Dispatches

There's sure to be a lot of back-slapping going on around Capitol Hill  today, now that the new veterans nursing home in Ogden is open for business. The state senate passed a bill back in March of 2008 that fronted $20 million in construction costs so that the facility could be built even as the state awaited federal reimbursement for the project.

There was a lot of back-slapping going on that day, too, as one by one, Utah's state senators took turns extolling their commitment to the nation's veterans.

The piece of legislation they passed, which would fund the construction of a veterans nursing home, was "a long time coming," one said. Yes, agreed another, the bill was evidence that legislators were prepared to "step up" for their state's vets. Indeed, said a third, the Ogden facility would be "an edifice of our support."

But there were more than a few raised brows and snickers among the dozens of aging veterans in the Senate gallery on that Friday morning. The waiting list at Utah's lone veterans home in Salt Lake City is hundreds of names long — and has been for years. And yet many of those same vets had watched as, for six years, construction costs rose as senators hedged over the funding for a second home in Ogden.

At issue were questions as to whether and when the state would be reimbursed for its investment by the federal government. Citing Utah's growing and aging population of vets, House members resolved to take a leap of faith on the reimbursement pledge as early as 2005.

But even as funding for the new home appeared on Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s recommended budget earlier in 2008, veterans advocates worried and wondered whether they would find support in the Senate, where lawmakers were worried that the feds might not make good on their pledge.

The Senate finally approved the funding — but only after a compromise was reached in which lawmakers agreed that the federal government must reimburse the state at least 65 percent of its investment on the Ogden home before another facility may be funded.

Veterans advocates say they'll challenge Utah's lawmakers to remove that stipulation so that work can get started on addittional facilities in St. George and Tooele.

Another member of "Team Hill" has committed suicide. The victim, a Hill airman, killed himself at Antelope Island over the weekend.

The latest suicide brings to at least eight the number of self-inflicted deaths by airmen and civilians at Hill Air Force base according to Salt Lake City's Fox 13 News. The grim tally, which does not include any of the thousands of contractors that work at Hill, is the most suicides in a single year in at least a decade at the base. And the rate of self-inflicted deaths at Hill is several times higher than Utah’s already higher-than-average suicide rate.

The Salt Lake Tribune has been reporting on Hill’s suicide problem since early this year, when it was learned that the last suicide victim of 2008, 39-year-old sheet metal machinist Donald Cleavenger, had killed himself in an aircraft hangar after receiving a poor performance review.

Hill officials say that the base offers a tremendous number of mental health services for struggling airmen and civilians who work at the base and deny that working conditions at the northern Utah logistics center and airbase have anything to do with the problem.

Military members needing help can visit militaryonesource.com or call 800-342-9647. Civilian employees can access help by calling 800-222-0364.

Journalism is not about being unbiased.

In fact, I often tell people, journalism is an exercise in bias. And you can see that played out, every day of the year, in your daily newspaper.

From what we choose to cover, to where we put that news in relationship to other news, to what facts we choose to focus on, journalism is the process of determining what news is most interesting and most important for our readers.
Professional journalists seek to do this with fervor, independence, accountability and compassion. And we always seek to be fair.

But, in the end, there are only so many words in each article, only so many articles on each page and only so many pages in each newspaper. And so we have to make choices. And in doing so, we exercise our biases.

I did so just today.

Aaron Nemelka, one of 13 people killed in a Nov. 5 mass shooting at Ft. Hood, was laid to rest on Saturday in Utah. At the same hour as his funeral, an uncle who has been estranged from Nemelka’s family over religious differences, had pledged to hold a press conference “in protest of the way in which his nephew has been publically (sic) memorialized.”

Even if the times and locations hadn’t clashed, I wouldn’t have bothered with the uncle’s rant. To me it was not interesting, nor was it important. And that’s not even to mention that the entire situation reeked of bad blood and opportunistic evangelizing.

Journalism is not about giving everyone a voice. It is about determining which voices best tell our society’s stories. 
Aaron Nemelka’s voice was silenced last week. I wouldn’t dishonor that by giving voice to someone who sought to exploit his family’s tragedy to further his own causes. There is a time and a place for everything. And today, the pages of The Salt Lake Tribune were not the time or place for this fallen soldier’s uncle.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who admittedly orchestrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be prosecuted in federal court in New York, the Obama Administration  has announced.

It will be interesting to see, now, how prosecutors manage to handle their duties given the fact that Mohammed was repeatedly subjected to waterboarding and other torturous interrogation techniques while in U.S. custody, as it's extremely unlikely that any federal judge would permit evidence tainted by torture.

It's been more than 400 years since William Shakespeare coined the term "Band of Brothers," but the term still endures as a way to describe the close-as-kin relationships formed between those who serve together in combat.

And for activist and Iraq War veteran Jeff Key, that's the biggest problem with the military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell: policy, which prohibits gay service members from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.

In a Veteran's Day article in The Tribune, Key said that the policy imposes "an essential dishonesty" into relationships that, by definition and necessity, need to be like family.

I'll be guest hosting Monday's RadioWest on 90.1 FM, KUER and we're planning a conversation about the Don't Ask policy. Is it essential to maintaining good order and discipline or has it had a contrary effect?

Join us and join the conversation. Monday at 11 a.m. and  p.m.