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…

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..

Says Bradbury of what happened inside: “You don’t understand what they did to these kids. . . . They put stuff up my butt.”…

For the past two years, Bradbury has dug through Sembler’s trash outside his St. Petersburg home. Set off by the story of an ongoing Death Row case involving a STRAIGHT teen who murdered a gay man after being spat on as a “faggot” in the program, Bradbury lashed out. He used eBay to post something he’d found on Sembler’s sidewalk: a penis pump…

When a lawyer demanded he give it back, he demanded $700,000 instead. Bradbury, accused of stalking and intentional infliction of emotional damage, is still in court. He’s hoping the ambassador will be forced to testify about STRAIGHT and be held accountable, though how likely that is remains unclear…

The Semblers live in a palace-like walled estate in Rome, featuring the city’s largest private garden. They jokingly call it “The Magic Kingdom” – like Disney World, the real one as opposed to the unmarked building near Burger King. The wealth that brought him here stems from his accomplishments as shopping center developer in St. Petersburg. He was also Bush I’s Ambassador to Australia. And he is founder of St. Pete’s Holocaust museum.

Then there is his public cheerfulness about STRAIGHT. His Web site brags of saving 12,000 kids from drugs. George H.W. Bush awarded it one of the “thousand points of light” awards.

His influence, according to a 1993 audit by the State of Florida, kept STRAIGHT open despite the facts. Phone calls from politicians in 1989 warned health inspectors that it didn’t matter what abuse they reported, the clinics would stay open. After all, they were run by a personal friend of the President…

By 1994 the clinics were closed in name, but offshoots continue today – with names like SAFE of Orlando….

It’s no wonder Italians are bewildered. Prison abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have Europeans wondering if their once-admired ally, the U.S., is O.K. in the head. And now we’re leaving the impression that it’s O.K. – heroic, even – to treat young Americans like Guantanamo Bay inmates….

(The ambassador has declined an interview request, has said he won’t answer questions about STRAIGHT, and his attorney did not return my e-mail.) link

I sat here for a while trying to compose some sort of commentary to accompany this. My attempt was unsuccessful and for that I apologize.

Watching the US crash is like watching a train wreck. You feel cheap and dirty, but you just can’t stop looking.

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