Column

Gregory Hicks’ account of what amounts to State Department security failures in the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, that cost the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others proved to be riveting testimony before a congressional committee recently.

WASHINGTON — Usually when a senator suffers a big public defeat, he slinks off to lick his wounds. He rarely retwists the arms that didn’t bend his way. Colleagues don’t like to be seen switching. Were they horribly mistaken the first time? Don’t know what they believe?

Donald Trump thinks it's a no-brainer that so many American servicewomen are raped by their fellow soldiers. This week, when the increase in these crimes is the subject of a Senate hearing, Trump tweeted: "26,000 unreported sexual assults (sic) in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?"

Put on your tinfoil hats everybody. Or didn't you get the memo? Its paranoia time in America again. Maybe it's the spring that brings out the crazy in our legislators. Of course, that would assume a semblance of sanity the other three seasons, and nobody wants to bet anything more than lunch money on that proposition.

LOS ANGELES — In 2004, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City home, held captive in the mountains, and raped repeatedly for nine months. Since her escape, she has emerged as an advocate for human trafficking victims — and recently, a critic of abstinence-only sex education. When Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins University panel last week, she explained one of the factors deterring her from escaping her attacker: She felt so worthless after being raped that she felt unfit to return to her society, which had communicated some hard and fast rules about premarital sexual contact.

Gabrielle Giffords received a Profile in Courage award this weekend at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. The award is fitting, though she is displaying a different kind of courage than was celebrated by the late president in his 1957 best-selling book.

The detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was established in 2002 to hold the most dangerous of those captured in what the George W. Bush administration called the Global War on Terrorism. Controversy over the facility has simmered ever since. In recent days, it has begun to boil. One hundred detainees, at last count, are staging a hunger strike.