Kill the Canaries!

Dear MRFF,

First off, congratulations on yet another signal victory for the Constitution and in keeping religious activity in its proper place within the military.  Someday, though, I wish you would have fewer victories as a more meaningful signal that our military and political leaders understand that supporting and defending the Constitution applies to their decisions and policy, and the guidance they give on a daily basis.

Calling the USAF Academy (USAFA) out on the Samaritan’s Purse Christmas Charity was important in many ways.  First, it validated what we should now call the “The Schwartz Doctrine” of official neutrality by commanders and their chains-of-command with respect to religious issues.  As far as I know, this is really the first time the Chief of Staff of the Air Force’s CSAF’s 1 Sep 2011 memo to commanders has been invoked in a public way to change an announced policy or program.  Maybe, if USAFA leadership had distributed the letter immediately upon receipt and made sure its contents were understood by cadets and staff, they would not have had to place the embarrassing role of “first public example.”  It’s probably also no coincidence that the Chief’s guidance is invoked at USAFA during the very week that the Gen Schwartz and all of the Air Force’s generals are visiting USAFA for the football game against Army.

The bad news here, though, is that this case shows more clearly than a canary in a carbon monoxide filled coal mine that a problem REALLY does exist at the Academy.  Let’s review the facts.  First, cadets come up with an idea for a holiday charity and then discuss it amongst themselves–within the Cadet Wing leadership.  I really doubt that this occurred in a vacuum without any officers knowing about it, but let’s presume that was the case.  The cadets should’ve known better, because they’d all received the CSAF’s memo from the Commandant more than two weeks before, but again, they’re young and shit happens even when intentions are good.

Next, they decide to make an announcement on the staff tower at lunch to the entire Cadet Wing.  Now, I don’t have the text of that announcement, but there isn’t a weekday lunch at the Academy that isn’t attended by numerous officers–including the Commandant or his deputies and group AOCs on the Staff Tower.  Did none of them think to question the issue?  Maybe the Samaritan’s Purse connection was avoided and it did just sound like a charity event with no religious ties.  I don’t know.

But, the staff tower announcement was followed up later that afternoon (at 1701 to be exact) by a Wing-wide email that explained the whole operation and included a link to Samaritan’s Purse.  Here’s where the canary really starts to get woozie.  One can read the email and it all looks fine, until you check the link.  Then from the link, you need to further click on the “About Us” and “Who We Are” links to get to the fact that Samaritan’s Purse is a blatantly evangelical christian organization that uses donated money, toys, and other items as bait to convert the World’s poor to their brand of christianity.  Not many cadets are going to take the time to click these links–they’re busy.  The officers and cadet leadership that allowed (and endorsed) the email to go out Wing-wide either didn’t click on that link, or they DID click on the links and it didn’t bother them.  This makes them either negligent or complicit.  Both are bad.

Obviously, some cadets DID click on the link and, given the fact that they couldn’t trust their chain-of-command (and why would they if this came to them from the pinnacle of cadet leadership after being approved by them and announced from on high) they took the only recourse currently available to them and contacted the MRFF.

What isn’t reported in the paper, but that I’ve learned from MRFF, is that the MRFF next TRIED to keep this internal to USAFA by contacting the Commandant via email that same evening.  This was the avian equivalent of the first (of several) canaries collapsing in its cage and the others saying to the miners:  “Get the Hell Out!  Bob just died.”  Unfortunately, the coal miners decided that they were too busy digging to check in on the canary or listen to the others–or they just needed their beauty rest–and the Commandant didn’t bother to respond to MRFFs alert until the afternoon of the NEXT DAY.

So, on Thursday, after receiving no response from USAFA leadership, the MRFF goes to the media and guess what?  The media listens.  A respected local reporter who’s proven himself friendly and loyal to the Academy for several years gathers his facts and thinks there might be a story here.  (This is like confirming that the first canary really is dead)  So, he contacts USAFA to ask why the first canary died and is told, “It’s just a charity.  Our cadets are great kids.  No religious participation on our part, so we’re good to go.  That Mikey Weinstein just hates us and is doing anything he can to dredge up a story to make us look bad.” (I paraphrase)

The reporter, though, as reporters are apt to do, actually does some research and finds that another governmental organization backed away from an identical charity operation with the same group in the past–Colorado Springs School District 11 in 2008.  In a town as conservative as Colorado Springs, this was bold enough news to cause production of an article in the Gazette!  Our intrepid reporter realized that maybe there is something to this, so he writes an article and posts it on-line, presenting the facts but now including the info on District 11 that was unknown (I presume) by the Academy.  In other words, the veterinarian just confirmed that the canary is, in fact, dead, that it died from carbon monoxide poisoning, that that same gas has killed other canaries in the past, and that if the miners don’t get the hell out of the mine now, they could be in some deep trouble.  He effectively pulled the alarm.

Finally, USAFA reacts.  I still don’t think most of them can even conceive that what they did wrong, but they know that when the Chief of Staff of the Air Force is in town, it’s not a good thing to be seen as less Constitutionally compliant than a local K-12 school district.  Emails fly, a retraction and mea culpa goes out to the Gazette (damage control) and the Commandant sheepishly calls Mikey Weinstein and apologizes for a mistake that he could’ve completely averted if he’d simply checked his blackberry before turning out the light on his nightstand the night before (or at the breakfast table the next morning, or when he first got into work, or…)

Meanwhile, on the message boards of the Gazette and in the hallways of USAFA, the answer to the problem for many seems to be:  “KILL THE CANARIES!  It’s those damn little birds and all their chirping that are causing us problems.”

USAFA Leadership doesn’t get it.  They’ve sworn an oath to protect the Constitution.  They have policy.  They have recent guidance.  But, because they’ve been an integral part of the problem itself for so long–in fact, fueling the burners that produce the very carbon monoxide, unseen and unscented, that’s killing the canaries–they can’t see the problem until its too late.  And even then, their reaction is to blame the alarm system instead of fixing the fundamental issue.

Anonymous USAF Academy Staffer, USAF Academy Graduate and USAF Officer