Washingtonian

John Beale could always be counted on to get the toughest jobs done at the Environmental Protection Agency and garnered respect and admiration from fellow staff members. But when he began taking days off to do work for the CIA while still collecting his full salary, something didn’t add up:

The first time anyone broached the subject was that year, when Jeff Holmstead, then assistant administrator of the Air and Radiation Office, spoke with Beale about his “D.O.” Wednesdays. Beale revealed that the joke was no joke: He’d worked for the three-letter agency earlier in his career, and it was now calling him back for a secret assignment. He would have to take a half day off here and there to help out. Maybe a few whole days, too. Holmstead, who’d known Beale during his time working on the Clean Air Act amendments, agreed to the arrangement.

In 2002 “D.O. Oversight” would appear in Beale’s calendar 22 times. The next year 14 times, and the year after that 18. In 2005 his covert operation took him away for 25 days. At times he’d make coy references to big international news—a bombing in Pakistan, violence in India—and insinuate that the CIA had him working on it. To colleagues who saw Beale as an outstanding employee, it made sense that agencies more selective than the EPA would put his talents to use.

Asra Nomani, a close friend and colleague of Daniel Pearl — who was murdered in 2002 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an architect of the 9/11 attacks — discusses how she grappled with Pearl’s death years later while investigating his murder:

One of the first people I come across while waiting for the courtroom doors to open is James Connell, a defense attorney.

“I’m sorry for the death of your friend,” he tells me. “This must be hard for you.”

I don’t know how to respond. Condolences aren’t what I expected to hear, especially from the defense. I’ve come defiant, wearing a gauzy pink tunic to reject the dark black shroud that a radical like KSM would expect on a Muslim woman. “Thank you,” I finally say.

By 9:25 am, we’re seated and a Guantánamo bailiff bellows, “All rise!” As Army colonel James Pohl, the judge, enters, the five defendants remain sitting.

Dr. Stephen Hoffman has been searching for a way to eradicate malaria for the past 30 years. He may have found a vaccine to do it:

There was no way Hoffman was going to ask US Marines to line up for a thousand mosquito bites each. But he decided to repeat the irradiated-mosquito experiments to understand the science better.

Once again, Hoffman signed himself up for the study. In the mid 1990s, he returned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to stick another pint-size container of insects against his arm. This time, the cylinder swarmed with hundreds of malaria-infected mosquitoes, each having been buzzed with a dose of radiation. The bloodthirsty insects left a circle of swollen red skin on his arm, but Hoffman didn’t stop until he had been bitten by 3,000 mosquitoes.

Weeks later, when he was infected with malaria, he didn’t get sick.

A profile of former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who spent time in prison for corruption and fraud charges. Abramoff is back in the public eye and wants to help with government reform, but it’s unclear if his intentions are completely sincere:

“Many who knew Abramoff in his past life view his reform efforts with skepticism. I could almost hear some of them rolling their eyes on the other end of the line when I called. A couple of them sighed loudly when I explained what I was working on. One suspected I was just a pawn in Abramoff’s comeback strategy, asking if he was ‘pushing’ me to do the story. (For the record, I approached Abramoff for this article, not the other way around.)

“‘Time will tell whether Jack’s doing this to get a seat at the big-boy table again in Washington,’ says Neil Volz, who worked with him at Greenberg Traurig. ‘He likes to win. He wants to engage in politics in probably the only issue that he currently can—and win.'”

A woman with Turner syndrome decides to participate in a study at the National Institutes of Health:

“I arrived at the NIH Clinical Center alone, early, and unprepared. The nurse responsible for checking me in wasn’t even on duty yet. I had packed my suitcase as if for a four-day business conference, not a hospital stay—slacks, blouses, and pumps rather than T-shirts, sweats, and tennis shoes. That was probably a function of my denial as well as my ‘don’t leave home without lipstick’ impulse. I’d never spent a night in a hospital, never had an MRI or CT scan.

“People generally don’t go to NIH when they have a garden-variety illness. NIH takes the sickest of the sick and offers hope. Old and young gather there. The common denominator is illness—the kind so serious that it generates platitudes and whispers. To be a patient at NIH feels like being a contestant on a reality show in which all the cameras are turned on you—or being a lottery winner when the prize is assuming a large debt at a huge interest rate.”

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As a bonus, read Steedly’s blog post about how her essay, which she worked on in a writing class in 2007, ended up being published in the Washingtonian.

On Sept. 22, 1987 an American pilot named Tim Dorsey shot down a U.S. plane during a flying exercise. The incident could have ended his career, but it didn’t:

“Dorsey offered compelling evidence that something was changing in the Navy. Every time he was up for promotion, a selection board reviewed his performance and the record of the shootdown. They’re required to consider any ‘adverse information’ in their decision. There’s actually a mark in a personnel record, called a Field-Code 17, that signals to members of a selection board that there’s a black mark in the officer’s past. That code stays in the officer’s file. In Dorsey’s, it pointed to hundreds of pages of testimony about the shootdown, flight records, even an invoice that itemizes millions of dollars in damage he caused to US government property.

“During every promotion review, the shadow of the shootdown hung over Dorsey. But it never overtook him.”

Hospitals nationwide are experiencing drug shortages, including critical nutrients needed to keep premature babies and other patients alive. Are drug manufacturers and the FDA both at fault?

“Some hospitals have resorted to bartering with one another to secure even a small supply of nutrients, and many are rationing.

“At least one NICU in the District is administering some trace elements only three days a week instead of seven. At Atticus’s hospital, no patients heavier than 2½ kilograms (5½ pounds), including NICU babies, are getting intravenous phosphorous. ‘You could have a brand-new, full-term baby and they don’t qualify,’ a staff member says. ‘There are really sick babies and one-, two-, three-year-olds that don’t get anything at all because we’re rationing it for our tiniest preemies.’

“‘It almost makes me cry—our patients are starving because of drug shortages. How can this happen in this country?’ says ASPEN past president Jay Mirtallo, a professor of clinical pharmacy at Ohio State University. ‘In the last three years, there hasn’t been one PN product that hasn’t been in short supply. I’ve traveled all over the world talking about parenteral nutrition, and our colleagues in Europe, South America, and Asia just look astounded and ask how this can be such a significant problem when they have no issue whatsoever in any of their countries.'”

The Supreme Court is considering whether or not it is unconstitutional for police to gather DNA from from individuals who are arrested—even if the DNA evidence results in crime-solving:

“Once the government has someone’s DNA, Shanmugam argues in his briefs, Big Brother has possession of that person’s genetic blueprint. Allowing the government to collect and keep DNA raises privacy concerns, he writes, because it contains ‘information that can be used to make predictions about a host of physical and behavioral characteristics, ranging from the subject’s age, ethnicity, and intelligence to the subject’s propensity for violence and addiction.’

“Shanmugam acknowledges that laws prohibit unauthorized disclosures of DNA, but he points out that Maryland’s law allows sharing DNA for ‘research’ purposes. And he notes that state attorney general Gansler ’embraced’ the notion that the government would eventually have everyone’s DNA, because Gansler testified before the legislature that someday ‘everybody’s DNA’ would be in some sort of a database, ‘like with our Social Security numbers.’

“Shanmugam wrote in his brief: ‘Some Fourth Amendment incursions may come dressed in sheep’s clothing. This wolf comes as a wolf.'”

How the last king of Rwanda ended up living on public assistance in Virginia:

“In 1990, under Western pressure, Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu who had ruled with an iron first for nearly two decades, agreed to share power with other parties. Seeing its chance, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the militant group of Tutsi exiles in Uganda, invaded, igniting long-dormant tensions between Hutu and Tutsi.

“Kigeli refused to endorse the RPF’s violent tactics, but a Rwandan journalist who interviewed him in Kenya was arrested upon his return to Rwanda on charges of harming state security. Kenya’s then-president, Daniel Arap Moi, had close ties to Habyarimana, and Kigeli and Benzinge began to fear for their security.

“The United States wouldn’t just be safer, they thought; its freedoms of speech would allow them to broadcast Rwanda’s plight to the world. They picked up the phone and called the one American they knew: Bill Fisher.”

[Not single-page] A man helps his friends during a killing spree in Southeast Washington D.C., leaving five young people dead. He then decides to testify against them in court:

“When they sat down a few days later, Williams launched into his standard spiel: Don’t talk on the jail phones, don’t discuss your case with anyone. ‘And I think he was hearing, ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah,’ because he turns to me and says, “Man, what can I do to make this right?” ‘

“Williams couldn’t recall working with a client whose first instinct wasn’t to minimize his exposure. But he did as asked and arranged a meeting with the prosecutors.

“A team of investigators crammed into a small conference room at police headquarters. One of the first things Nate told them was perhaps the most surprising: Malik Carter, the 14-year-old, had nothing to do with the shooting. The government’s working theory—the kid’s name was Carter, after all, and he’d run at the sight of the cops—now had an ugly hole in it. ‘Mike Brittin’s jaw was on the floor,’ Williams says.”