For troop greeters every day is Veterans Day

By DeWayne Wickham

While the nation pauses tomorrow in annual observance of the patriotism of this country's servicemen and women, nearly every day is Veterans Day at Bangor International Airport.

It is through this small American portal that many of the troops who are dispatched to, and return from, Afghanistan and Iraq travel. It's at this airport in Maine that a small band of senior citizens have greeted every soldier, sailor, Marine and airman who traveled through its corridors since May 3, 2003. They're called "troop greeters," but in essence they serve a much greater purpose. They are the heart and conscience of a grateful nation.

For far too many Americans, Veterans Day - Nov. 11 - is simply a day off from work with pay that is barely distinguishable from any other holiday. But for Maine's troop greeters, who have seen more than 4,300 flights with nearly a million U.S. troops come and go, Veterans Day is almost a daily event - one they treat with great reverence.

"Our boys got a raw deal when they were over in Vietnam. ... We wanted to make sure that the government would not send our boys into battle, or to defend our country in any way, without giving them credit for what they're doing. We made up our minds that that would never happen again," 87-year-old Bill Knight said in the opening scene of The Way We Get By, a documentary about the troop greeters that airs tomorrow on PBS.

While most Americans view the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq with great detachment, the troop greeters take it personally. A contingent of them goes to Bangor's airport at all hours of the day and night to meet every plane that ferries troops into that facility. They welcome the troops with a handshake or embrace; they comfort them with simple words of appreciation, some snack food and the free use of cell phones.

That might not seem like much of a sacrifice until you consider that the troop greeters do this over and over again, as if each time they are there for a member of their own family.

"Once you start going to the airport to greet the troops, if you stay home you go through withdrawal," Joan Gaudet, 76, said in the film that her son, Aron Gaudet, directed.

If this film were only about what these aging patriots do for the morale of the young people this nation sends to war it would be worth watching. But it's about more than that. It's also about how these people's lives are made better by the sacrifices they make for the troops - a story that makes it compelling viewing.
At home, Joan Gaudet uses a walker to get around and is afraid to go out of the house, especially at night in the slippery snow of a Maine winter. But her gait stregthens when she enters the airport. The place has the same effect on Jerry Mundy, a 74-year-old retired ironworker.

"Jerry lost one of his sons at an early age," Aron Gaudet told me. "He can't connect with his son anymore but the thing he loves the most at the airport is to give these cell phones to the troops so they can connect with their parents."

That how they get by. They get past the pain in their lives by bringing some small pleasure to the troops America sends to war. And by doing so, they give new meaning to poet John Milton's words: "They also serve who only stand and wait."

Those responsible for "failed school" must share blame for rape

By DeWayne Wickham

The early reports of a horrific crime are often so sensationalized that the truth is slow to emerge. Sometimes it takes years before fact is separated from fiction.

But in the case of the 15-year-old girl at California's Richmond High School who allegedly was gang raped on campus late last month, this much is certain: What happened gives new meaning to the words "failed school."

Those words used to describe a school whose students did poorly on standardized tests, had high absenteeism and low graduates rates. But the conditions at Richmond High that created the environment in which the girl was savagely attacked expand the definition of a "failing school."

The first priority of any public school should be the safety of its students. Sure, education is their primary purpose, but it's hard for serious learning to take place in a school where violence, or the fear of violence, goes unchecked.

The attack happened in a corner of the school's sprawling campus as a homecoming dance took place nearby. Police have arrested six of the 10 young men they think might have taken part in the sexual assault. They also are trying to track down as many as 20 others believed to have watched the rape. Some onlookers, cops said, used their cellphones to take pictures of the attack.

"I think we have become a country of spectators. The violence many young people see just doesn't reach the area of their humanness that says there is a real person being treated that way," Saundrea Young, the co-founder and former clinical director of Loved Ones of Homicide Victims, a Los Angeles group that offers counseling to relatives of murder victims, told me.

There were four police officers at the homecoming dance, which attracted about 400 students. The school's principal, Julio Franco, told the Contra Costa Times that he believed the police officers would "do the perimeter checks" of the campus. But Richmond's police chief, Chris Magnus, said that wasn't the officers' job. They were there to provide security inside the gym, where the dance took place, and a nearby parking lot. It was the school district's responsibility to make sure other parts of the campus were safe, he said.
However, a spokesman for the West Contra Costa Unified School District said it wasn't the school system's job to safeguard students outside the dance. "Once the child leaves the dance, we don't take them home," Marin Trujillo told ABCNEWS.com.

But it should ultimately have been the school's responsibility to make sure the campus was a safe place to be that night.

The young men who attacked the girl did so in the school's courtyard, not off campus. For more than two hours, they continued their assault without once being interrupted by the cops, administrators, teachers and site supervisors who were there to provide security at the dance.

The job of these people might have been a lot easier if the school district had moved more quickly to install the security cameras, better lighting and improved fencing that Richmond High had sought for years. Last November, an investigative report by San Francisco's CBS.5 revealed that only seven of the school's 16 security cameras worked. New cameras and fencing would be installed by the summer, a school board member said back then.

That didn't happen. But the rape did. Now, more than those who committed that awful crime must be held accountable.

Polanski's a victimizer, not a victim

By DeWayne Wickham

The important thing to know about Roman Polanski is that he is a pedophile.

Last week, the U.S. government filed an extradition request with Switzerland to have the 76-year-old Academy Award-winning director return to this country to faces charges related a sexual encounter he had with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

Since his arrest last month after he arrived in Switzerland from his home in France to attend the Zurich Film Festival, Polanski's supporters have mounted a campaign to keep him from the clutches of the U.S. justice system.

They circulated a petition that demands his release while decrying his detention by Swiss police for what they describe simply as a moral charge. Among those signing it are a who's who of movie directors, including Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, John Landis and Martin Scorsese. While their hearts may be in the right place, their heads are in the sand.

Thirty-two years ago, Polanski plied a girl with champagne and Quaaludes to loosen her inhibitions. Then he sodomized her.

After listening to the girl's testimony, a grand jury issued a six-count indictment against the Polish-born director that included charges of rape, sodomy and lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14.

However, when the young victim's lawyer said the girl didn't want go through the spectacle of a Hollywood trial, Polanski got a big break. He was allowed to plead guilty to the single charge of "unlawful intercourse with a minor." But before he was sentenced, Polanski fled to France, where he had an affair with Nastassja Kinski. She was just 15.

Polanski is a pedophile, by any definition. Yet instead of snatching a child off the street or entering their bedroom late at night through an unlocked window, he used guile and his celebrity to have his way.

In the Los Angeles case, he wooed the young girl away from her mother with the false claim that he wanted to photograph the child for Vogue Hommes, a French fashion magazine. After feeding the girl alcohol and drugs, Polanski took partially nude photographs of the child before performing anal sex on her.

Afterward, he took the girl home and told her not to tell her mother what he'd done. But she did, and Polanski was arrested.

Polanski's supporters want us to believe his apprehension in Switzerland is a violation of some cultural code of conduct. "By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this," the petition states.

That's buncombe.

Polanski wasn't arrested because of his art; he was jailed because of the sexual offense he committed against a 13-year-old girl - a crime he admitted to before fleeing. They also claim Polanski was the victim of judicial misconduct. The judge, they say, was going to renege on a commitment to incarcerate Polanski for only 90 days. If he hadn't fled, supporters say he would have received a much longer sentence.

They want us to see Polanski as the victim, not a victimizer.

In a 1993 civil suit brought against him by the girl - who was then nearly 30 - Polanski invoked his right against self-incrimination when he was asked whether he fed her champagne and drugs before assaulting her.

Roman Polanski has evaded justice for 38 years. It's time he pays a price for the awful crime he committed.

Obama's most loyal supporters are a problem

By DeWayne Wickham

Barack Obama has a simmering race problem.

The nation's first black president, who relied heavily on black voters to reach the Oval Office, is coming under increased criticism from blacks who think he's not doing enough to address their concerns.

So far, this talk hasn't gotten much national media attention. Obama's approval rating among blacks is still in the political stratosphere, and many of his black supporters have a low tolerance for blacks who publicly question the president's decision-making, even when they agree with the criticisms.

But the grousing continues.

Recently, some black activists formed a group to monitor how Obama deals with black issues. Called the Shirley Chisholm Presidential Accountability Commission, the panel is headed by Julianne Malveaux, an economist and president of Bennett College for Women, and Ronald Walters, director of the University of Maryland's African American Leadership Center.

Panel leader Julianne Malveaux was asked during a recent interview in Essence magazine whether she should be more patient before taking the president to task.

"He's our brother ... but we're not his only constituency," the long-time Democratic activist responded. "He's not the president of black America. We have to make him do right. He's not going to do right just 'cuz. We've got to make him."

That's apparently what Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, tried to do when he broke his silence over the slow pace of Obama's efforts to fill about 90 vacancies on federal appeals and district courts. Henderson complained the president is kowtowing too much to congressional Republicans, who see his outreach as a weakness.

"I commend the president's effort to change the tone in Washington," Henderson told The Washington Post earlier this month. "I recognize that he is extending an olive branch to Republicans ... but so far, his efforts at reconciliation have been met with partisan hostility."

That public breach of the black community's "speak no ill of Obama" rule followed a festering rift over the Obama administration's decision to exclude from his budget $85 million for black college aid that was in the last two budgets of Republican President George W. Bush.

Outrage among supporters of the nation's 105 historically black higher-education institutions has been an open secret. Tom Joyner, whose syndicated radio talk show airs on more than 110 stations across the nation, wrote the president during the summer asking him to restore the funds.

So far, that hasn't happened. White House officials say the money was part of a one-time, two-year grant to black colleges. Critics said Obama should have continued the grant, which will be hard to replace for many financially strapped black schools.

"It suggests that HBCUs are not a priority," Lezli Baskerville, who heads the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, a lobbying group for black colleges, told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This growing discontent among black activists is compounded by political fissures dividing Obama and some black politicians.

Obama tried mightily to persuade former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder to endorse Creigh Deeds, a fellow Democrat and the party's candidate for governor in Virginia's Nov. 3 election. But Wilder, the state's first black governor, recently announced he'll remain neutral. His refusal to support Deeds in the close race could cost Democrats the election.

In New York, black politicians reacted angrily to Obama's push to get black Gov. David Paterson to drop his bid for re-election and clear the way for a bid by the state's white attorney general.

Obama needs to get a handle on his race problem. Otherwise, he could be drawn into a very public feud with members of his most loyal constituency.

One billion hungry people need action now

By DeWayne Wickham

If you didn’t know it, this past Friday was World Hunger Day. To make sure I knew it, a press aide to Hillary Clinton invited me to join a conference call with the secretary of State and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who touted the Obama administration’s commitment to reducing hunger around the world.

There are a billion people who are chronically hungry. That’s roughly one of every seven inhabitants of this planet. Hunger is a far greater pandemic than AIDS. Nearly 16,000 children die of hunger every day, according to Bread for the World, a Washington, D.C., faith-based organization that advocates for the hungry. That amounts to more deaths in a single year that the total of all the people who died violently in wars over the past 50 years.

“We are very pleased to be part of a commitment, along with other nations, of more than $22 billion over three years to spur agriculture-led economic growth,” Clinton said. That money will be used not just to the delivery of food to starving people but to pay for programs that provide food security for countries where hunger is widespread.

Food security is diplomatic-speak for what the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi said: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Helping poor countries feed their hungry masses is not just a grand humanitarian gesture; it is good diplomacy – a refreshing change from the jingoism and dollar diplomacy of previous administrations.

“Our goals should be to increase the availability of food by helping people in countries produce what they need, to make that food accessible to those who need it, and to teach people to use it properly so that they can make the most of it,” Vilsack said.

Understandably, it is the Obama administration’s efforts to keep Iran and North Korea from joining the world’s nuclear club and end the long-running conflict between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East that grabs the headlines. But it is the shortage – or unavailability – of food that is the immediate threat to global security.

Last year there were food riots in Haiti, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico and Pakistan. Since 2007, there have been more than 60 food riots around the world, Clinton said. That’s a warning shot that shouldn’t be ignored. The Obama administration’s effort – along with that of other members of the G-8 (the countries with the world’s eight strongest economies) is movement in the right direction.

I’ve seen what chronic hunger does to people in places like the Cite Soleil slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The long-term strategy for the reducing the widespread hunger there and elsewhere in the world poor nations the resources they need to sharply increase their production of food. That won’t be easy.

For example, there is little arable land in Haiti, a once lush-green Caribbean nation. Trees are used for fuel by that country’s poor, a vandalization of the landscape that robs the soil of vital nutrients needed for agriculture – and condemns millions of Haitians to a life of hunger and despair. A part of the answer to Haiti’s food shortage is the biotechnology (the use of scientifically altered seeds to improve food production) that Clinton and Vilsack said the United States will share with other nations to jumpstart their food production.

But as the deadly food riots in Haiti and other places last year indicate, there is an urgent need to feed hundreds of millions of starving people around the world now – and then teach them how to fish.

Flight attendant on hijacked plane says Hill is no killer

By DeWayne Wickham

The excited voice on my answering machine was that of a woman who had read my recent column about Charles Hill, an American who skyjacked a plane to Cuba 38 years ago.
Hill and two other black revolutionaries were driving from California to Mississippi with a trunk full of high-powered weapons and dynamite the night of Nov. 8, 1971 when they were stopped outside Albuquerque, N.M. by New Mexico state trooper Robert Rosenbloom. In the ensuing confrontation, the trooper was shot dead.

For nearly four decades, there was no information on which of the three men — Hill, Ralph Goodwin or Michael Finney — had fired the fatal shot. If the cops had an idea, they didn’t say. And from their self-imposed exile in Cuba, the three fugitives revealed little about the fatal confrontation.

But the 66-year-old former flight attendant who left the message on my phone believes she knows.

Elizabeth Walthall was working TWA Flight 106 the day the three men, members of the Republic of New Afrika, a black separatist group, stormed aboard the jet as it sat on the tarmac at Albuquerque airport.

They demanded to be taken to Africa, but the plane wasn’t equipped for a transatlantic flight, so they settled for Cuba, she said in a telephone interview from her home in Pinehurst, N.C.

Walthall said the skyjacking occurred the day before Thanksgiving. The plane was scheduled to fly to Philadelphia, where it was supposed to arrive in time for her to have dinner the next day in her hometown of Camden, N.J.

When the three men came aboard the plane, Walthall said, Hill brandished a knife, Goodwin carried a briefcase and “Finney had the gun.” It was that gun, and what Finney said he’d done with it, that convinced her he killed Rosenbloom.
“I’ve already killed somebody ... I didn’t like it, but I could do it again,” she said Finney told her at one point during the flight when he tried to silence her nonstop chatter.

At another point during the flight, Walthall said Goodwin, who seemed very remorseful, told her of Rosenbloom’s death that Finney “got crazy and he shot him and killed him.”

Why did Walthall want me to know this? Because I’d written that improved relations between the U.S. and Cuba could prompt Cuba to send Hill back to the U.S. to be tried for skyjacking and murder. Walthall wants potential jurors to know Hill wasn’t the triggerman.

“I think I know enough that he didn’t commit that murder that it would be criminal of me not to say so,” she told me. “I’m in favor of capital punishment ... but I don’t believe in punishing someone for a murder they didn’t commit.”

When it comes to the death penalty, the passage of time probably will be a greater help to Hill — if he’s ever tried here — than any testimony Walthall might offer. Earlier this year, Gov. Bill Richardson signed a bill that abolished New Mexico’s death penalty.

But her testimony might help Hill , 59, get a lesser sentence than the life without parole that Richardson said will now be given to “the worst criminals.” With diplomatic contacts between the United States and Cuba on the rise, Hill could soon end up in an U.S. courtroom, where he will need a jury to hear what Walthall has to say about who killed Rosenbloom if he expects to ever see more than the inside of an American prison cell.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, ironic but not undeserved

By DeWayne Wickham

It is more than just a little bit ironic that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just hours before he met with his war council to consider how many more troops the United States will commit to the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Of the 120 men and women to receive this international honor since 1901, President Obama is one of a handful of heads of state to get it while still in office and the only one awarded that prize while leading his nation in war.

Just two other U.S. presidents received the Peace Prize while in the White House. Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for using his bully pulpit to end conflicts in Europe and Asia. Woodrow Wilson got his in 1919 - just months after the end of World War I - for his role in creating the League of Nations, the body he hoped would prevent future wars.

In 1990, a year after the Soviet Union ended it military occupation of Afghanistan, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave it to Mikhail Gorbachev for permitting the political changes that ended Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe.

So, understandably, Obama was as humble in acknowledging the committee's action,. "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations," Obama said in a hurried statement from the Rose Garden. I'm sure he knew critics would latch on to the Feb. 1 nomination deadline - when Obama had been president just days - while conveniently forgetting that the vote occurred in October.

But Obama's soft peddling of his honor didn't pacify critics. "I'm not sure what the international community loved best; his waffling on Afghanistan, pulling defense missiles out of Eastern Europe, turning his back on freedom fighters in Honduras, coddling Castro, siding with Palestinians against Israel or almost getting rough on Iran," harped Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C.

How about all of the above? While the decision reeks of irony, the recognition is hardly undeserved. He earned it by deciding to scale down and retool the missile defense system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic. While the Bush administration said it was meant to shield U.S.allies in Europe and the Middle East from Iranian missile attacks, Russia saw it as a U.S. threat in its backyard.

Scrapping that land-based system for one that relies heavily on ship-board missiles makes Russia less jittery - and the world a safer place. Ensuring this nation is on the right path in Afghanistan before sharply increasing the U.S. presence there is not "waffling;" it's good leadership. It sends the right message about the Obama administration's intention to defeat the forces that attacked us on 9/11 and end as quickly as possible a war he inherited from his predecessor.

Increased diplomatic contact with Cuba, recognizing the Honduran president's claim to office after he was ousted by a coup and acknowledging that Israel isn't always right and the Palestinians aren't always wrong is a better road to a more peaceful world than the ones previously taken by other U.S. governments.

The Nobel Peace Prize should go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses," Alfred Nobel said in his will of award he endowed.

By that standard, Barack Obama has done a lot in a short period of time to earn such a lofty honor.