Libby's defense fund team

First up: Melvin Sembler




The chair: Melvin Sembler, a wealthy Florida real-estate developer and ex GOP finance chief who, ironically, was President George W. Bush's ambassador to Italy when the embassy in Rome first got the forged yellowcake documents that helped trigger the affair.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10117472/site/newsweek

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1937032





This Bush crony has blood on his hands! I'm on the radio tonight to talk about it
by johngorenfeld
Thu Nov 10, 2005 at 02:21:41 PM PDT
I'm the guy who exposed the crowning of Rev. Moon on Capitol Hill last year. Tonight I'll be talking about a harrowing saga of Bush family cronyism, on Mark Levine's D.C. talk show Radio Inside Scoop, which you can listen to on the Internet live -- 7 p.m. EST, 4 p.m. West Coast.

You thought Michael Brown was bad? In a true story worthy of Edgar Allen Poe, I'll be talking about how the Bush family's close friend and ambassador to Italy ran a teen drug rehab center closed for cruelty to thousands. Survivors will be calling in to tell their stories of this American Abu Ghraib. The Torquemada of this teen punishment story, Melvin Sembler, has gone on to live the high life in Italy, embraced by cigar buddies Jeb and George Bush as an anti-drug hero, treated as a drug policy expert, and having a Roman palace renamed for him at taxpayer expense by Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young (R-FL) -- opponent of the McCain torture ban.

More importantly, his powerful influence in drug policy could be affecting your life. I'd love it if you'd tune in. It's an important underbelly of Republican corruption that is hurting a new generation of teenagers today.

johngorenfeld's diary :: Permalink :: Discuss (7 comments)
EXPOSED ON ALTERNET: A Bush crony's saga of teenage torture
by johngorenfeld
Tue Nov 08, 2005 at 07:59:50 AM PDT
Hi, I thought I'd post some extra information here that didn't make it into my AlterNet story on STRAIGHT, Inc. and Melvin Sembler, the Bush family friend who stepped down as U.S. Ambassasdor to Italy this year. A recurring Bush family crony, and RNC Finance Chairman from 1997-2000, his influential teen treatment business was shuttered by authorities for cruelty, in 1993 -- this despite having been named among the "thousand points of light," during its 16 years, by the first Bush.

For years, the Bushes have embraced a man whose private business subjected young Americans -- perhaps thousands -- to some of what we've seen in detainee prison scandals. After the ACLU accused his for-profit punishment centers of something "very close to really performing psychic murder," Sembler grinned and said, "It just shows we must have been doing something right."

http://www.dailykos.com/tag/melvin%20sembler


His Own Private Abu Ghraib

He created a system to reprogram bad kids. Delete the bad code in their personalities. Break the will of sullen stoner boys, make bad girls confess to whorish secrets and reverse-engineer the minds of heavy metal kids. And rebuild all of them into an anti-drug army. Such were the works of Melvin Sembler and the feats that STRAIGHT, the ultimate in teen drug rehab programs, attempted during the Totally Awesome Eighties.

Melvin Sembler's clinics might have seemed like a good idea at the time, when teen drug use was high and New Age thinking seemed to offer new and hopeful therapies for pressing the RESET button on human beings.

There were major problems, though. He modeled STRAIGHT after another program, creepily named "The Seed," shut down after the U.S. Congress literally issued a report in 1974 comparing it to "the highly refined 'brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans." Sembler's imitation wasn't shut down until 1993 for illegal child abuse: beatings and sexual humiliation. Kids were thrown against walls. Or forced to sit in their own menstrual blood. Unless, of course, they were ready to cooperate, confess, and chant "I'm at STRAIGHT, feeling great" with the others. In that case they got to be the enforcers. Dozens of lawsuits exposed a similar picture in 12 clinics across America.

Fast forward to 2005. Sembler, 75, is the United States Ambassador to Italy. The enforcers have turned into Sembler's enemies and one man is out for payback.

http://media.orkut.com/articles/r0145.html


Ambassador de Sade

Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic.

Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents -- all behind Sembler's back.

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome.

"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul." She told AlterNet that she was committed at 12, in 1980, for nothing more than being caught with a mini-bar-sized liquor bottle, handed out by a classmate whose mother was a flight attendant. Samantha's mother suspected more, and a STRAIGHT expert reassured her fears. The small blonde junior high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her mother, told by counselors that her daughter was a liar, was encouraged to trick the girl for her own good.

http://www.alternet.org/story/27725/

Mel Sembler's monument to himself exposed--but it's just the tip of the iceberg!

Last week when Al Kamen (The Washington Post) exposed Ambassador Sembler's $113 million, taxpayer-paid monument to himself courtesy of Congressman C.W. "Bill" Young, it was only the tip of the iceberg. And The St. Petersburg Times can't escape blame for letting it happen.

In 2003 US ambassador to Italy Melvin Sembler, AO personally negotiated with an Italian company to procure the INA building in Rome (shown at left) for $83 million and then got his buddy from his hometown of Pinellas County, Florida Congressman C.W. "Bill" Young (the most senior Republican in Congress and chairman of the House's Appropriation Committee) to fork over the money plus another $30 million to renovate it and then have it named, as a shrine to himself, The Mel Sembler Building . According to State Department spokesman Emil Skodon this is the first time in the history of the United States that a sitting ambassador has had a building named for him on foreign soil, so he must be doing something very, very right--or terribly, terribly wrong. This was not the first time somebody tried to erect a monument to Mel Sembler. Young also appropriated $50 million to repair the causeway to Treasurer Island, Florida (an exclusive waterside community in St. Petersburg where the Semblers live); $3 million to build a research center for Operation PAR--his wife Betty's current drug rehabilitation program association, and $10 million for some screwball Italian research project for an AIDS vaccine. So what does Bill Young get out of all this? Well Sembler has named the main hall in the Mel Sembler Building the C.W. Bill Young Conference Center and the research building for Operation PAR is named the C.W. Bill & Beverly Young, Center for Research & Recovery.

Al Kamen and The Washington Post broke the story on the Shrine on March 4, 2005. Sembler's hometown newspaper, The Saint Petersburg Times , made just a brief mention of the naming of the building on February 24 but did no further investigation. Also the Times failed to mention that 14 years before Sembler, then Ambassador to Australia and Nauru, may have been the force behind an initiative to get a monument erected to himself in his hometown of Saint Petersburg. As you are about to learn Ambassador Sembler has a dark past and the St. Petersburg Times knows it. His outlandish behavior should have been briddled years ago, long before he cost taxpayers 1/10 of a billion dollars to pump up his enormous ego, and the one entity that could have and should have stopped him was The Saint Petersburg Times. Why it did not is the story behind the story.

http://www.tampaindymedia.org/bin/site/templates/default.asp?area_2=imc/open%20newswire/2005/Mar/53793.5625.dat

Narcissus Is Now Greek AND Roman

The media blew it once again last week, focusing on President Bush's fence-mending trip to Europe. There were countless stories about yet another presidential visit across the pond where world leaders said things they surely didn't mean.

The big news was not in Brussels or Bratislava, but in Rome, where real history was made with the dedication of the Mel Sembler Building. This lovely, ornate building in the heart of the Eternal City had been put up for sale a couple of years ago by an Italian insurance company. U.S. Embassy officials jumped at the chance to consolidate outlying offices in a more secure location near the embassy.

And who better to negotiate the $83.5 million deal than the ambassador himself, a wealthy former shopping center developer in St. Petersburg, Fla., and former Republican National Committee finance chairman who gave the GOP boatloads of money over the years?

And this would be . . . yes, Mel Sembler. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush rewarded Sembler with a fine ambassadorship in Australia. But the money kept coming in, and Sembler got the RNC post in 1997. So by 2000, something much better than Canberra was only fitting. Only one of the great ones -- say, Rome -- would do.

But how is it the building came to be named for a sitting ambassador? This is something that apparently has never happened in U.S. diplomatic history, no matter how meritorious the diplomat. Not even for such folks as Llewellyn Thompson or Charles "Chip" Bohlen, both ambassadors to Moscow during the darkest days of the Cold War.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5165-2005Mar3.html

I'm one dandy freedom-loving sumbitch.