#tragically i was writing this paper in MARCH 2020 so i never wrote it for obvious reasons

[your-local-granny]

winter break is a dangerous time because ill spend the entire semester going "if only i had a few days off then i could get glasses and see a hemotologist and an ENT and maybe even the dentist and get a credit card and—" and then winter break hits and instead im gaslighting myself into thinking i should read multiple translations of beowulf so i can compare the translations and use it to support an essay on tolkien that i outlined FOUR YEARS AGO AND NEVER WROTE

[letterboxd]

Milking It.

Peerless American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt talks to Ella Kemp about her new film, First Cow, her favorite animal performers, and getting down to the nitty gritty of things.

We’re resharing this post to mark the arrival of ‘First Cow’ on VOD. The interview took place timed to the original release of the film in March, prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

With little fuss, Kelly Reichardt has been making some of the most tender and thoughtful films about American loneliness for decades. The quietly acclaimed director, writer and film lecturer began her feature career in 1994 with River of Grass, a runaway story of a couple caught in a tragedy, and now celebrates her ten-title milestone as a filmmaker by gifting the world the peaceful and moving portrait of another pair of nomads in First Cow.

Reichardt has earned her reputation as one of the most impressive and reliable American filmmakers with knockouts including the stripped-back heartbreaker, Wendy and Lucy and the stunning portrait of feminine isolation and frustration, Certain Women. There is always a common thread—and there is often Michelle Williams—but then, also, each film is a rich, vivid new tale that feels like it belongs to you and no one else.

Based on the 2004 novel The Half-Life, written by Reichardt’s frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, First Cow has been coming together for over a decade, and feels like the culmination of Reichardt’s finest skills and sensibilities. The story follows Cookie (John Magaro) a taciturn cook travelling alongside fur trappers in 19th-century Oregon, whose ambition comes into focus when he meets King Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant. Together, they develop not only an essential friendship, but also a delicious business model, which involves slyly stealing milk from a cow owned by a wealthy landowner. It’s a film of subtle gestures, of deeply tender attentions, with a sharp eye across endless landscapes, and already has devoted fans on Letterboxd.

“I have never felt so well cared for by a movie,” writes Liz Shannon Miller in her Letterboxd review. Zachary Panozzo appreciates the way the film tackles American capitalism as a system, writing that “First Cow, in the most pleasant and honest way, calls bullshit on that.” And Phil Wiedenheft observes: “It feels—like all her work—so simple and elegant that it’s a wonder how [many] histrionics so many other filmmakers have to perform to end up saying less.” And, everyone wants those butter-honey biscuits.

First Cow premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last year and went on to the New York Film Festival shortly after, before impressing European audiences last month in competition at the 2020 Berlinale.

Sharing memories of the writers who shaped her movies, the first film that proved that cinema could show a different view of the world, and the greatest animal performers of all time, Reichardt chats with our London correspondent, Ella Kemp.

Orion Lee as King-Lu and John Magaro as Cookie in ‘First Cow’.

How did you choose where to strip The Half-Life back, to get to a film-sized story? Kelly Reichardt: The novel goes through four decades and they sail to China, so it was way outside the realm of what we could do. It also has a contemporary thread, and that just became a prologue and we settled into the 1820s. We found the main mechanism, the cow, which doesn’t exist in the novel—in the novel they’re selling the oil from beaver glands to China. So once we had the narrative element of the cow, we could work our own way into the script while still using a lot of the themes and stories from John’s novel. And the other thing John did, which was great, was to combine two characters from the novel. King Lu is actually a fusion of two people in the novel.

On paper, First Cow might seem like a straightforward Western but in practice it feels much softer. How do you see it in terms of genre? I didn’t feel any limits by a genre, and I wasn’t really thinking of it as a ‘big W’ Western. I actually see it as a heist film if anything. When I made Meek’s Cutoff, we were dealing with bonnets and wagons and the desert and people crossing West. That felt like having to deal with the whole history of the Western while we set up the camera, but I didn’t feel like that at all here. I just felt like we were telling an intimate story about two people. We were in the minutiae of trying to find out as much as we could about the Multnomah tribes that lived on the Columbia river, and we had fashioned Toby Jones’ character—the Chief Factor—after John McLoughlin in the [retail business group] Hudson’s Bay Company. It was more about researching the beaver trade and definitely taking artistic liberties, while also really trying to stay pretty true in the details to the period. It was such a little world we were building, I didn’t really have the feeling that I was confined in a genre at all.

Kelly Reichardt. / Photo by Jens Koch courtesy Berlinale

You work with outdoor landscapes a lot, particularly in Oregon. There are similarities with Meek’s Cutoff but also with Wendy and Lucy—the nomadic loners, the animal companion… What keeps you coming back to these places? I’ve actually worked outdoors much more than I’ve worked indoors. It’s really the indoors which was really fun to shoot here, because with Tony Gasparro, who was the production designer on First Cow, he and I were able to design these cottages and interiors and build around what [we] wanted to shoot, which is really great and a first for me. But outdoors is where I’m usually mostly shooting. It was recognizable to me at different points in the film that we were recalling Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy. It was like the ‘Best Of’ of my movies.

There were some echoes of the other films for sure. It’s interesting to think how that’s happened. Because really, John’s novel The Half-Life is the first thing I ever read of his, and I wrote to him asking if he had any short stories—because I knew the novel was too big back in 2004—and he sent me Old Joy, the short story, which became the first thing we did together. But in between all that we’d been musing together for a decade, whenever there’s a lull in whatever we’re working on, we’d ask ourselves how we could do The Half-Life. It’s been cooking on the back burner for a long time, so maybe it’s bled into other films along the way.

Would you ever consider working in the city? I’m definitely ready to do something contemporary. It could be anything. I will just say on the practical side I do enjoy going away with a crew and feeling somewhat off the grid while making a film, separate from everyday life. When you say a city, I immediately think of New York. Never say never, but it’s just the practicalities of it… even if you can hire the crew you want, it doesn’t jump out at me as the most inviting thing.

In First Cow, your central characters are two men. Did you encounter different things in delving into male psychology after shaping so many rich female characters across your filmography? I don’t think of it in terms of gender, more in terms of personality. Maile Meloy’s short stories that I was working off for Certain Women focus on isolated women, a theme in some of her writing. But it’s really more about getting down to details on all levels of filmmaking for me. You have at some point the bigger picture, but I like to get down to the nitty gritty of things, in the story I’m telling and the people I’m making the story about and not worry about what gender anybody is. It’s more about who are these characters. A big draw to The Half-Life was that the Cookie character was so great. King Lu was totally fascinating as well. So it was more about keeping track of what they wanted, what they were to each other in the minute-by-minute, more even than in the big sense.

Lucy, the very good girl in Reichardt’s ‘Old Joy’.

Evie, the titular cow, is a terrific performer. What is your favorite animal performance on film? Oh god… Lucy! My own beautiful dog in Old Joy (2006), actually. No, of course there’s others. The animal that probably made the biggest impression on me as a kid was in Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin (1973). That dolphin was everything. You’re always afraid the animals are going to come to some demise. There’s [Vincente] Minnelli’s Home from the Hill (1960), which has the tragic hunting dog there. But it’s such a beautiful film. Whenever a film is named after the animal, you know it’s bad news for the animal.

Do you have a favorite film to teach your students? I’ve been teaching since 1998 so I wouldn’t call anything a favorite, but one film I’ve used in a sound class a lot is the opening scene of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), where we’re just listening to the sound, and we turn off the image and the students describe the space. And so by doing that over the years I have René Auberjonois’ voice so firmly planted in my head, as he’s the bartender in the opening scene. I had the great pleasure of working with him on Certain Women and we wrote a little part for him [in] First Cow where he’s the cranky guy in town with the raven.

What is the film that made you want to be a filmmaker? When I was a kid and I saw Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) on TV, and there was a scene on a beach at night that happened in black and white. It was the first time I’d seen the ocean in black and white—I grew up in Miami. It was the first time I became aware that people could do something as far as film went. I think when I was in art school, Stranger Than Paradise (1984) came out, and it probably opened the door to a lot of people’s minds—like a lot of people who saw the first band who played their own music and not cover tunes, like, ‘maybe I could tell my own story on film’. It made something seem possible, for myself anyway.

‘First Cow’ is in US cinemas now. An international release is yet to be confirmed. Kelly Reichardt’s films ‘First Cow’ and ‘Wendy and Lucy’ feature in Letterboxd’s Official Top 100 Narrative Feature Films Directed by Women.

[xtruss]

Death of a Whistleblower

Questions raised by a Pentagon investigator went unanswered following his workplace suicide.

Although whistleblowers are protected under the law, they often face retaliation, demotion or the loss of their livelihoods which can take a profound toll, raising the age-old question: Who watches the watchdogs?

— By Amy Mackinnon | MARCH 20, 2020 | Foreign Policy

It’s almost not possible to overstate how large and complicated the United States Department of Defense is. It is the largest U.S. government agency, serves as the country’s biggest employer, and wields an annual budget of $738 billion. The task of detecting and deterring malfeasance within this labyrinth falls to the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General. Each year, the watchdog’s hotline receives some 14,000 complaints from Department of Defense employees, many of whom make grave allegations of criminality, fraud, or waste of government resources.

When credible allegations were made against senior officials, they landed on the desk of Steven Luke, one of around 30 investigators tasked with handling probes into some of the highest-ranking officials in the Pentagon. Having worked in the office for over a decade, Luke was well acquainted with the Washington swamp. He enjoyed his job, and he was good at it. But in January 2018, Luke was handed a case that caused him to question the integrity of his office and the motives of his supervisors, and led him to blow the whistle on the Pentagon’s own watchdog office.

At first glance, the case should have been relatively straightforward. Robert Cardillo, who was then the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, had been accused of violating agency travel protocols. Luke had handled plenty of similar cases over the years, and travel investigations often left a paper trail.

He reviewed the evidence and felt that it was too thin to substantiate the claims. But in a series of emails obtained by Foreign Policy, Luke described how he felt under pressure from his supervisors to back up the allegations made against Cardillo. “From the outset, everyone in my leadership chain suggested or directed that I should substantiate the primary allegation,” he wrote in an email to the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican known as the “patron saint of whistleblowers.” “I felt bullied, berated, and belittled unless I acquiesced to go along with everyone else and write the ROI [Report of Investigation] as a substantiation,” Luke wrote.

The case was ultimately closed as unsubstantiated, but the experience left Luke rattled.

If you are in crisis or are worried about a friend or loved one, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline network is available 24/7 across the United States. Call 1-800-273-8255, or visit www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org for options in Spanish and for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

He felt sure that had he not stuck his neck out, the case would have been upheld, leaving an indelible stain on Cardillo’s decadeslong record of government service. His wife, Amy Luke, said that it was the worst work-related stress she had ever seen him under. He was frustrated, preoccupied, and beginning to look for other jobs.

After the case was closed, Luke wrote a two-page email outlining his concerns to Charles Murphy, an investigator in Grassley’s office. They arranged to meet on Feb. 4, 2019.

But Luke never made it to the meeting.

On Jan. 8, 2019, he was found dead in the trunk of his red Volvo S60 in the parking garage of the Mark Center office building, home to the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General. An Alexandria police department investigation concluded that Luke—a father of four who had been stalked by depression throughout his adult life—had killed himself. He was 54 years old.

Jon Benedict For Foreign Policy

Last year, a whistleblower complaint by an anonymous CIA official set off a chain of events that culminated in the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump. It underscored the remarkable power of whistleblowing, as well as the enormous pressure that can come to bear on those who speak out, as the president and his allies doubled down in their efforts to expose the complaint’s author.

Each year, tens of thousands of government employees come forward to report misconduct. They play a pivotal role in holding the government to account and have saved taxpayers billions of dollars. Most whistleblowers do not imperil a presidency. Few ever make the news. The reality of whistleblowing is often different, and much darker, than the David and Goliath portrayal that has long captured imaginations in Hollywood. Having stumbled upon nepotism, corruption, vested interests, or political agendas, many are simply crushed by the powerful interests they are trying to expose. Whistleblowers are protected under the law, but they often face retaliation, demotion, or the loss of their livelihoods, which can take a profound toll: “There is a burgeoning field of research on whistleblower retaliation and a hostile work environment that causes stress-related disorders, such as PTSD, depression and suicide along with a host of physical disorders such as autoimmune diseases, musculoskeletal, and gastrointestinal,” said Jacqueline Garrick, the founder of the nonprofit Whistleblowers of America, in an email to Foreign Policy. In a poll of 100 whistleblowers run on the organization’s website, 50 percent of respondents said they had some thoughts of suicide during the whistleblowing process, Garrick said. “There is a burgeoning field of research on whistleblower retaliation and a hostile work environment that causes stress-related disorders, such as PTSD, depression and suicide.”

In writing to Grassley’s office, Luke was in the early stages of becoming a whistleblower himself. Allegations he made in a series of emails exchanged with Grassley’s office raise serious questions about the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General, where officials have previously been accused by lawmakers and independent watchdogs of exerting undue influence in investigations of senior officials and of presiding over a “toxic” environment for whistleblowers. “The tragic suicide of Steven Luke may be part of a long-standing pattern of alleged investigative misconduct, retaliation and bullying in the directorate where Luke worked. This abusive culture has apparently been allowed to exist unchecked for far too long,” Grassley said in a statement to Foreign Policy. “Those responsible must be held accountable.” Grassley added that acting Inspector General Glenn Fine “needs to address this problem without further delay.”

Responding to Grassley’s statement, Dwrena Allen, a spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office, wrote, “This statement raises inaccurate allegations and unfairly makes inferences that are simply not supported by facts.” Allen referred Foreign Policy to the latest Federal Viewpoint survey of government employees, which showed significant improvements over recent years in the way employees of the Office of the Inspector General regard their workplace. “[T]he scores in Steven’s office on this survey (consistently over 90%) are much higher than in the federal government and the Department of Defense as a whole, and they demonstrate that there is not an abusive culture,” she said in a statement.

In 2015, 56 percent of employees at the Office of the Inspector General felt that they could make a disclosure about suspected wrongdoing without fear of reprisal, below the government-wide average. By 2019, 73 percent of agency staff said that they felt they could blow the whistle without facing retaliation, higher than the average across the government.

The Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General is a “shop that’s had a lot of problems for a long time,” said Mandy Smithberger of the Project on Government Oversight, a good governance watchdog. As far back as 2002, a review by an external independent contractor found that “The culture of the OIG DoD has been, and continues to be, hostile to internal whistleblowers. All too often, OIG employees who have endeavored to identify mismanagement or violations of law have been punished by their chain of command.” This was echoed 14 years later in a letter from the Project on Government Oversight to Fine, the acting inspector general, that described the office as having a “cultural aversion” to whistleblowers.

“There is a lot of pressure there not to even open cases,” said Garrick of Whistleblowers of America. “I’ve not seen anybody that I can think of off the top of my head who has gone to the DoD OIG and even had a case get opened.”

Allen, the spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office, described these comments as inaccurate, saying, “There is no pressure to reach any particular outcome on a case—other than to take the facts and evidence wherever they lead and to ensure the investigations and reports are well supported, well explained, and factually correct. That is what happened in the case discussed in the article, and what happens in our other cases as well.”

“There is no pressure to reach any particular outcome on a case—other than to take the facts and evidence wherever they lead.”

A spokesman for Grassley estimated that the senator’s office had been contacted by dozens of whistleblowers from within the Pentagon’s inspector general office over the last decade. “There have been concerns for a long time about the treatment of whistleblowers, certainly hostility toward internal and external whistleblowers,” Smithberger said. She added that it wasn’t necessarily unusual to see so many whistleblowers come forward from a watchdog office, as they are likely more aware of what their rights are than other government employees.

Allen declined to comment on past concerns raised about the inspector general’s office, describing the allegations as “not fully accurate” and “dated.” She said that the Administrative Investigations division where Luke worked had made numerous improvements since 2016, stepping up the timeliness of investigations, reallocating significant resources to the office, and increasing staff numbers. She pointed to a 2018 report from the Project on Government Oversight recommending that the inspector general’s alternative dispute resolution initiative, which uses mediation as a means of resolving complaints instead of lengthy investigations, be considered for implementation at other large offices of inspectors general.

In a 2017 speech, Grassley raised concerns that senior managers in the Pentagon inspector general’s office had, “allegedly been tampering with investigative reports and then retaliating against supervisory investigators who call them to account.” In the same speech, he took the office to task for its backlog in processing whistleblower tips that come in through the agency’s hotline. One of the sharpest critics of the inspector general’s office, Grassley later commended it for reducing the backlog in a 2019 speech, describing it as “a glimmer of hope in an otherwise swamp of secrecy.”

Previous whistleblowers who have come forward from the Office of the Inspector General have alleged that there had been pressure in politically sensitive cases not to stand up allegations made against senior officials. What is different about the claims made by Steven Luke is that he instead seemed to feel pressure to substantiate a case in which he didn’t feel the evidence held up.

It’s not clear whether any senior officials at the Pentagon’s inspector general office sought to influence Luke’s investigation into Cardillo or why. Nor is it apparent from his emails who he allegedly felt under pressure from to substantiate the investigation. Allen denied that there had been any improper influence on the outcome of the case.

In emails to Grassley’s office, Luke said that the then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis had taken a personal interest in Cardillo’s case and speculated that Mattis may have been planning to move or promote the geospatial intelligence chief. “Honestly, it really bothers me—as a human being—that this gentleman’s long and distinguished career would have ended based on a group think ROI [Report of Investigation] had it not been for my willingness to say to my supervisors, ‘No, this isn’t right,’” he wrote.

Cardillo confirmed to Foreign Policy that he had been the subject of an inspector general investigation into two alleged violations of travel standards, and he confirmed that he’d met with Luke during his investigation. He was not aware whether or not he was being considered for a more senior appointment by Mattis. Through a spokesperson, Mattis declined to comment on this story.

Seventy-four offices of inspectors general operate across the U.S. government, and they are often the first port of call for federal employees looking to report allegations of wrongdoing. Luke’s claims of alleged misconduct within the Pentagon’s watchdog office cut to the heart of an age-old dilemma of who watches the watchmen.

Luke’s claims of alleged misconduct within the Pentagon’s watchdog office cut to the heart of an age-old dilemma of who watches the watchmen.

“I often say that IGs, the overseers of agencies, need to be as pure as driven snow, because if they are not, all of their work is tainted,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee in September 2019. Luke’s emails to Grassley’s office raise significant questions about conduct within the inspector general’s office, questions that went unanswered after his death, which is reported here for the first time. Did Steven Luke face any undue pressure regarding Cardillo’s case? Was he “bullied” by his supervisors to substantiate the claims? Was someone looking to use the case to smear Cardillo, as Luke feared?

A Freedom of Information Act request by Foreign Policy revealed that the watchdog did not conduct an internal investigation into Luke’s death. Grassley’s office halted its investigation of the claims upon the advice of counsel as Luke’s death was investigated by law enforcement.

Experts caution against trying to pinpoint a single cause in cases of suicide. “Suicide is complex, and there are many factors that contribute—it’s never just one single factor,” said Jill Harkavy-Friedman, a clinical psychologist and the vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “What happens is when somebody has a stress or multiple stresses it can look like that was the cause, but we don’t know what the person brings to it in terms of any risk factors and vulnerability.” Harkavy-Friedman noted that around 60 percent of people who die by suicide are known to have depression at the time of their death.

Luke’s wife said that his supervisor was aware of her husband’s mental health history and had been very supportive over the years. Allen, the spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office, said, “Mr. Luke was a part of a close office that supported him over the years with personal and caring help when he needed it, both in and outside the workplace. His OIG colleagues—employees, supervisors, and leadership alike—were heartbroken when we learned that Mr. Luke succumbed to his illness.”

Luke had previously attempted to take his own life, and his wife, Amy, worried that it was only a matter of time before he would reach that point again. But she does fear that it was hastened by stress he faced at work. “If they would have just let him do what he’s supposed to do in the job, he would have not been in that darkest place that he ended up being. But I think he eventually would have,” she said. The weekend before his death, Luke had seemed overwhelmed. “He just was dissolving. His mind was just not functioning right,” Amy Luke said.

The living room of the Luke family home in Stafford, Virginia, is adorned with photographs and mementos of all that the Lukes held dear: Texas roots, family, and their Mormon faith. Beneath a photo of the Lukes with their four children, the youngest of whom is now 16 years old, is a long drop-leaf table that has been turned into a memorial to Steven Luke’s life: A graying plush Snoopy from his childhood in Lubbock, Texas. An award he received in 2015 for “Investigation of the Year” in his department of the Office of the Inspector General. The bullet casings from the three-volley salute fired at his funeral.

Luke joined the inspector general’s office in 2008 after retiring from a 20-year career in Air Force intelligence. With a staff of more than 1,500 members, the office is responsible for detecting and deterring unscrupulous behavior that can gather in the corners of the Department of Defense. It’s this kind of work that makes it one of the highest-stakes watchdog offices in the federal government, according to Irvin McCullough of the whistleblower advocacy group the Government Accountability Project. “The DoD OIG is also conducting many, many sensitive investigations, some of which are still properly classified, on extraordinarily sensitive programs,” McCullough said. Luke worked in the Investigations of Senior Officials directorate, a subcomponent of the inspector general’s office that investigates allegations leveled against some of the most senior figures, both military and civilian, within the Department of Defense. In 2019, the office was tasked with investigating then-acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan himself. The allegations were not substantiated.

Working hard had become a form of self-medication for Luke, a way to stave off the depression that weighed heavily on him—Amy Luke, his wife of 33 years, recalled him saying, “I work so hard so people don’t think there’s something wrong with me.” Amy said her husband had long been motivated by a strong sense of justice. In his email signature he included a quote sometimes attributed to the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”

At work he had a reputation among colleagues for being diligent, uncompromising. He had a “high level of attention to detail, very committed to sticking with an investigative plan,” said Daniel Meyer, who previously served as director for whistleblowing and transparency at the Pentagon inspector general’s office. “He really didn’t try to read what his boss wanted. He just presented his work as he found it,” Meyer said. These were useful characteristics to have in an investigator, but it made it all the more difficult when Luke came up against what he felt was wrongdoing by his own supervisors. Meyer, who went on to serve as the executive director of intelligence community whistleblowing and source protection, said that whistleblowers or investigators who have an unyielding approach to wrongdoing can be challenged most when they’re confronted with it in their own office.

“The folks who have the hardest time are the whistleblowers or investigators who see a rule, and they see it violated, and they expect there to be a response to that.”

“The folks who have the hardest time,” Meyer said, “are the whistleblowers or investigators who see a rule, and they see it violated, and they expect there to be a response to that.” He added that there was often an issue of “emotional intelligence” and “resilience” among whistleblowers: “[W]e used to study and watch those two qualities carefully in the IG, when I worked with Steve and the other investigators.”

Meyer himself had blown the whistle on the inspector general’s office in 2016, alleging that they had watered down an investigation into whether former CIA Director Leon Panetta had revealed classified information about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound to the screenwriter who wrote the script for Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the raid.

In late January 2018, Luke was handed the case that would ultimately prompt him to go from watchdog to whistleblower and approach the office of Grassley, whose staff have handled a number of whistleblower complaints about the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General. It wasn’t the first time Luke had contacted the office. In 2013, he reached out to report concerns about the length of time it took for investigative reports to be reviewed by senior leaders in his office and by the agency’s general counsel, but he never followed up.

In a two-page email sent on Dec. 17, 2018, Luke detailed how he felt bullied and increasingly isolated as he sought to resist efforts by his supervisors to substantiate the claims made against Robert Cardillo, who stepped down as director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in February 2019 as part of a scheduled departure. In the email, Luke dispassionately recounts how, after examining the evidence, he advised his bosses that he did not see a “slam dunk” violation of the agency’s rules regarding travel. His supervisors, according to Luke, felt differently. “Over a period of several months, I was pressured and bullied to write the ROI [Report of Investigation] in such a fashion that it would conclude as a ‘substantiation.’”

Luke describes how he found himself excluded from meetings about the case even though he was the lead investigator. When he complained, he received his first ever letter of counseling, a letter from his supervisors detailing what they saw as unacceptable behavior. “I began to believe that my exclusion from internal meetings was because I was the lone voice that insisted the evidence led to a non-substantiation,” he wrote.

In a subsequent email, Luke alleged that a few months into the probe, Marguerite Garrison, the head of his division, told him she was briefing acting Inspector General Fine that they planned to substantiate the claims against Cardillo. In response to questions from Foreign Policy, Allen, the spokeswoman for the Office of the Inspector General, said that it was not uncommon for senior officials to advise the inspector general about the status of an investigation. She added Luke had not included exculpatory evidence in his initial draft report and, at the time, it looked as if the case was set to be substantiated.

Garrison’s handling of cases has previously drawn scrutiny from Grassley. In speeches on the Senate floor in 2016 and 2017, Grassley singled her out when he accused the department’s leaders of having “doctored” an investigation in favor of a rear admiral accused of retaliating against subordinates he suspected of being whistleblowers. He said Garrison allegedly wrote a letter to the rear admiral, clearing him of any wrongdoing before the investigation had been finalized. “To conform with the Garrison letter, the findings in the draft report had to be allegedly changed from substantiated to not substantiated. The investigators dug in their heels and stood their ground,” Grassley said in the 2016 speech.

Allen described these allegations as inaccurate, adding, “Rear Admiral Losey had five separate reprisal investigations opened against him, three of which were found to be substantiated by the OIG. In the first of the other two cases, Rear Admiral Losey was not substantiated against for reprisal, and in the second case, to which Senator Grassley referred, Rear Admiral Losey was removed as the subject of that case because the evidence developed in the investigation showed that the prohibited personnel action was taken by the other alleged subject.”

By August 2018, after months of feeling “pressured and bullied,” Luke acquiesced and told his supervisors that he would write a report substantiating the claims, but only if all of the exculpatory evidence could be included in the final report. If it were deleted, he would complain to Congress.

It was at this point that the pressure began to ease. Luke started to feel like his leadership had begun to take his draft report seriously. According to his email to Grassley’s office, he shared it with four colleagues, senior investigators who were not involved in the case, for a cold read. All reached the same conclusion that the primary allegation against Cardillo did not stand up. Ultimately, the case was closed as unsubstantiated and, according to Luke’s email, was hand-delivered to Mattis, the then-secretary of defense, on Nov. 30, 2018.

“I take no joy in doing this. I like my co-workers. However, our ISO [Investigations of Senior Officials] process is broken and no one here is willing or able to change it,” he wrote in a later email.“I take no joy in doing this. I like my co-workers. However, our ISO [Investigations of Senior Officials] process is broken and no one here is willing or able to change it,” he wrote in a later email.

Allen declined to comment on the facts and circumstances surrounding the case, or on Luke’s perceptions of how it was handled. “Mr. Luke was involved in professional discussions with his supervisors where they sought to confirm that there was sufficient evidence to support Mr. Luke’s proposed outcome in the case,” she said. “Mr. Luke’s supervisors ultimately reviewed the evidence collected by Mr. Luke, found the information in Mr. Luke’s files to support the conclusions in the report, and the report was issued with all relevant evidence, in accord with Mr. Luke’s initial conclusion about the case.”

In the days before Luke died, internal Office of the Inspector General emails obtained by Foreign Policy show that he informed his bosses of his plans to meet with Murphy, the investigator in Grassley’s office, regarding their handling of the Cardillo investigation, which by that point had been closed. Emails also show his supervisor informed him that he could use official time for the meeting.

On Monday, Jan. 7, Fine, the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense, wrote to Luke and offered to meet with him to talk through his concerns. Luke replied the next day to say he would be happy to meet that morning. It is unclear whether the meeting ever took place. Later that day, when Luke failed to return home at the usual time, his wife raised the alarm. His body was found later that evening.

Following in the footsteps of his father, Luke joined the U.S. Air Force in 1988, drawn by a desire to serve his country and a love of travel. His work in Air Force intelligence took the family around the world, from South Korea to Panama to Spain and Germany, but wherever they went, Luke’s depression followed. For years he resisted seeking help for his mental health, fearing that it could put his security clearance and by extension his job at risk. It was only some 15 years into his Air Force career that he was placed on medication that helped to alleviate some of his symptoms. But years of missed treatment had already taken a toll, further entrenching his depression, Amy Luke said.

Only a tiny number of security clearances are denied or revoked because of mental health, according to the Department of Defense. Between 2006 and 2012, only one in every 35,000 people either applying for the first time or looking to maintain their security clearance was denied because they disclosed a history of mental health issues, a message military leaders have tried to drive home. But Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist, said that the stakes of losing a security clearance have long held service members back from seeking help. “Say you’ve been in the military for 10 to 15 years. Losing your clearance means losing your job—that means losing your health care. It also means losing your housing and losing your retirement,” said Ritchie, who at the time of her retirement from the military in 2010 served as the director of proponency of behavioral health in the Office of the Army Surgeon General. Added to that is the stigma attached to seeking help, “It’s a concern about what your buddies will think, concern that you won’t be found fit for duty,” Ritchie said.

“I don’t think Steven’s death can be attributed directly to this case or to the atmosphere at work or from anyone’s actions or inactions.”

The one thing that offered Luke a temporary release from his depression was speaking Spanish, Amy Luke said. After graduating high school, Luke spent 18 months in the Dominican Republic as a missionary. He went on to complete a degree in Spanish at the University of North Texas. “It’s like he could compartmentalize the depressed Steven from the Spanish-speaking Steven,” Amy said. He tried to instill his love of the language in their four children, buying them books and Disney films in Spanish.

Five months after her husband died, Amy Luke wrote to his former colleagues, explaining his history of depression. “There was not anything that could have been said or done to have changed the outcome. I know, I tried to save him from his suicidal thoughts for thirty-three years,” she wrote in the letter. It was signed off with a red heart.

In response to questions from Foreign Policy, the Office of the Inspector General reached out to Steven Luke’s wife for comment, which Allen included in the agency’s response. Amy Luke said, “I know that Steven’s peers and his leadership were thoughtful, professional, and caring when it came to the depression he experienced. He suffered from a pervasive and profound depression that he lived with for most of his life. Unfortunately, the suicidal ideation that often accompanies this kind of depression can be deadly, as was the case with Steven. I don’t think Steven’s death can be attributed directly to this case or to the atmosphere at work or from anyone’s actions or inactions.”

On Jan. 15, 2019, Steven Luke was buried amid the neat rows of granite headstones in Quantico National Cemetery in Virginia. On a recent Saturday afternoon, the only sound to disturb the silent repose of the cemetery was a light breeze that whispered through a nearby thicket of trees and rippled the miniature American flags planted in the earth.

Amy Mackinnon is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @ak_mackForeign Policy Magazine

[fromtheothersideby]

And so here I am, asking bluntly – is the closedown of the country the right answer to the coronavirus? I’ll be accused of undermining the NHS and threatening public health and all kinds of other conformist rubbish. But I ask you to join me, because if we have this wrong we have a great deal to lose. I don’t just address this plea to my readers. I think my fellow journalists should ask the same questions. I think MPs of all parties should ask them when they are urged tomorrow to pass into law a frightening series of restrictions on ancient liberties and vast increases in police and state powers. Did you know that the Government and Opposition had originally agreed that there would not even be a vote on these measures? Even Vladimir Putin might hesitate before doing anything so blatant. If there is no serious rebellion against this plan in the Commons, then I think we can commemorate tomorrow, March 23, 2020, as the day Parliament died. Yet, as far as I can see, the population cares more about running out of lavatory paper. Praise must go to David Davis and Chris Bryant, two MPs who have bravely challenged this measure. It may also be the day our economy perished. The incessant coverage of health scares and supermarket panics has obscured the dire news coming each hour from the stock markets and the money exchanges. The wealth that should pay our pensions is shrivelling as share values fade and fall. The pound sterling has lost a huge part of its value. Governments all over the world are resorting to risky, frantic measures which make Jeremy Corbyn’s magic money tree look like sober, sound finance. Much of this has been made far worse by the general shutdown of the planet on the pretext of the coronavirus scare. However bad this virus is (and I will come to that), the feverish panic on the world’s trading floors is at least as bad. And then there is the Johnson Government’s stumbling retreat from reason into fear. At first, Mr Johnson was true to himself and resisted wild demands to close down the country. But bit by bit he gave in. The schools were to stay open. Now they are shutting, with miserable consequences for this year’s A-level cohort. Cafes and pubs were to be allowed to stay open, but now that is over. On this logic, shops and supermarkets must be next, with everyone forced to rely on overstrained delivery vans. And that will presumably be followed by hairdressers, dry cleaners and shoe repairers. How long before we need passes to go out in the streets, as in any other banana republic? As for the grotesque, bullying powers to be created on Monday, I can only tell you that you will hate them like poison by the time they are imposed on you. ll the crudest weapons of despotism, the curfew, the presumption of guilt and the power of arbitrary arrest, are taking shape in the midst of what used to be a free country. And we, who like to boast of how calm we are in a crisis, seem to despise our ancient hard-bought freedom and actually want to rush into the warm, firm arms of Big Brother. Imagine, police officers forcing you to be screened for a disease, and locking you up for 48 hours if you object. Is this China or Britain? Think how this power could be used against, literally, anybody. The Bill also gives Ministers the authority to ban mass gatherings. It will enable police and public health workers to place restrictions on a person’s ‘movements and travel’, ‘activities’ and ‘contact with others’. Many court cases will now take place via video-link, and if a coroner suspects someone has died of coronavirus there will be no inquest. They say this is temporary. They always do. Well, is it justified? There is a document from a team at Imperial College in London which is being used to justify it. It warns of vast numbers of deaths if the country is not subjected to a medieval curfew. But this is all speculation. It claims, in my view quite wrongly, that the coronavirus has ‘comparable lethality’ to the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed at least 17 million people and mainly attacked the young. What can one say to this? In a pungent letter to The Times last week, a leading vet, Dick Sibley, cast doubt on the brilliance of the Imperial College scientists, saying that his heart sank when he learned they were advising the Government. Calling them a ‘team of doom-mongers’, he said their advice on the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak ‘led to what I believe to be the unnecessary slaughter of millions of healthy cattle and sheep’ until they were overruled by the then Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King. He added: ‘I hope that Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance show similar wisdom. They must ensure that measures are proportionate, balanced and practical.’ Avoidable deaths are tragic, but each year there are already many deaths, especially among the old, from complications of flu leading to pneumonia. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) tells me that the number of flu cases and deaths due to flu-related complications in England alone averages 17,000 a year. This varies greatly each winter, ranging from 1,692 deaths last season (2018/19) to 28,330 deaths in 2014/15. The DHSC notes that many of those who die from these diseases have underlying health conditions, as do almost all the victims of coronavirus so far, here and elsewhere. As the experienced and knowledgeable doctor who writes under the pseudonym ‘MD’ in the Left-wing magazine Private Eye wrote at the start of the panic: ‘In the winter of 2017-18, more than 50,000 excess deaths occurred in England and Wales, largely unnoticed.’ Nor is it just respiratory diseases that carry people off too soon. In the Government’s table of ‘deaths considered avoidable’, it lists 31,307 deaths from cardiovascular diseases in England and Wales for 2013, the last year for which they could give me figures. This, largely the toll of unhealthy lifestyles, was out of a total of 114,740 ‘avoidable’ deaths in that year. To put all these figures in perspective, please note that every human being in the United Kingdom suffers from a fatal condition – being alive. About 1,600 people die every day in the UK for one reason or another. A similar figure applies in Italy and a much larger one in China. The coronavirus deaths, while distressing and shocking, are not so numerous as to require the civilised world to shut down transport and commerce, nor to surrender centuries-old liberties in an afternoon. We are warned of supposedly devastating death rates. But at least one expert, John Ioannidis, is not so sure. He is Professor of Medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University in California. He says the data are utterly unreliable because so many cases are going unrecorded. He warns: ‘This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4 per cent rate from the World Health Organisation, cause horror and are meaningless.’ In only one place – aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess – has an entire closed community been available for study. And the death rate there – just one per cent – is distorted because so many of those aboard were elderly. The real rate, adjusted for a wide age range, could be as low as 0.05 per cent and as high as one per cent. As Prof Ioannidis says: ‘That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05 per cent is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.’ Epidemic disasters have been predicted many times before and have not been anything like as bad as feared. The former editor of The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins, recently listed these unfulfilled scares: bird flu did not kill the predicted millions in 1997. In 1999 it was Mad Cow Disease and its human variant, vCJD, which was predicted to kill half a million. Fewer than 200 in fact died from it in the UK. The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported as having ‘a 25 per cent chance of killing tens of millions’ and being ‘worse than Aids’. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared ‘the first pandemic of the 21st Century’. There were similar warnings in 2009, that swine flu could kill 65,000. It did not. The Council of Europe described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as ‘one of the great medical scandals of the century’. Well, we shall no doubt see. But while I see very little evidence of a pandemic, and much more of a PanicDemic, I can witness on my daily round the slow strangulation of dozens of small businesses near where I live and work, and the catastrophic collapse of a flourishing society, all these things brought on by a Government policy made out of fear and speculation rather than thought. Much that is closing may never open again. The time lost to schoolchildren and university students – in debt for courses which have simply ceased to be taught – is irrecoverable, just as the jobs which are being wiped out will not reappear when the panic at last subsides. We are told that we must emulate Italy or China, but there is no evidence that the flailing, despotic measures taken in these countries reduced the incidence of coronavirus. The most basic error in science is to assume that because B happens after A, that B was caused by A. There may, just, be time to reconsider. I know that many of you long for some sort of coherent opposition to be voiced. The people who are paid to be the Opposition do not seem to wish to earn their rations, so it is up to the rest of us. I despair that so many in the commentariat and politics obediently accept what they are being told. I have lived long enough, and travelled far enough, to know that authority is often wrong and cannot always be trusted. I also know that dissent at this time will bring me abuse and perhaps worse. But I am not saying this for fun, or to be ‘contrarian’ –that stupid word which suggests that you are picking an argument for fun. This is not fun. This is our future, and if I did not lift my voice to speak up for it now, even if I do it quite alone, I should consider that I was not worthy to call myself English or British, or a journalist, and that my parents’ generation had wasted their time saving the freedom and prosperity which they handed on to me after a long and cruel struggle whose privations and griefs we can barely imagine. - Peter Hitchens https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8138675/PETER-HITCHENS-shutting-Britain-REALLY-right-answer.html 

#resistthelockdown #whatsreallygoingon