The worst thing for Capt. Jennifer Machmer was knowing that the U.S. Army had actually promoted her rapist. Four years in the military, from proud [passing out] at West Point to humiliating discharge, had provided an education into the Pentagon’s thinking on sexual assault in the ranks, but Machmer never expected an accused rapist to be rewarded.
Her story, narrated to a hushed congressional committee in April of this year, was a rare first-person account of the dangers faced by women soldiers during the Iraq war from their fellow troops. With thousands of women on the front line of America’s war on terror, the Pentagon has been forced to acknowledge that female soldiers are at risk from their comrades in arms, and that, in the U.S. military, rapists often go unpunished.
As Machmer’s experiences in uniform reveal, the culture of violence runs deep. In her first command, she was nominally in charge of a soldier who regularly abused and threatened her. Machmer had the soldier transferred, and he was punished with an $875 fine. In her second posting, in 2002, the military chaplain she was seeing for marriage counseling sexually abused her. Machmer opted for discretion and did not file a complaint.
Later, in Kuwait, during the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq in early 2003, she was raped. “There was no way I could file away another violation,” she told the congressional committee. After asking herself, “Do I stay quiet and just suck up the life that has been ruined, or do I speak out and try to go back to that route I was on,” the captain reported the attack within 30 minutes. Then she watched her career implode. Under the narrow definition of military law, the assault was not considered rape — though it would have been under criminal law in most states.
Machmer was discharged from the military against her wishes, on a partial pension because of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her assailant was transferred to a prized post. “The aftermath of the report has been terrifying,” she told the Congressional Women’s Caucus. “Every time you turn around, you are revictimized, and retraumatized.”
It has been 10 years since the Clinton administration opened up 90 percent of military jobs to women. More than 200,000 women now serve in the U.S. military, with at least 15,000 stationed in Iraq. Some of the women who put on the uniform and went off to war came home as heroines, like Pvt. Jessica Lynch, whose capture by Iraqi forces was spun by the Pentagon into a tale of military derring-do; or Rachel and Charity Witmer, who returned to their grieving parents in Wisconsin in April after a third sister was killed in Baghdad. Lynndie England, a young soldier from a poor town in West Virginia, became instead the symbol of the ugly American, grinning and giving the thumbs-up to scenes of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
As now seems clear, the Pentagon could not sustain its military presence in Iraq without women soldiers. However, activists say the military establishment has done little to protect its female troops. As the committee hearing broke up, Machmer told reporters that she came to trust the Iraqis more than her fellow soldiers.
As in the civilian world, the greatest threat comes from known colleagues, says Christine Hansen, director of the Miles Foundation, an independent advocacy organization for victims of violence. “Predominantly, we are seeing that these are acquaintance rapes, that the victims and the alleged assailant know each other. It might be your battle buddy, or a friend of your battle buddy who is in another squad.”
As of September 2004, the Miles Foundation had received credible reports of rape or sexual assault (in the period August 2002 to August 2003) from 243 women serving in the U.S. military in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Afghanistan. An additional 431 instances of assault were reported elsewhere. No figures are available for the rape of male soldiers serving in Iraq, although campaigners say there are such cases. Meanwhile, the Miles Foundation says it has charted a sharp increase in reports of domestic violence among military families with soldiers returned from the war.
Hansen believes the reported rapes account for just a fraction of the attacks. Most of the known victims were senior noncommissioned officers or officers — which Hansen says suggests that junior personnel are even more afraid of coming forward.
And who could blame them? A woman who reports a rape often suffers hazing or and retaliation. She may be forced to continue serving with her attacker. In extreme cases, she may be thrown in the brig and be accused of sexual misconduct. “It’s a career ender,” says Louise Slaughter, a Democratic congresswoman from New York and leader of the women’s caucus. “The sad thing is that, in addition to everything else, we are losing brainpower, and people who would be extraordinary soldiers.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. military has become notorious as an institution reluctant to confront a culture of abuse. Since 1991, when 83 women were assaulted at the annual Tailhook pilots’ convention, the Pentagon has had ample evidence of the abuse of women within the ranks. In 2002, a civilian rape crisis center near Sheppard Air Base in Texas saw two dozen new recruits who were victims of assaults. Last year, the U.S. Air Force Academy was shaken by reports from women cadets of rape and humiliation that went unpunished by their superiors.
During the last Gulf War, 8 percent of women sent overseas were sexually assaulted or raped, according to a study by researchers for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Other surveys of women soldiers have confirmed the trend: Sexual assault is widespread, and there are rarely consequences for the assailant. According to the Miles Foundation, fewer than 3 percent of reported assaults result in court-martials, let alone punishment.
That was Sheri Chance’s experience after she was drugged and sexually assaulted by a Navy recruiter in February 2001. “The last conscious thing I remember is that I hit my head,” she says. She woke up in the recruitment office in Peru, Ill., as the assault was underway. Chance reported the attack when she arrived at boot camp. After a one-day trial, the man who attacked her was fined one month’s pay. Chance was discharged from the Navy. “When all of this started happening to me I thought I was the first. Now it seems like it was constant all the time,” she says.
Over the years, the Pentagon has launched repeated investigations into sex scandals. When the first reports of sexual abuse of women serving in Iraq emerged, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered an official inquiry. Last month he appointed Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, a female officer who investigated rape cases at Sheppard Air Base two years ago, to head a new Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.
But advocates say that such fact-finding missions are a substitute for real change. “We have known for a long time that there is a problem with sexual assault in the military. There have been more than 40 surveys in 16 years,” says Carolyn Maloney, a New York congresswoman, “yet sexual assaults have gone up 19 percent since 1991. What is very frustrating is that the military has allowed these problems to get worse. What we have to do is to move past the acknowledgment that there is a problem and try to address it.”
In recent months, women’s organizations have pressed the Pentagon for reform, demanding amendments to military law to encourage prosecution for assault, and urging new procedures in the war zone. By the Pentagon’s admission, the U.S. military’s record on sexual assault — from protecting victims and their privacy to prosecuting assailants — is “inconsistent and incomplete.”
In a report issued in May, the Pentagon noted that there was no uniform definition of rape or sexual harassment under military law. The military had also failed to institute widespread sensitivity training for commanding officers, or to make counseling services available to women who had been assaulted. It is not even properly equipped to investigate such crimes: In the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, fewer than 100 rape-detection kits (which collect crucial DNA evidence) have been distributed to field hospitals. The backlog for DNA testing in rape investigations is 16 months, and overstretched commanders are disinclined to investigate reports of assault.
That was the experience of Beth Jameson, a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, who was assigned to a large staging area in Kuwait. She was raped on March 20, 2003, the first night of the war, in the shower block during an alert for a feared chemical attack. In May of this year she told ABC television: “I donned my mask and my chemical suit, and my gloves, and my boots, everything. So I stayed there and waited for the all-clear sign to come about. Well, then all of a sudden there was a knock on the bathroom door. And the door opened and somebody said, ‘Are you OK?’ And I gave my thumbs-up, saying, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ And the door shut. And then, it seems like a split second later, the door just flew open and this person jumped in. He turned on me, kneed me in the groin and pushed me in the back of the bathroom. He pushed me to the ground and I fought with him.”
She soon became convinced that the authorities were not interested in a prosecution. The investigators asked repeatedly if she had been having an affair with her attacker. She was also told that military regulations did not permit investigators to match the semen sample against the DNA registry of U.S. service personnel, which is maintained to identify remains.
Maj. Jameson told ABC: “I’m just angry now at the system — the military system that won’t protect the victim. I understand now why women don’t bring forward the fact that they’ve been attacked — because they’re made to be the victim again.”
Brazil Tuesday became the first country to take a public stand against the Bush administration’s massive AIDS program, which is seen by many as seeking increasingly to press its anti-abortion, pro-abstinence sexual agenda on poorer countries.
Campaigners applauded Brazil’s rejection of $40 million for its AIDS programs because it refuses to agree to a declaration condemning prostitution. The government and many AIDS organizations believe such a declaration would be a serious barrier to helping sex workers protect themselves and their clients from infection.
The demand from the U.S. administration, heavily influenced by the religious right, follows what is known as the “global gag” — a ban on U.S. government funds to any foreign-based organization that has links to abortion. This has resulted in the removal of millions of dollars of funding from family-planning clinics worldwide.
Tuesday Pedro Chequer, the director of Brazil’s HIV/AIDS program, said the government had managed to resist U.S. pressure during negotiations on the AIDS funding to focus on promoting abstinence and fidelity rather than condoms — another ideological battle being waged by the religious right. But the U.S. negotiators insisted that the clause on prostitution had to stay.
“I would like to confirm that Brazil has taken this decision in order to preserve its autonomy on issues related to national policies on HIV/AIDS as well as ethical and human rights principles,” Chequer told the Guardian.
Campaigners congratulated the Brazilian government for its stance, and voiced concerns that the declaration on prostitution could damage efforts to tackle AIDS among sex workers in many countries. Jodi Jacobson of the Center for Health and Gender Equity in the U.S. said that, unlike the global gag, the declaration on prostitution looked likely to be imposed on U.S.-based organizations as well as their subsidiaries abroad. The office of Randall Tobias, the global AIDS coordinator who is responsible for spending the $15 billion President Bush promised for the fight against AIDS, was working on the language to be adopted, she said.
“Any organization receiving U.S. global AIDS funding will have to agree to the policy,” she said. That would include charities as large as Care, Save the Children and World Vision.
“It is a hugely problematic policy from the standpoint of public health alone. It goes against the entire grain of public health principles in not judging the people you are trying to reach.”
But Sam Brownback, a leading Senate conservative, told the Wall Street Journal: “Obviously Brazil has the right to act however it chooses in this regard. We’re talking about promotion of prostitution, which the majority of both the House and the Senate believes is harmful to women.”
Most U.S. AIDS funding goes directly to organizations working in the field, and much will be channeled through faith organizations that back the no-abortion, pro-abstinence and anti-prostitution stance of U.S. conservatives.
But the Brazilian government has strong HIV/AIDS policies and insists that all negotiations go through its own committee. It also has a strong partnership between governmental and nongovernmental organizations, which encouraged a united response to Washington.
“This would be entirely in contradiction with Brazilian guidelines for a program that has been working very well for years. We are providing condoms, and doing a lot of prevention work with sex workers, and the rate of infection has stabilized and dropped since the 1980s,” said Sonia Correa, an AIDS activist in Brazil and co-chairwoman of the International Working Group on Sexuality and Social Policy. “The U.S. is doing the same in other countries — bullying, pushing and forcing — but not every country has the possibility to say no.”
Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition, said: “The importance of the Brazilian government’s decision can not be overstated.”
Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, is set to appear in court this week to register a guilty plea.
In a notice issued by the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., court officials Wednesday said that the hearing was convened with the express purpose of entering a guilty plea from Moussaoui, and to move forward on a case that has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration. More than three years after the attacks, the administration has failed to bring any captured al-Qaida figures to trial.
In Moussaoui’s case, delays, legal wrangling and courtroom outbursts turned the test case into a bizarre spectacle punctuated by the suspect’s outbursts and volatile behavior. Moussaoui’s mental state was the prime consideration before the U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who issued her decision after a one-hour private meeting with Moussaoui Wednesday morning.
The meeting was convened two weeks after Moussaoui wrote to the judge indicating that after more than three and a half years in prison he was willing to plead guilty to conspiracy and terrorism, even though these admissions would carry the death penalty.
According to some reports, Moussaoui’s decision arose from his conviction that that would enable him to move immediately toward an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. However, his court-appointed lawyers argue that he is unfit to stand trial, and they have objected to his decision.
But, two years after stripping Moussaoui of the right to conduct his own defense, Brinkema evidently was persuaded that he was mentally competent. It also appears that Brinkema received assurances that Moussaoui would not reverse his decision, as he did in 2002 when he withdrew a guilty plea after one week.
If he does decide to stick with his decision and plead guilty Thursday, he faces the very real possibility of a death sentence, since it is unlikely that the prosecutors will relent on their demand for the ultimate penalty.
Moussaoui, 36, a French citizen of Moroccan extraction, was arrested a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. prosecutors believe that he is the so-called 20th man, the missing hijacker who was to have joined the 19 others who commandeered the aircraft that flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
Moussaoui admits to membership in al-Qaida, but maintains he was training for a different operation. His trial has been delayed on three occasions and marked by arguments over his demands to interview other al-Qaida members in U.S. custody, who he says could clear him.
The Kremlin’s alleged backsliding on democracy is “very worrying,” the U.S. secretary of state said Tuesday on the eve of her meeting with the Russian president in Moscow. Condoleezza Rice expressed increasing concern at the consolidation of power inside the Kremlin, and warned Vladimir Putin not to cling to power beyond his present term.
The comments, made to reporters traveling with her on her first official visit to Moscow, carried even greater resonance because of her status within the Bush administration, where she is one of President Bush’s most trusted confidantes. In addition, she was an expert on the former Soviet Union before becoming involved in Republican politics and joining the government.
In the harsher of two attacks on Putin’s reforms since her appointment, she told reporters Tuesday that “trends [in Russia] have not been positive on the democratic side.” The secretary of state had been expected to water down her past criticism of the Kremlin as the United States attempts to draw Russia closer to the West with trade incentives.
She will meet Putin Wednesday to smooth the way for a summit meeting between him and Bush when the U.S. president attends the 60th anniversary Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9.
Speaking aboard her aircraft as she flew to the Russian capital, she told reporters: “The centralization of state power in the presidency at the expense of countervailing institutions like the Duma [lower house of Parliament] or an independent judiciary is clearly very worrying.”
Rice’s arrival in Moscow Tuesday night was lent added drama when her motorcade was diverted to the U.S. Embassy after a bomb threat at the hotel where she was to stay. It was a false alarm.
The Kremlin has faced criticism since Putin approved plans to replace elected regional governors with his appointees. His allies claim the reforms will strengthen state control in the fight against Chechen terrorism, but the U.S. and Britain have warned that the Russian electorate is being sidelined.
Rice also condemned the growing state manipulation of Russia’s broadcast media, saying: “The absence of an independent media on the electronic side is clearly very worrying.”
The Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry refused to comment on the accusations.
Her comments appeared to be a fresh sign of Washington’s crusading attitude to spreading democracy in all its bilateral relations. Rice signaled a toughened U.S. stance on Russia shortly after her appointment in January, when she called on Moscow to “make clear to the world that it is intent on strengthening the rule of law, strengthening the role of an independent judiciary, [and] permitting a free and independent press.”
In U.S. eyes, the prosecutions of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (a billionaire critic of Putin) and other executives of the Yukos oil company have raised doubts about the Kremlin’s commitment to democracy. Another concern is the state’s increasing domination of television channels. Soon after meeting Rice in Turkey two months ago, Russia’s smooth-talking foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, gave her a CD with a compilation of Russian TV reports. His attempt to prove a plurality of coverage has clearly failed. Rice said Tuesday that the lack of media freedom was her “principal concern.”
Her comments appeared to answer the pleas of Reporters Without Borders, an international media protection organization that had urged her to condemn the narrowing of press freedom in Russia.
Relations between Moscow and Washington have cooled since their high point of cooperation in the “war on terror” after Sept. 11, 2001. At their last summit in Slovakia in February, Putin responded to Bush’s overtures by stressing that Russia would follow its own “history and traditions” in pursuit of democracy.
Despite her harsh comments, Rice admitted after her arrival in Moscow Tuesday night that there was a “considerable amount of individual freedom” in Russia. “One can’t imagine reverting back to Soviet times,” she said.
There are books full of prohibitions for the pregnant woman: Don’t drink alcohol, don’t eat sushi, don’t take saunas, don’t embark on lengthy air journeys without getting up every hour to revive circulation. But not many bother with the warning: Do not try to dismantle volatile explosives during the second trimester.
It might have proved helpful to former CIA operative Melissa Mahle. In 1998, Mahle was the CIA station chief in Jerusalem when a call came in that Palestinian police had seized two bags of explosives at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. She was five months’ pregnant — a fact that she overlooked after arriving at the scene. “At the time I was focused on mission accomplished; I didn’t even think about my baby,” she says. Over dinner that evening, she learned that the friction of opening a a bag — or wayward cigarette ash — could have detonated an explosion that would have flattened the police station as well as Christendom’s holiest shrine.
Mahle’s years at the agency, described in her new book, “Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/11,” were full of such what-ifs. Some are deeply personal, involving the choices Mahle made between career and family. Other choices were not of her making, but haunt her just as fiercely — like the bureaucratic wrangling that allowed the escape of al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Muhammad just as Mahle was closing in on him.
Now under interrogation by the CIA at an undisclosed location, Muhammad was the destructive visionary behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The original terror plot called for the simultaneous hijacking of 10 aircraft; Osama bin Laden clipped Muhammad’s wings, telling him his plans were too ambitious.
In 1995, while Mahle was working in the Middle East, a man fitting Muhammad’s description turned up in Qatar. At the time, Muhammad was a shadowy figure, and his exact importance to al-Qaida was relatively unknown — as indeed was bin Laden’s. But the CIA believed Muhammad was involved in a bungled plot in the Philippines and in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. “He wasn’t in the top 10, but he had still killed Americans,” she says.
Mahle was assigned the task of hunting him down, verifying his identity — the CIA had a set of fingerprints — and putting him under the control of the U.S. authorities. In her reports back to CIA headquarters, Mahle was all for a “snatch,” spiriting Muhammad out of the country in secret. She says she feared officials in the Qatari government sympathetic to extremists would tip off Muhammad if a formal request were made for his arrest.
She argued her case to the highest reaches of the National Security Agency, where she was eventually overruled. The United States lodged a request with local authorities for Muhammad’s extradition, and almost immediately the man Mahle had been hunting disappeared. Had she had her way, she believes, the post-Sept. 11 world might have been a very different place. “He had these two ideas in his mind as early as 1994. If he had been removed from the operational environment there might still have been a 9/11, but I doubt it would have [been] multiple airplanes crashing into an iconic building,” she says.
At a time when the CIA has yet to recover from the colossal failure of the World Trade Center attacks, Mahle’s is one of three female spies to come in from the cold with books on the world of espionage. Her book was published at the same time as a novel by Stella Rimington, the first woman to head MI-5, and a critical memoir by another former CIA agent, Lindsay Moran.
The publishing boom comes at a time when the CIA is braced for yet more uncomfortable revelations — this time about discrimination within its ranks. Last week, Janine Brookner, a former station chief in Jamaica, began efforts to file the first class-action suit against the agency on behalf of women agents who say they lost their jobs because of sexism. This has caused a frisson in Washington, which, despite Rimington’s example, does not appear entirely comfortable with the idea of female spies. In a recent TV appearance, Mahle was asked by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer: “If you’re roaming around Ramallah or Jericho or Nablus on the West Bank, in any of these towns, an attractive American woman, a blonde, all these guys probably think you’re out there, you’re coming on to them.”
Such attitudes have occasionally eclipsed the criticisms Mahle has made of the agency. In her view, the CIA was hobbled over the years by low morale and budget cuts, which made it slow to react and overly bureaucratic. In a changing world, the agency was also fatally blinkered — a last preserve of white, middle-class men.” I can’t tell you how many minority applicants — Arab Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans — whom I lost to security or suitability,” she writes in her book.
Women who made it past those gates weren’t entirely welcome, either, especially out in the field, where there was a stubborn belief that women were not fit to recruit agents or run spy networks. They would be fatally handicapped by their gender, the old adage went, especially in the Middle East or Latin America, where they would not be granted full respect.
Mahle had a different experience. “I found the Arab male infinitely more predictable and manageable than Near East Division management,” she writes. “With the latter, I always felt that I was walking on eggs. I sensed that at the first mistake, my career would be ended, because I did not have protectors in the old-boy system.”
Her years at the CIA coincided with a period of great upheaval at the agency. She was recruited from university in the mid-’80s, soon after the Iran-Contra affair, a time when public distrust of the spy agency was at its height. Mahle, studying Middle East politics and international relations at graduate school, needed a job; the CIA needed an Arabic speaker.
She fell into the spy game, immersing herself in a shadowy world where lying to friends and relations was routine. In the old days, agents were barred from revealing what they did for a living; nowadays it is compulsory for agents to tell their spouses they work at the CIA. In Mahle’s time, it was discretionary. She told her husband and her father, but did not dare tell her mother until she went abroad, fearful of the anxiety it would cause her.
Soon after Mahle moved to East Jerusalem in the late 1990s, a bomb went off near her house. “My mother was apoplectic,” she says. “I can only imagine what she would have thought if she knew I was chasing terrorists rather than just avoiding them.” But maintaining the deception was exhausting. “I am very close to my mother, and this was a very big piece of my life to keep secret,” she says.
Her departure in 2002, during the aftermath of 9/11, was a forced exit. Mahle is barred from discussing the circumstances beyond the fact that she lost her security clearance for “lack of candor” about her contacts with Palestinians.
Her last posting outside the U.S. for the agency was in Israel and the occupied territories, and much of her job focused on building up the Palestinian security services and keeping tabs on militant groups — although CIA regulations barred her from making direct contact with militants. She was also responsible for broader security arrangements, which meant that in 1998, she found herself making arrangements for a presidential visit from a hospital delivery room. Mahle went into labor six days before President Clinton made his historic visit to Israel and the territories. But there was no question of switching off her duties.
“There were a lot of security details that needed to be nailed down, and it was a high-threat environment,” she says. “I had meetings scheduled. I had places to be. The Secret Service was in town.” Mahle’s daughter was born in the morning. By evening she was back on the job. “I remember thinking it was poor planning on my part,” she says. But she had little choice; the CIA did not have maternity leave.
Other choices she confronted were heartbreaking. Soon after the Palestinian intifada erupted in September 2000, her daughter was just a toddler. Mahle, charged with assessing the dangers posed to U.S. citizens by the rising violence, advised the evacuation of all Americans from East Jerusalem. That included her daughter, but she could not leave her post to bring the child to safety. “Jerusalem was still smoldering from the riots and it was very difficult to navigate. I remember thinking that it was my job to go to my family at this time, and I couldn’t do it. I had to send my [bodyguards] instead,” she says.
She phoned home, and told the nanny to pack the baby photographs. “It was just one of those moments where you have to choose, and I made a decision based on my work. I felt I had failed my family.”
Now, after more than a decade roaming the Middle East, Mahle lives in an affluent suburb of Washington with her husband and daughter. But she retains the habits of her former life, arriving early for meetings to scope out the surroundings, choosing restaurant tables with a clear view of the exit.
She no longer has to worry about swathing herself in dark robes and head scarf — her method for disappearing into the crowd in the Middle East. When we meet at Washington’s Union Station, Mahle, who is tall, carries a bright pink tote and matching handbag.
On the neo-Nazi Web sites where the teenage loner aired his admiration for Adolf Hitler’s notions of ethnic purity, he was known as Todesengel — German for Angel of Death. Late on Monday, at a secluded Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, he played out those dark fantasies. Jeff Weise, 16, shot dead his grandfather, five teenagers, a teacher and two other adults before turning the gun on himself. A dozen others were wounded, with two in a critical condition.
It was the deadliest school shooting since April 20, 1999, when two students at Colorado’s Columbine High School killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. The scale of the violence overwhelmed the emergency services in the remote community, forcing the evacuation of some of the more seriously wounded. “We’ve never dealt with anything like this before,” Sherri Binkeland, spokeswoman for North County Regional Hospital, told reporters.
Even among Indian reservations, Red Lake is a particularly close community, one of only two reservations in America where all lands are held in common. The tribal government has sole jurisdiction over the community’s 850,000 acres, and there are very few non-Indians living among the reserve’s 5,100 members. Located in a secluded area of northern Minnesota, the reservation sits remote and desolate amid vast plains of farmland, on the snow-covered banks of the frozen Lower Red Lake. But Tuesday the isolation was abandoned as police officers, federal investigators, counselors and journalists descended on the reservation in its time of grief.
“There will not be one soul who isn’t touched by this tragedy here in Red Lake,” Floyd Jourdain, chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, told a press conference. “It still hasn’t sunk in.”
At Red Lake High School where the killings took place, Weise was known as a misfit and a loner, the product of a deeply troubled family. His father committed suicide four years ago, and his mother was in a nursing home in Minneapolis more than 200 miles away after suffering brain injuries in a car crash. Classmates described him Tuesday as “weird” and “antisocial.” Relatives said he was regularly teased. But it was unclear what knowledge his classmates or the authorities in Red Lake had about Weise’s inner life, which he pursued on a number of neo-Nazi Web sites, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
In his postings, Weise showed strong identification with Hitler and ideas of racial supremacy, calling himself Native Nazi as well as Todesengel. “I guess I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations,” said one of his postings last year. He vented his impatience with those who did not share his fascination with Hitler, singling out his teachers for rebuke. “The only ones who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion of the student body who think a Nazi is a klansman, or a white supremacist thug.”
On Monday, that frustration with his teachers and classmates came pouring out in a murderous rampage. But he apparently had another score to settle first — with his grandfather, Darryl Lussier, a known figure on the reservation where he had served as a police officer for three decades. After shooting dead his grandfather and the grandfather’s companion, Weise stole his grandfather’s police-issue bulletproof vest and official car, as well as two handguns and a shotgun, and drove toward the red-brick schoolhouse, arriving at about 3 p.m., FBI officials told a press conference Tuesday.
Witnesses said that Weise had a grin on his face and waved to fellow students as he walked along the school corridor, emptying his guns. He was challenged by Derrick Brun, a 28-year-old unarmed security guard, and shot him dead before resuming his rampage. “Mr. Weise continued to roam through the school, firing randomly,” the FBI spokesman, Michael Pabman, told the press conference.
Reggie Graves, 14, told the Associated Press that teachers herded students from one room to another, trying to move away from the sound of the shooting. Some students crouched under desks. Another student, Ashley Morrison, said she heard shots, then saw the gunman peering though a door window of a classroom where she was hiding with several others. “I can’t even count how many gunshots you heard; there [were] over 20 … There were people screaming, and they made us get behind the desk,” she said.
Armed tribal police soon arrived to confront the teenager, forcing his retreat into a classroom, where he shot dead five students and a 52-year-old teacher, Neva Rogers, before turning his gun on himself.
According to the Associated Press, three of the students were shot in the head at close range. “You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?’” one student, Sondra Hegstrom, said.
That remained unclear Tuesday, with the FBI struggling to piece together a motive for what they believed was a premeditated attack. Some of those clues may eventually be provided by Weise himself, from his involvement with neo-Nazi Web sites. In a posting last year, he admitted that he was questioned by police after a threat against the school, in what could have been a possible warning sign.
“By the way, I’m being blamed for a threat on the school I attend, because someone said they were going to shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitler’s birthday, and just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they’ve pinned,” he wrote in comments posted at 11:41 p.m. on April 19, 2004.
The newspaper added that Weise was subsequently cleared, and quoted him as saying: “I’m glad for that. I don’t much care for jail; I’ve never been there and I don’t plan on it.”
For the people on the Red Lake reserve, the killing spree was “the darkest hour in the history of our tribe,” said Jourdain. “Our community is devastated by this. We have never seen anything like this in the history of our tribe.”
