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Show WeeMy SpecgnsaH gasr Official wants to know if porn turns kids into criminals Washington The Justice Department Depart-ment official in charge of juvenile justice, Alfred S. Regnery, appears to have some curious ideas about the causes of and cures for delinquency. At his Senate confirmation hearings, hear-ings, Regnery advocated harsh punishment pun-ishment for juvenile offenders. He used to display a bumper sticker that asked: "Have you slugged your kid today?" Last October, we reported that Regnery wanted to spend $500,000 to test young boys for criminal tendencies. tenden-cies. According to the project proposal, the initial test group would have been made up of 2,000 boys aged 9 to 12 "who have had their first contact with the police." The kids were to be checked for such physical characteristics as lefthanded-ness, lefthanded-ness, "malformed ears, low-set ears, asymmetrical ears, soft pliable ears, no ear lobes, high steepled palate, furrowed tongue, smooth tongue with rough spots, curved fingers, wide gap between first and second toes, and third toe longer than the second." Our disclosures blew up a storm of protest and Justice Department officials beat a hasty retreat. Now Regnery is proposing to spend $800,000 on a project to evaluate the reactions of children to pornography. The researchers who proposed the study want to determine the biological, biologi-cal, hormonal and neurological responses re-sponses of juveniles as they read sexually oriented magazines and watch pornographic films. The findings are supposed to help the researchers figure out whether exposure to pornography will cause juveniles to become criminals. According to the proposal, the researchers would fan out across the country and collect "media scenarios" that depict "murder, mutilation, bloody confrontation, adolescent, inter-generational and promiscuous sex, individual and gang rape, sexual battery, incest, child-sexual abuse, sadism, forced analoral copulation, etc." An "expert team" of specialists will then examine the materials to determine whether they cause "juvenile "juve-nile delinquency, runaways, teenage pregnancy, mayhem, rape in gangs or as individuals, murder, alcohol and drug abuse, pederasty, child prostitution prostitu-tion ... incest, rape, torture ... mutilation." A Justice Department official insisted there would be no experiments experi-ments conducted on children. Such data is available, he said, from studies that have already been conducted. Who submitted children to these pornographic tests? The official acknowledged that some of the experiments may have been financed by the federal government. POOR PLANNING: When two Navy jets were downed while conducting bombing raids in Lebanon last December, U.S. officials insisted the mission had been well-planned and executed and that the losses were "acceptable." But we have spoken to military experts who recently returned from the Middle East, and they say the raids were a tactical disaster. Here's why: The aircraft were launched from carriers in the Mediterranean Sea, within sight of a Soviet intelligence vessel and a warship. The Soviets certainly alerted the Syrians and they were laying in wait when the U.S. planes showed up. The planes ran short of flares (used as decoys for heat-seeking missiles) and "chaff" (shreds wrapped wrap-ped in plastic that are used to confuse enemy radar). The planes spent too much time over their targets in an apparent effort to avoid hitting innocent civilians. But this noble gesture came to naught when one of the downed jets crashed into a coastal town and injured seven bystanders. EXECUTIVE MEMO: During a General Services Administration auction auc-tion of surplus boats, a collections officer took about $95,000 in cash. But when she went to deposit the money, she came up $1,710 short. Under the rules, she was compelled to make up the loss out of her own pocket. Her employers determined she was not at fault, but the General Accounting Office, which reviews such matters, overturned the ruling on the grounds that the circumstances surrounding the loss were "sufficient to raise a presumption of negligence." The president's Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, receives home-to-office transportation in government gov-ernment automobiles when he is in Washington. Usually, such service is provided only for high-level officials who live in the Washington area, but the State Department put in a special request for permission to provide transport for Rumsfeld. It was granted, even though Rumsfeld stays in a hotel suite when he is in the capital. UNDER THE DOME: Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, believes the Democrats Demo-crats are speaking through their hats about the possibility of fielding a woman vice-presidential candidate this year. "They'll talk about it a lot," he says, "but they won't do it." Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, says that his "first failing is the ability to remember jokes and my second is the ability to tell them." Copyright, 1984 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. |