels came, put the bodies onto the trucks and took them away somewhere," Pilyushny said.

Neither Bystro nor Pilyushny could explain what happened to the 102 bodies that have not yet been found.

Earlier, the Ukraine government said it had reached a preliminary deal with the pro-Russia separatists who control the plane crash site to remove the bodies.

News reports of how the bodies have been decaying for days in the summer sun have ignited outrage worldwide, especially from the Netherlands, home to over half the 298 victims.

Ukraine and the separatists accuse each other of firing a surface-to-air missile Thursday at Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur some 33,000 feet above the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Both deny the charge.

The U.S. has pointed blame at the separatists, saying Washington believes the jetliner was probably downed by an SA-11 missile from rebel-held territory and "we cannot rule out technical assistance from Russian personnel."

Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

Rebels load plane crash bodies onto trains

HRABOVE, Ukraine -- International monitors and Ukrainian officials say armed rebels forced emergency workers to hand over all 196 bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines crash site and have loaded them onto refrigerated trains.

Iryna Gudyma, a spokeswoman for monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said some of the bodies were put on trains at Torez, 9 miles from the crash site.

Russian news agencies said the bodies were heading to the rebel stronghold of Donetsk. Ukrainian officials say they expect to have the bodies eventually delivered to government-held city of Kharkiv, but it's unclear if the rebels will agree to do so.