Missing the targets

Washington Post: Between 1993 and 2002, 142 female cadets at the Air Force Academy reported being victims of sexual assault. When the scope of this scandal finally emerged into public view last year, one of the most disturbing aspects was the lackadaisical attitude of much of the leadership throughout this period. So it sounded like good news -- and a welcome if belated dose of accountability -- this week when the Defense Department's inspector general released his report on the academy. Not only did the report find a "failure of successive chains of command over the last ten years to acknowledge the severity" of the academy's sexual assault problem, it identified eight officers who it said were responsible for the lapse. But in fact the report got things almost completely backward. Among the officials it cited as culpable was at least one who ought to have been praised for trying to improve an intolerable situation for the academy's female cadets; among those it cleared were some who were most responsible for allowing the problem to fester.
Dissenting voice
Former representative Tillie Fowler, R-Fla., who chaired an earlier, outside review of sexual misconduct at the academy, termed the report "completely off the mark" in criticizing retired Lt. Gen. Bradley Hosmer, a former academy superintendent. (The public version of the report didn't include names, but the individuals were identified in subsequent news reports.) In a letter to Inspector General Joseph Schmitz last month, all seven members of the Fowler panel expressed their concern and amazement that the inspector general was targeting Hosmer. "General Hosmer was the first senior leader at the Academy to take concerted action to determine the extent of the sexual assault problem," they wrote, "and to take decisive action to both prevent this misconduct and to respond to it more forcefully and effectively when it did occur."
Likewise, Fowler said, it was "shameful" that Schmitz "refused to hold accountable the immediate past leadership" -- Brig. Gen. S. Taco Gilbert III, the former academy commandant; Brig. Gen. David Wagie, the former faculty dean; and Col. Laurie Slavec, the former training group commander -- "who so strikingly failed the academy at its most vulnerable time."
Fowler, it's important to understand, isn't a foe of the military or of its current management; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld named her to chair the Defense Policy Board, and he turned to her again this year, in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, to join a panel on prisoner abuse.
It's hard to understand how a thorough review of the goings-on at the academy could hold these officials blameless. Schmitz seems to have an unerring instinct for the capillaries -- and the wrong capillaries at that. His findings need a thorough, and skeptical, scrubbing.