Dear Kos Readers,
Hi again. I've been writing (Part I) about the improbable ascent of U.S. Ambassador to Italy and Bush fundraiser Melvin Sembler, whose wife Jeb Bush calls "ambassadorable." It's about the mainstreaming of torture in American life.
The story so far: STRAIGHT, Sembler's teen drug rehab center named among the "thousand points of light" by Bush I, was shut down for widespread criminal violations in 1993. Florida politicians were complicit in covering up abuses, the St. Petersburg Times reported.
I'd like to use this diary to share more information that didn't make my article.
How bad was the abuse at STRAIGHT, where kids were beaten, spat on, and sexually abused in Abu Ghraib fashion? Bad enough to make a boy commit murder?
In a Death Row case, a Pennsylvania judge ruled March 4, 2004 that it was worth considering. Please read on.
STRAIGHT encouraged kids to confess to perversions. Young Bradley Martin admitted he'd been molested. And so he was spat on and called a "faggot" -- told he liked it up the ass.
This is typical of the pictures of the 12 STRAIGHT clinics that emerge in court papers, though the ambassador continues to boast on the U.S. Embassy Web site that he saved 12,000 children from drugs.
When Bradley Martin left STRAIGHT he was a reeducated man -- with new feelings, perhaps, about his relationship with one elderly Guy Goodman.
He kidnapped Goodman, bound him with electrical tape and suffocated him.
When the cops caught Bradley, they found marijuana on him. Evidently STRAIGHT hadn't made him drug-free.
Bradley was sentenced to death. But Judge Robert Eby of Lebanon County, Pa., ruled that Martin was entitled to a new sentencing hearing, because the first jury hadn't been told about potentially mitigating evidence -- including his 25 months at STRAIGHT's all-day confession sessions.
Meanwhile the Hon. Mel Sembler lives with his wife Betty on a walled estate in Rome, which encompasses the city's largest private garden. A recent St. Pete Times article on their anniversary called the event "a regal toast to love," as guests strolled the azalias and played tennis.
It was like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe story.