FV Katmai has been found about 200 miles offshore of Mobile, Ala. It disappeared in February 1972. Photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard.
Forty-one years ago, a Kodiak-bound fishing boat out of Mobile, Alabama, disappeared without a trace, taking all hands with it. Now the Coast Guard says the fishing vessel Katmai has been found.
A Schmidt Ocean Institute survey of the ocean floor came across the Katmai in December, while working for the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
The crew of the research vessel Falkor saw an unknown sonar blip about 200 miles offshore of Mobile, in the Gulf of Mexico, but had no record of a sunken vessel in that spot. They sent a remote operating vehicle, or ROV, to investigate, and found the Katmai in 9,000 feet underwater — in remarkably good shape.
The Coast Guard was notified and initiated a cold-case investigation.
They determined the vessel was constructed by Bender Ship Building and it departed Mobile on February 18, 1972. It never made its destination of Alaska, or even as far as the Panama Canal, and was presumed at the time to have sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
It was skippered by owner Oskar Joos. His wife and their eight-year-old child were on board, and crewman Clinton Hollevoet.
The Coast Guard has contacted the families of the victims and told them what happened to their loved ones.
U.S. Air Force B-2 stealth bomber flies over near Osan U.S. Air Base in Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul on Thursday. Shin Young-keun/Associated Press
The U.S. military is making no secret about a training flight by a pair of nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers from a base in the American Midwest to the Korean Peninsula — what’s being described as an “extended deterrence mission.”
The flight of the two radar-evading bombers “demonstrates the United States’ ability to conduct long range, precision strikes quickly and at will,” the United States Forces Korea said in a press release Thursday.
The strategic bombers belonging to the 509th Bomb Wing took off Thursday from a base at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., and flew “more than 6,500 miles to the Korean Peninsula, dropping inert munitions on the Jik Do Range [in South Korea], and returning to the continental U.S. in a single, continuous mission,” USFK said.
It said the United States is “steadfast in its alliance commitment that the defense of the Republic of Korea, to deterring aggression, and to ensuring peace and stability in the region.”
The B-2 bomber is a vital element in that deterrence, according to the USFK release.
The Associated Press says it’s “unclear whether America’s stealth bombers were used in past annual drills with South Korea, but this is the first time the military has announced their use.”
Drawing attention to the stealthy (and normally quiet) training mission is clearly meant as a signal to North Korea. It comes amid ongoing joint exercises between the U.S. and ally South Korea, and as Pyongyang has stepped up rhetoric — warning of a “simmering nuclear war” on the peninsula.
According to The New York Times, North Korea is particularly sensitive about U.S. bombers in the region:
“It keeps most of its key military installations underground and its war cries typically reach a frenetic pitch when American bombers fly over South Korea during military exercises. The resulting fear and anti-American sentiment is used by the regime to make its people rally behind Pyongyang’s ‘military-first’ leadership.’ ”
Winter view of West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Alaska’s tsunami warning communications system will be tested as part of Tsunami Preparedness Week.
The test will occur sometime between 9:45 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. Wednesday. It may be heard or seen on radio or televisions stations around the state, and on NOAA weather radio.
Some video messages may not specify that Wednesday’s message is a test, although the audio should clearly specify that it is only a test.
And so, that tests, basically, the plumbing of the system all the way through from generation here at the Warning Center to activation at the (National Weather Service) forecast offices, and then through propagation through the broadcasters in the Emergency Alert System.”
The test will be cancelled if excessive earthquake activity is already underway.
If you live in a coastal area, you can provide feedback on the test by going online at ready.alaska.gov/survey
Activities for Tsunami Preparedness Week include a tsunami exercise on Wednesday and an open house at the Palmer center on Saturday afternoon.
The 49th anniversary of the Good Friday earthquake is Wednesday, March 27th.
Wednesday, March 27th 9:30 a.m. update:
Whitmore says they constantly monitor about 600 stations around the world for possible activity. If an earthquake is detected and it meets certain criteria, then Whitmore says they’ll immediately issue a warning. Then, as more data comes in, they’ll continuously refine their modeling for any potential waves and revise their warnings.
As an example of some of their criteria used in issuing tsunami warnings, Whitmore says they may immediately issue a warning for parts of the Alaska coastline if they detect a North Pacific earthquake of 7.0 magnitude or greater that’s centered near the coast or just offshore, and is not located too deep.
Wednesday, March 27th 11:30 a.m. update:
EAS test occurred at 9:53 a.m. AKDT
EAS test as received by 360North/Gavel Alaska television through GCI cable. The test message was not rebroadcast though KTOO, KRNN, or KXLL FM in Juneau. But KTOO engineers have already identified potential fixes for proper relay of emergency alerts. Photo by Matt Miller/KTOO News
A Predator drone taxis in after a sortie over Iraq in 2004. U.S. Air Force/Getty Images
The responsibility for counterterrorism operations involving unmanned drones could soon begin shifting from the CIA to the Pentagon as part of Obama administration efforts to mollify critics who say the program lacks transparency, says NPR’s Tom Gjelten.
A senior U.S. official tells NPR that while no decision has been made, the change is a “distinct possibility.” The Daily Beast broke the story on Wednesday.
The move would come in response to a bruising confirmation fight for John O. Brennan to become the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Republicans and Democrats alike used Brennan’s confirmation hearings to criticize the administration for not being more open about the drone program, especially when it has, on rare occasions, targeted U.S. citizens.
“The Obama administration basically had to promise to come clean on the drone program in order to get Brennan approved,” Gjelten says.
For years, the CIA has been using unmanned aircraft to target suspected terrorists — first under President George W. Bush and then under President Obama. A CIA drone was used in Yemen to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, after he became a key operative in the al-Qaida network.
Under the aegis of the CIA, the program has enjoyed a considerable degree of secrecy and flexibility because under U.S. law is not subject to the same restrictions as a traditional military operation carried out by the Pentagon, Gjelten says. The president can authorize the CIA to carry out the operation outside the normal military chain of command, where it can remain covert and deniable.
From the administration’s standpoint, such a shift would occur at a time when the drone program is not quite as high of a priority as it once was, Gjelten says.
“To be brutal, they’ve killed most of the really bad guys they’ve been after,” he says. “They lately have been going after second- or third-tier al-Qaida operatives.”
Gjelten says that in his new post, Brennan also wants to demilitarize the CIA.
If a decision is made, shifting responsibility for the program would occur gradually as “a phased approach” of operations in individual countries.
“It would be easiest to do it in Yemen, because the drone strikes there are already being carried out jointly by the Pentagon and the CIA,” he says. “Pakistan would be the big change. The drone strikes there have been almost entirely directed by the CIA.”
In an interview with NBC last month, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta hinted at the change and suggested that even if most of the drone operations were moved to the military, some of them might remain covert.
“I think a lot more of this can be put under Title 10 [military operations] and that on Title 50 [intelligence operations] we always ought to have that capability to use a covert effort if we have to,” he said. “But I would limit that.”
Jamie Livingston was sexually abused while serving in the Navy. She now lives in El Paso, Texas. David Gilkey/NPR
Dora Hernandez gave a decade of her life to the U.S. Navy and the Army National Guard, but some of the dangers surprised her.
“The worst thing for me is that you don’t have to worry about the enemy, you have to worry about your own soldiers,” she says.
Sitting in a circle, a group of women nod in agreement. All are veterans, most have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they’re also survivors of another war. According to the Pentagon’s own research, more than 1 in 4 women who join the military will be sexually assaulted during their careers.
“I was assaulted while I was in boot camp in the Army, and I was raped when I went to the Navy,” says Sabina Rangel, who is hosting the group in her living room outside El Paso, Texas.
The women introduce themselves with similar short, shocking accounts of their military careers. It’s the first meeting of a group set up by Grace After Fire, an organization designed specifically to work with female vets on their journey back from active duty to civilian life. Not an easy task.
Gautier served 23 years in the Army, and her friendly, confident demeanor helps break the ice. “We may not have the same trauma that you have, but you’re not alone,” she says.
A ‘Culture Change’
About 19,000 sex crimes take place in the military each year, according tothe Pentagon’s most recent estimate. Many of the victims are male, but men in the service face the same risk of sexual assault as civilian men do. It’s a different story for women. Women who join the military face a much higher risk of sexual assault than civilian women.
“It’s a complex problem because it involves a culture change,” says Maj. Gen. Gary Patton, the head of the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. “We have to see a culture change where those victims of this crime are taken seriously at their unit level by every member of their unit, so you don’t see the divisiveness and the lack of support and the feeling of isolation that these victims feel.”
That isolation, and the uphill fight to even get the crime of rape reported, is what drives a high number of women like Sabina Rangel away from a planned career in the military.
Rangel signed up after high school to serve her country and earn money for college. It started from day one, with her drill sergeant at basic training.
“I thought he was trying to mentor me, but it was ‘How close I can get?’ ” she recalls.
Rangel didn’t enlist in the Army after boot camp. She didn’t talk about the attack — almost to convince herself it never happened.
The Pentagon estimates that only 14 percent of sexual assaults get reported. Many victims say their rapists outranked them, and sometimes the perpetrator was the same official they’d have to report the crime to. This was the case for Rangel.
She was young, and after the assault she moved on with her life, got married and had a daughter. She later divorced, and in June of 2000, she tried the military again, thinking it could lead to a better job, this time in the Navy Reserve. She was assigned to an Army joint command in El Paso.
Red tape held up Rangel’s paychecks, and when she got called in to her command sergeant major’s office, she thought he was going to help her solve the problem.
“He let me know that if I would meet up with him in a hotel he would give me money. And I was like, ‘No, I just need my paycheck,’ ” she says.
But the propositions didn’t stop.
“I finally asked his secretary that when he called me and closed the door [to] please knock on the door. And she said, ‘Sabina, it happens to everybody,’ ” Rangel says.
Dozens of women interviewed for this story spoke about a culture where men act entitled to sex with female troops. One joked that rape is part of the job description. Rangel says she tried to avoid ever being alone with the sergeant major, but he greatly outranked her.
“Then I had a mission that I had to go on, and this command sergeant major was there,” Rangel says. “He and another sergeant major outright told me that we were going to have sex.”
She reported the rape to her superiors, including a female officer, and was told to keep quiet. Other officers started hinting that they knew about the rape. Another sergeant major asked her for sex.
Rangel says she was trying to fight and stay in the military. “Finally one day I thought, what am I fighting for? For these people to abuse me, to sexually assault me?” She says she knew it was time for her to leave.
“I was really at a breaking point; I was becoming depressed. I contemplated suicide,” she says.
A Pervasive Crime
Women in the military face a higher risk of being raped multiple times, according to the Pentagon’s research. Rangel was doing well; she got two master’s degrees in the military, and she’d earned medals and citations for her work. But she left in 2006 feeling angry, like a failure, and thinking she’d never be able to trust anyone.
Rangel says serial sexual predators move up through the service while women like her are driven out.
She adds that the predators seek out vulnerable women who they think will keep quiet for the sake of their military careers, and women who come from abusive family lives who have sought refuge in the military.
At the support group, Jamie Livingston chimes in.
“I was in the Navy for almost six years. I served on the USS Abraham Lincoln and we deployed to the waters outside of Iraq, the Gulf,” she says.
Livingston grew up all over. Her stepfather was running from something, she thinks, because they moved from state to state suddenly and without explanation. She was home-schooled and had no teachers or friends to reach out to.
Livingston, like many people, saw enlisting as an escape to a better life.
“I wanted to join the military from as old as I knew there was a military,” she says.
Pictures of her baby daughter and her husband decorate the walls of her living room in her home outside El Paso. The window shades are down to prevent the scorching desert sunlight from coming in, and though the house is hot, Livingston grabs a blanket.
“I always get cold when I start talking about this,” she says. “I wanted to be out of my house because there was physical, emotional and sexual abuse since as long as I remember.”
Livingston says her stepfather raped her through her teenage years. As soon as her mom got away from him, Livingston joined the Navy. She thrived, working on the flight line of an aircraft carrier.
Livingston doesn’t smile much, but she does while showing visitors her cruise log, sort of a yearbook of her deployment on the ship. She looks proud. The log brings back some good memories.
She loved the work, she says, but her chief, her direct supervisor, had a combination lock on the inside of his door. She didn’t understand why but didn’t dare question it.
“There was no reason to have a cipher lock on the inside of the door; obviously you’d have to have a combination to open it,” she says. “So any time I’d go in there for my qualifications he would lock that. And every time I needed a qualification signed off he would ask for a sexual favor.”
Livingston was later able to join in a successful prosecution of that chief, a rarity among the women we spoke with.
But her troubles didn’t end. Livingston was gang-raped by a group of sailors in a dark storage berth. She then decided to join the military police, in part, she says, to help other victims.
“I went to become a military police and I was raped there, too,” she says, struggling to control her emotions. “But I didn’t report that one. I knew the command’s attitude toward rape, so I didn’t say anything, and this guy was my superior and I had to work with him every day.”
The “command’s attitude toward rape” is why most victims don’t report. They see a chain of command and a military justice system that almost never gets justice for victims, while often allowing perpetrators to stay in the service.
Federal spending cuts known as sequestration will have less of an impact on the Coast Guard in Alaska than elsewhere in the country. That’s the word from Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo, who is in charge of the Coast Guard’s District 17, which encompasses the entire state.
Ostebo says the Coast Guard is in high demand as activity picks up in Alaska, especially with offshore oil development.
“It’s going to require the Coast Guard and Coast Guard aviation assets to have a presence up on the North Slope, and Kodiak is making preparations to be up there, in less capacity than we were last year, but more than we have been traditionally,” Ostebo said at an awards ceremony Friday at Air Station Sitka.
Ostebo says that’s the good news. The bad news is that sequestration has created “uncertainty” in the budget. Tuition assistance for Coast Guard personnel is gone. Improvements for Coast Guard housing in Sitka are on hold. A request to add a fourth helicopter in Sitka will have to wait, too. And, Ostebo says, there are other uncertainties.
“We’ve got some icebreaker issues. We’re supposed to have two ice breakers up here. Both the Polar Star and the Healy were going to come up. Whether they show up or not is now of great debate,” Ostebo said. “Just fueling those ships is millions of dollars. You’ve got 1.5 million gallons capable on the Polar Star. At $4 a gallon, it’s pretty expensive to fill it up. So we’re trying to figure out how best to use that, or whether we will use it at all in the Arctic.”
Ostebo says District 17 paid some bills early and put itself in a pretty good place to whether budget cuts. He says the core missions of the Coast Guard, from rescues to navigational aid maintenance to vessel safety, will not change.
Close
Update notification options
Subscribe to notifications
Subscribe
Get notifications about news related to the topics you care about. You can unsubscribe anytime.
