Attacks on the Homeless Rise, With Youths Mostly to Blame

By AMY GREEN | NYTimes.com |Feb. 15, 2008

CROSS CITY, Fla. — Warren Messner was 15 when he and some friends attacked a homeless man and left him for dead. Mr. Messner jumped on a log laid across the man’s ribs. He does not know why. He was high, does not remember much and wants to forget the rest.

Today Mr. Messner is a baby-faced 18-year-old serving 22 years for second-degree murder. He used to like skipping school and listening to rap music with friends. He imagined he eventually would help his father install flooring. Now he talks to his parents nearly every night from the maximum-security Cross City Correctional Institution.

“It was just a senseless crime.” he said, his eyes down, his shoulders slumped. “I wish it would have never happened. It made no sense. It was stupidity.”

Mr. Messner’s story is not unusual. Nationwide, violence against the homeless is soaring, and overwhelmingly the attackers are teenagers and young adults. In Florida the problem is so severe that the National Coalition for the Homeless is setting up speakers bureaus to address a culture that sees attacking the homeless as a sport. It is the first time the organization has singled out a particular state.

Of more than 142 unprovoked attacks on homeless people in 2007, the most — at least 32 — were in Florida, according to a preliminary count by the coalition and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Nationwide, such attacks rose about 65 percent from 2005.

In Fort Lauderdale a group of teenagers captured national attention in 2006 when a surveillance camera caught one laughing as he beat a homeless man with a baseball bat. The teenagers attacked three homeless men that night and face a murder trial in one man’s death. A year later in Daytona Beach, a 17-year-old and two 10-year-olds attacked a homeless Army veteran. One 10-year-old dropped a cement block on the man’s face, the police said.

“What could possibly be in the mind of a 10- or 12-year-old that would possess them to pick up a rock and pick up a brick and beat another human being in the head?” said Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust. “It defies any rational thought process, but it’s also why we felt so strongly we had to do something.”

The trust has teamed with the local schools to develop a curriculum for elementary, middle and high schools teaching respect for the homeless.

Advocates for the homeless blame a society that they say shuns the homeless through laws that criminalize sleeping in parks, camping and begging.

“I think it reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people,” said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

Troubled by news photos showing those two 10-year-olds in Daytona Beach in prison suits and handcuffs, the National Coalition for the Homeless joined with AmeriCorps Vista to open speakers bureaus last fall in Key West, Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Nine more are planned in Florida. The idea is to educate students using speakers who are homeless or once lived on the streets, and the organization wants to open more bureaus nationwide, said Michael Stoops, executive director of the coalition.

The speakers are like George Siletti, who grew up in foster care and lived as a homeless drifter on and off for 25 years, starting at the age of 16. Now 51, Mr. Siletti said he took medication for schizophrenia and depression and lived in subsidized housing in Washington, addressing schools, churches and organizations about homelessness.

“I’ve had bottles thrown at me. I’ve had people spit on me, cursed me out for no reason,” said Mr. Siletti, who was attacked by teenagers in Fort Lauderdale as he and others slept under a bridge in the 1980s. “People seem to pick on the most vulnerable because they really think that they won’t do nothing.”

In Miami, students are learning from a weeklong curriculum and a DVD teaching that families are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population. The curriculum requires younger students to make posters and older students to write essays about what they learned.

Legislation adding the homeless to hate-crime laws has been introduced in Alaska, California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio and Texas. Bills are also pending in Congress.

Mr. Messner, who is an imposing six feet, 240 pounds in his blue prison suit, talks about his crime with quiet resignation.

He and his friends were looking for a place to smoke marijuana near his home in the Daytona Beach area when they stumbled on Michael Roberts. Mr. Messner joined the attack and remembers hearing Mr. Roberts groan when he jumped on the log, but then Mr. Messner tried to pull his friends away, he said.

‘Our Country Is in Trouble’

By John Barry | Newsweek | Feb. 13, 2008

Michael Scheuer is a worried man—and an angry one. He's worried by what he regards as the United States's failure to devise a successful strategy against Osama bin Laden and angered by what he sees as the political timidity behind that failure. Scheuer has a claim to be heard. He was a CIA officer for almost 20 years. In the 1980s he was involved in the arming of the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviets. For much of the 1990s he ran the team hunting for Osama bin Laden. In 2004 he quit the CIA to write a book titled "Imperial Hubris," an account of years of Western failure to take seriously the growing threat of Islamist terrorism. Now Scheuer has written a new book, "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq." He spoke with NEWSWEEK'S John Barry about it. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Why did you write this new book?
Michael Scheuer: Because I think our country is in trouble. The enemy we are facing, Osama bin Laden and the movement he heads, is much more dangerous than anyone gives him credit for. Much smarter, much more talented, and now increasingly recruiting a new generation that's better educated, not just in school terms but in operational and especially technological ways. We defeated the swashbucklers. The Errol Flynns of the jihad are gone; they're about to go on trial in Guantánamo. Now we have the gray-suited fellows who are quiet, don't draw attention to themselves, but are tremendously savvy.

Have we underestimated Osama bin Laden?
I think there is tremendous racism in our response to bin Laden. He wears a beard and a robe and lives in a cave. (I doubt that's true, by the way. It's the made-for-Hollywood version.) So we dismiss him. But it is just extraordinary to treat your enemy as an idiot, especially when you are losing two wars to him, and when our director of national intelligence is warning that Al Qaeda is rebuilt, refitted and stronger than ever.

We've been fighting bin Laden for longer than we fought World War II. Why haven't we won?
Because our political elite do not want to level with the American people about the real reasons why bin Laden hates and opposes us. Our leaders say he and his followers hate us because of who we are, because we have early primaries in Iowa every four years and allow women in the workplace. That's nonsense. I don't think he would have those things in his country. But that's not why he opposes us. I read bin Laden's writings and I take him at his word. He and his followers hate us because of specific aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden lays them out for anyone to read. Six elements: our unqualified support for Israel; our presence on the Arabian peninsula, which is land they deem holy; our military presence in other Islamic countries; our support of foreign states that oppress Muslims, especially Russia, China and India; our long-term policy of keeping oil prices artificially low to the benefit of Western consumers but the detriment of the Arab people; and our support for Arab tyrannies who will do that.

You say bin Laden has laid all this out. But one doesn't hear discussion of this in the current presidential campaign.
I've come to the conclusion that it's just too inconvenient for our political class. It's much easier to tell Americans that crazy people are after you and tomorrow morning your daughter is going to have to go to school in a burqa. And we have so few people, even now, with real expertise in the Arab world. In the year 9/11 happened, there were three Ph.D.s awarded that bore on Arab affairs. Three, in the whole country. One was in Islamic architecture. One was in Islamic poetry. The third was in Islamic history. And things haven't gotten a lot better since. We are still not building the intellectual capital we need. In the cold war did we say, "We really don't need to understand what Marx or Lenin or Stalin wrote because they are just gangsters, not smart men, just nihilists, and we can beat them because we are the good guys"? No. We built, with government money, institutions to study the Soviet Union. But almost nothing comparable is being done now. The effort is tiny. And more often than not you find that the outfits we do have are funded by Saudi money. Which means there are real constraints on what they can say. So I read in the National Review or the Weekly Standard about Osama bin Laden being a gangster or an idiot or both. But I have to tell you there is a touch of genius here. To pick the six elements of U.S. foreign policy that are most entwined with our domestic politics is a great piece of analysis. Because it makes frank debate so tough.

And if we don't have that debate?
Look, we have a political class in this country that lives and dies by polls. They don't go to the john without looking the polls. Well, polls tell us that in the Muslim world somewhere around 75 to 80 percent agree with Osama bin Laden that American foreign policy is meant to undermine or destroy Islam. Now, nowhere near that percentage is going to pick up an AK-47. But how many does it take to cause you a problem? Osama bin Laden is, in some sense, talking about a war of liberation. And it is true that for 50 years we have supported tyrannies that have oppressed Muslims, tyrannies with strong fascist elements. We hear a lot of talk about "Islamofascists." Yes, there's a lot of them out there. And they're all on our side. They're in Riyadh, Amman, Kuwait City, Cairo. Even Bernard Lewis, the patron saint of our neocons, has written that the governments that rule Muslims are basically [practicing] European fascism adapted to the sand … We can continue the current course of American foreign policy, but we need to realize that over time this may involve us in sending troops to fight on every continent as new generations of young Muslims sign up under the Al Qaeda banner. The candidates in the presidential campaign are talking about reviving jobs and wages and moving toward universal health care. None of that is going to be possible if this country is involved in some generation-long struggle with millions of Muslims. My own view is that it's more sensible to confront the fact that our foreign policies toward the Arab world [add up to] the one indispensable ally Osama bin Laden has.