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 **Mentally ill relegated to jail cells **  The voices are relentless. They insult him, threaten him, tell him to slit his wrists. Raymond Santos is 30 years old and exhausted, run ragged for most of his life by a biochemical tempest in his mind. A year ago, he grew so desperate for the voices to shut up that he tried to appease them by taking a large, serrated kitchen knife and digging it four inches into his stomach. Two weeks later, with 31 staples in his abdomen, he landed in Florida's largest psychiatric facility. The Miami-Dade County Jail. He was locked up in a wing where psychotic inmates sleep on the tile floor or rusted metal bed frames, without sheets, blankets or mattresses. They stay in their cells for 24 hours a day. No books, no TV, no visitors, no toothbrush, no eating utensils, no clothes. They screech and cower at unseen demons. They pace furiously and rip their paper gowns off. They urinate on the floor and bathe in the toilet. The noise never stops, the fluorescent lights mask the passing of days, and the psychiatrist treats patients through a three-inch-wide chow hatch in a steel door. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">I don't even try to describe to people what's going on up here, said Dr. Joseph Poitier, the jail psychiatrist. ``It's beyond talking about.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">The scene is just one consequence of a nationwide failure to care for the severely mentally ill, a situation created over the last 40 years by the closing of psychiatric hospitals in Florida and other states. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Those institutions -- often bleak warehouses for the insane -- were supposed to be replaced by local treatment centers that would get patients functioning in the community. But mental health experts widely agree that the new system never received enough funding and has offered fragmented services at best. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">With the safety net frayed to threads, untold thousands of people suffering schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression have gone untreated, often homeless and wandering the streets, unable to guide their unruly minds through the straight lines of society. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">They trespass, they commit lewd acts, they resist arrest. And many end up in jail over and over. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Jails and prisons have become, in effect, the country's front-line mental health providers, according to a Human Rights Watch report released last October. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">While some other states, like New York, have made significant strides in keeping the mentally ill in treatment -- and out of jail -- Florida has been slow to move. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">**<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">`BIGGEST FAILURE' **<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;"> <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">This is our biggest failure, said Miami-Dade County Court Judge Steve Leifman. ``It's this cycle of despair.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Santos, from Carol City, landed in jail last June on a probation violation for a previous offense; he was too paranoid to report to his officer, he says. He was stripped naked, given a paper gown and locked into the C-wing on the ninth floor. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">You hear people screaming, people laughing, he said. ``It is hell. I wouldn't wish the ninth floor on my worst enemy.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">In Miami-Dade County, where the percentage of people suffering serious mental illness is between two and three times the national average, the justice system is overloaded with a population it was never meant to care for. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">At any given time, an average of 600 inmates have mental illness serious enough for them to be segregated from the general population. Ten years ago, the number was about 300. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">It's a test of your faith, said Officer Clarence Clem, a pastor and officer who has worked on the ninth floor of the jail for 19 years. ``There's got to be a better solution than this.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Broward County has had similar problems. On any given day, about 400 people are segregated out of 1,100 inmates -- or 23 percent of the jail system's population -- on psychotropic drugs. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Psychiatric inmates languish in jail eight times longer than other inmates, Judge Leifman says. They wait for court-ordered evaluations. They wait for medication to make them competent to stand trial. They wait for beds in treatment facilities. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Often cut loose from their families and unable to work, they rarely post bail, and when they are released, they have nowhere to go. Many just ride a merry-go-round through a wretched freedom on the streets and oppressive confinement in jail. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Santos did two rounds in jail since his injury. On June 1, 2003, he was arrested for not reporting to his probation officer and released two months later. Without treatment, he was arrested for the same thing in January. This time, he stayed for three months before he even went to court. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">No one is an advocate for these people, said Poitier, the psychiatrist. ``They are always at the end of the line. . . always, always, always.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">**<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">PUSHING MEDS **<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;"> <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Poitier does rounds every morning, treating up to 100 patients in less than two hours. His only goal is to persuade inmates to take their medication. There is no time for anything else. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Shadowy faces peer out the windows in C-wing, some just gazing, some frantically trying to make eye contact with anyone. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Several inmates are cataleptic, as still as statues. One bangs his head violently and writhes on the floor. Another shouts gloriously, ``Thank you, Jesus!'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Poitier, with an unfathomable patience, leans down to the chow hatch of a cell and raises his voice to get the attention of an inmate slumped on the floor. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">``Mr. Aviles, do you have any suicidal thoughts?'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">The inmate slowly nods no. His eyes are blank. His bare feet are chalky and cracked. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">``Do you hear any voices?'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Same response. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">The cell walls are scratched with desperate, fantastical messages. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Mom, I Miss U, is written in one cell. In the adjacent cell: ``I am an alien that not belong here. My place is on the sky.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Poitier comes to a cell with one metal bed rack and three men. On the rack is Jose Freddie Jacome. A week before, the 34-year-old man would not move, speak, eat or even shift his eyes. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">But on Feb. 6, he agreed to take his medication. Four days later, he was answering the doctor's questions and eating. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Santos was also languishing in jail that day. After several weeks in the C-wing, he was transferred to one of six other psychiatric wings that are less severe. He is allowed to have clothes. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">I was real bad when I came in, he says. ``I was talking out loud to myself. . . . It bothers me remembering the things I've gone through. If you could only see what's going through my mind. There's some part of it I can't control.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">In jail, Santos was given heavy doses of medication that helped quell the voices but made him slow and groggy, his voice flat. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">Santos is as fragile and earnest as a child. His probation officer, the guards and social workers almost dote on him. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">He's just the sweetest kid, says Jill Sperling, a mental health paralegal with the public defender's office. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">But his life is a wreck. Santos has been homeless for months at a time, eating out of trash cans. He gets paranoid and thinks his parents are trying to persecute him. He goes on bouts of using crack cocaine. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">He once sold the family television set and even stole a necklace off his 7-year-old niece's neck. He was attacked in prison. He has scars from self-inflicted knife wounds all over his body. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">I fight every day in my head, he says. ``I don't want to hear voices. Only crazy people hear voices. But I'm not crazy, so why do I hear these voices?'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">His family must assure him over and over again that they still love him. My mom will hug the kids, says his younger sister Dialis Santos, 'and he'll say, `Why don't you hug me, too? I need love, too.' He is a 30-year-old child.'' <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">He often tries to call his family, but they don't have the money to accept collect calls from jail pay phones. His disabled father sells avocados on the street corner so Santos can buy cookies and chips from the jail commissary. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">**<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">TREATMENT AT LAST **<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;"> <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">On March 16, Santos was finally sentenced. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">The judge granted him a conditional release to the type of in-patient treatment he had wanted, a new program at Bayview Center for Mental Health in Pembroke Pines. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">He was lucky to get on the waiting list. There are scant few of these programs and hundreds of people in need. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">On April 27, nearly a year after he stabbed himself -- and after more than 165 accumulated days in the county jail -- Santos was finally transferred to treatment. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">They cut down my medication and gave me better therapy, he said last week ``I was like a zombie in jail. <span style="line-height: 13pt; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 9pt;">``I am alert now. I actually have fun now.'' <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
 * || <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 7.5pt;">Posted on Sun, May. 23, 2004 ||
 * <span style="color: #666666; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt;">MENTAL HEALTH **<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt;">
 * <span style="color: #666666; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 7pt;">BY JOE MOZINGO **<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt;">
 * <span style="color: #666666; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 7pt;"> jmozingo@herald.com **<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt;">
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> ||
 * <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Lawyers protest sharp cut in pay **

<span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 7.5pt;">By Paula McMahon <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 7.5pt;">Staff Writer <span style="color: #999999; font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 7.5pt;">Posted May 20 2004 <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> || <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">South Florida attorneys and Broward County's chief judge are predicting a serious crisis in the criminal justice system after July 1, when the paycheck for representing low-income people accused of capital crimes will be slashed statewide to a maximum of $3,500.

As the burden for paying court-related costs shifts this summer from counties to the state, local attorneys and legal experts are predicting that it will be impossible to get lawyers to do the demanding and emotionally draining work of representing poor people who face the death penalty. <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Death cases are the most challenging and time-consuming because a life is at stake and the attorney must try to save it. And even supporters of the death penalty should be concerned, local attorneys said, because the problems will slow down cases and may make them even more likely to be reversed on appeal.

"I think concerned is too light a word to describe what I feel, I think it borders on the critical," said Broward Chief Judge Dale Ross. "If we're limited to $3,500, I can see a crisis looming.

"At $3,500, I don't think we're going to get anyone to represent these people, and if we were to get somebody for that money, I'm not sure what caliber of representation we would get," Ross said. He is drafting a letter to the program's administrators in Tallahassee to express concern and press for more realistic rates.

At issue are cases in which courts appoint private attorneys to represent indigent defendants when the Public Defender has a conflict of interest.

On Wednesday, the Broward Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers wrote to Ross expressing grave concerns about the fee cuts. Joint association presidents Michael Gottlieb and Charlie Kaplan said they have not yet found a local lawyer willing to take on a case for that amount of money.

"That would average out at about $3 per hour for these complex cases," Gottlieb said. "It's certainly below minimum wage and any attorney willing to take a case for that would not be qualified to handle it."

The association is considering filing a class action lawsuit because the rate cut would deprive judges of the ability to appoint effective attorneys to represent poor people, a right the U.S. Constitution guarantees every defendant, said Bruce Rogow, a Fort Lauderdale attorney and nationally recognized expert on constitutional law. Rogow said he is interested in handling such a case for the association.

"It is the hardest, most debilitating kind of work," Rogow said. "When you do it, your bed is wet at night with sweat because of the pressure and the responsibility."

Right now, Broward County pays attorneys handling such cases $50 per hour for in-court work and $40 for out-of-court work, up to a maximum of $25,000 for the lead attorney and $15,000 for the penalty phase lawyer, Gottlieb said.

In 2002, the county paid an average of $25,600 per capital case. A lawyer working for a private client with money could expect to earn from $50,000 to $250,000, depending on the lawyer's ability and reputation, said Gottlieb.

In Palm Beach County, lead defense attorneys in death penalty cases have been paid $100 per hour and other attorneys on the team have been paid $75 per hour, according to Palm Beach County Court Administrator Susan Ferrante.

And in Miami-Dade County, attorneys working death penalty cases have been paid $80 per hour. If they're in trial for more than 41/2 hours, they have been getting $800 per day, said Nan Markowitz, a courts spokeswoman.

Palm Beach County defense attorney Robert Gershman, who just finished a monthlong death penalty case, said he expects the quality of defense attorneys on the Palm Beach registry after July 1 to suffer because of the $3,500 fee limit. "I don't know, in Palm Beach County, of any capital defense attorney who would take a capital defense case with a $3,500 cap."

Sen. J. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami, who is also a lawyer and has handled capital cases in the past, acknowledges that the rate for capital cases is grossly inadequate. He would not do death penalty work for that cut-rate price, he said.

He said a crisis may be needed to repair the system.

"It probably would be a good thing for the system to crash so the non-attorneys in the Legislature understand [the problem]," Villalobos said.

Broward attorneys are also very concerned about changes in the payment methods for noncapital crimes.

Under the new rules, attorneys appointed to such cases will have to pay upfront for costs such as hiring a private investigator, taking depositions of witnesses and getting mental health evaluations. They will later be reimbursed by the state.

Many self-employed lawyers cannot afford to carry such costs, Gottlieb said. And the system, he said, will discourage qualified attorneys from taking noncapital cases and affect the quality of representation.

Staff Writers Jaime Hernandez and Linda Kleindienst contributed to this report.

Paula McMahon can be reached at pmcmahon@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4533 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> || || <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> ==<span style="margin: 10pt 0in 0pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> Saving Private England   == <span style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 7.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Published: May 16, 2004
 * || <span style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;">**<span style="color: #666666; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">FRANK RICH **

<span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> IT'S almost too perfect. Two young working-class women from opposite ends of West Virginia go off to war. One is blond and has aspirations to be a schoolteacher. The other is dark, a smoker, divorced and now carrying an out-of-wedlock baby. One becomes the heroic poster child for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the subject of a hagiographic book and TV movie; the other becomes the hideous, leering face of American wartime criminality, Exhibit A in the indictment of our country's descent into the gulag. In the words of Time magazine, Pfc. Lynndie England is "a Jessica Lynch gone wrong." <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> Maybe that's true — we are just starting to hear Private England speak for herself — but there's a more revealing story in these women than the cheap ironies of their good witch/wicked witch twinship might suggest. Our 13-month journey from Jessica Lynch's profile in courage to Lynndie England's profile in sadism is less the tale of two women at the bottom of the chain of command than a gauge of the hubris by which those at the top have lost the war in both the international and American courts of public opinion. And the supposedly uplifting Lynch half of the double bill is as revealing of what's gone wrong for us in Iraq — and gone wrong from the start — as is her doppelgänger's denouement at Abu Ghraib. <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> Flash back for a moment to the creation of Jessica Lynch Superstar. It was in early April 2003 that the stories first surfaced about the female Rambo who had shot her way out of an ambush." `She Was Fighting to the Death' " read the headline in The Washington Post, an account that was then regurgitated without question by much of the press. Later we learned that this story was almost entirely fiction, from the heroine's gunplay to the reports of her being slapped around by her Iraqi captors to the breathless cliffhanger of her rescue. Meanwhile, Jessica Lynch herself, unable to speak, was reduced to a mere pawn, an innocent bystander to her own big-budget biopic. When she emerged six months later, Diane Sawyer asked if it bothered her that she had been showcased by the military. "Yeah, it does," she answered. "It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong." <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> This wrong was not committed by accident but by design. In the revelatory new documentary about Al Jazeera, "Control Room," opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, we are taken into our own Central Command's media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action. The Lynch episode came at a troubling moment in the war; our troops were being stretched thin, the coalition had mistakenly shot up a van full of Iraqi women and children, and three Marines had just been killed in the latest helicopter crash. But as we see in "Control Room," the CentCom press operation was determined to drown out such bad news by disseminating the triumphant prepackaged saga of its manufactured heroine no matter what. <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> The documentary captures some of the briefing at which the dramatic Lynch story was first laid out. An American journalist on hand, the veteran CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, grumbles afterward about how the "minute-by-minute" account of the rescue has superseded the major news he and his colleagues had been waiting for: the fate of troops just entering Baghdad. His cavils were useless, however; the instant legend was moving too fast to be derailed. Soon the military would buttress it with a complementary video, shot and edited by its own movie crew: an action-packed montage of the guns-blazing Special Operations rescue raid, bathed in the iridescent "Matrix"-green glow of night-vision photography. But the marketing of this Jerry Bruckheimer-style video was itself an exercise in hype, meant to blur and inflate the Lynch episode further. <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> The director of "Control Room" is Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American who is a protégé of D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the chroniclers of the '92 Clinton campaign in "The War Room." Though Ms. Noujaim's principal subject may be the Arab satellite news station that has been widely condemned as a fount of anti-American propaganda, her eye for the American media is no less keen. The true control room in "Control Room" is not so much the Al Jazeera HQ as the coalition media center. It is there, from a costly Hollywood set, that the military commanded its own propaganda effort, which was aided and abetted by an American press sometimes as eager to slant the news as its Arab counterpart. The attractively forthright American press officer we follow throughout the documentary, Lt. Josh Rushing of the Marines, doesn't deny the symmetry: "When I watch Al Jazeera, I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing — by choice. Same thing when I watch Fox on the other end of the spectrum." <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> Revisiting the invasion of Iraq again in "Control Room," we can see how much the Bush administration was seduced into complacency early on, not just by the relative ease with which it took Iraq but by its success at news management. The Lynch triumph was followed within days by the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue (which looks more like a staged event than a spontaneous Iraqi outpouring when Ms. Noujaim shows it in wide-angle shots). Next up was "Top Gun." Yet we were very good at feigning ignorance about our own propaganda while decrying Al Jazeera's fictionalizations. In one particularly embarrassing illustration of American hypocrisy, we're reminded of how Donald Rumsfeld berated the Arab channel for violating the Geneva Convention by broadcasting pictures of American prisoners of war. By the time of his outburst — March 2003 — we were very likely already violating the Geneva Convention ourselves. The confidential Red Cross report uncovered this week by The Wall Street Journal reveals that complaints about our abuse of Iraqi prisoners had already started by then, some 10 months before the Pentagon launched the Taguba investigation. <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> In retrospect, much of what we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom was as fictionalized as CentCom's version of "Saving Private Jessica." When we weren't staging the news, we were covering it up. "A war with hundreds of coalition and tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties" was transformed "into something closer to a defense contractor's training video: a lot of action, but no consequences, as if shells simply disappeared into the air and an invisible enemy magically ceased to exist." That was the conclusion reached by one of the leaders of a research project at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, which examined 600 hours of war coverage on CNN, Fox and ABC from the war's March 20, 2003, start to the April 9 fall of Baghdad, "to see how `real' the war looked on TV." Of the 1,710 stories they surveyed, "only 13.5 percent included any shots of dead or wounded coalition soldiers, Iraqi soldiers or civilians." <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> That brief war, since renamed "major combat operations," seems like a century ago. As "Saving Private Jessica" symbolizes how effectively the military and administration controlled the news during Operation Iraqi Freedom, so the photos of Lynndie England and her cohort symbolize their utter loss of that control now. More scoops are on the way, and not just those of torture. "Everybody wants to cut to the chase, but the movie has just started," a top Republican aide told The New York Times this week. We are only beginning to learn, for instance, about the shadowy roles played by America's most sizable ally in "the coalition of the willing" — not the British, with some 9,000 troops, but the mercenaries, whose duties and ranks (now at some 20,000) have crept up largely out of our view. <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> It has taken a while for Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers to figure out just how much their power to enforce their own narrative of this war has waned. Their many successes in news management have been their undoing, leaving them besotted by their own invincibility and ill-equipped for failure. Clearly they still believed they could control the pictures. According to Mr. Rumsfeld's own congressional testimony, he was "surprised" that lowly enlisted men could be "running around with digital cameras" e-mailing grotesque Kodak snapshots all over the world. Even after making that discovery, such was his and General Myers's habitual arrogance that they didn't bother to get ahead of the Abu Ghraib story — or to familiarize themselves with its particulars — once CBS gave them a full two weeks of head's up before "60 Minutes II" broadcast it to the world. Or maybe they just hoped that the press's wartime self-censorship would continue. After all, in happier times, Larry Flynt had done the patriotic thing by refusing to publish half-nude snapshots of Jessica Lynch that fell into his hands at the time of her greatest celebrity. <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> In desperation, some torture apologists are trying to concoct the fictions the administration used to ply so well. Rush Limbaugh has been especially creative. The photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib "look like standard good old American pornography," he said as the story spread, as if he might grandfather wartime atrocities into an entertainment industry that, however deplorable to Islam, has more fans in our Christian country than Major League Baseball. In Mr. Limbaugh's view, the guards humiliating the Iraqis were just "having a good time" and their pictures look "just like anything you'd see Madonna or Britney Spears do onstage . . . I mean, this is something that you can see onstage at Lincoln Center from an N.E.A. grant, maybe on `Sex and the City . . .' " <span style="mso-element-anchor-horizontal: column; mso-element-anchor-vertical: paragraph; mso-element-frame-hspace: 2.25pt; mso-element-wrap: around; mso-element: frame; mso-height-rule: exactly;"> But this movie has just started, and it's beyond anyone's power to spin it any longer. Yet when the president traveled to the Pentagon on Monday to look at previews of the coming attractions, he seemed as out of touch with reality as Mr. Limbaugh. It was nothing if not an odd moment to congratulate the secretary of defense, who has literally thrown the reputation of our honorable military and our country to the dogs, for doing a "superb job." But to understand where Mr. Bush is coming from, one need only recall the interview he gave last fall to Brit Hume of Fox News, in which he griped about the press ("the filter," as he calls it) that was now challenging administration propaganda from Iraq. "The best way to get the news is from objective sources," the president said back then, "and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Perhaps someone on that staff might tell him that, according to the latest polls, most of the country has changed the channel. ||