Courtesy of
Alaska Dispatch:
As the Alaska National Guard sexual misconduct and leadership scandal evolves into a major issue in his re-election bid, Gov. Sean Parnell is confronting two key questions: When did he learn about problems in the guard, and did he respond effectively?
The record shows that Parnell took nearly his entire four-year term to remove officials at the top of the guard and its related civilian department.
Parnell, officially the guard’s civilian commander, has acknowledged receiving complaints about deeply entrenched problems within guard leadership starting in 2010, but he said they lacked specifics.
The problems didn’t go away. More than three years later, on Feb. 28, Parnell called for help from the Pentagon.
Parnell’s plea to the federal government was answered by Gen. Frank Grass, chief of the National Guard Bureau, who sent a team of investigators to Alaska. They delivered a scathing report into leadership failures in the guard that created a toxic climate in which sexual assaults, sexual harassment, misuse of guard money and equipment, and outright fraud persisted for years.
The report by General Grass was released at the beginning of last month, at a time when Parnell was attempting to run for reelection literally forcing him to respond. Which he sort of did by firing two entire people, Major General Thomas Katkus and deputy commissioner McHugh Pierre.
Of course Parnell also tried to share the blame by stating that, Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski had not done anything about it either.
The difference being of course that it is NOT their fucking job. It is the job of the governor of the state to make sure that the National Guard was not misusing government resources or allowing female members to be sexually assaulted or raped.
The Dispatch then goes on to explain just now many people tried to get Parnell to get off his fat ass and do something, including three chaplains, a Colonel, two lieutenant colonels, retired Alaska Air Guard Brig. Gen. Gene Ramsey, and State Senator Fred Dyson, a fellow Republican.
Here is what Dyson had to say:
“I three times went to Sean and said, ‘You need to get on top of this and do something,’ and his response was, ‘I’ve done everything asked of me and every charge that has been brought has been referred to law enforcement. What more should I do?’ I said, ‘You need to be in charge of this and there’s more stuff, including an atmosphere that allows this stuff to go forward.’”
Dyson did not get involved until two years after Parnell had first been notified of the situation.
There were also two ADN stories in 2013, but still Parnell did nothing.
Finally when he could not longer ignore it, and there was a danger that it might negatively impact his bid for reelection, Parnell stumbles into action.
Here was how he explained the delay:
In hindsight, Parnell said, he should’ve acted sooner, but believed he was being reasonable “under the circumstances.”
“You check the traplines over there, you do what you think is reasonable at the time, and it turns out that we were wrong, and I was wrong to trust what I was hearing, ” Parnell said.
I have no fucking idea how a trapline analogy is supposed to work here, but I think a better one would be if you heard your frat brother raping a young woman and you closed his door so that the sounds of her screams and cries for help would not bother you.
And this is the guy who wants credit for starting a program to fight sexual assault in Alaska.
