MUSTANG DAILY | Thursday, May 9, 2013
BY DAVID LIEBIG
arts@mustangdaily.net
RORY ARONSON does a little bit of everything: He bikes, travels and builds. But now he’s branching into something new: a startup aimed at helping people do.
I
t’s a warm spring night in the heart of San Luis Obispo, and cyclists have gathered in ranks to swarm the downtown scene with a carnivalesque circuit of Marsh and Higuera streets. Rory Aronson joins the herd to cheers of his name: “Rory’s here!” As the mob rolls on, flagrantly dressed riders maneuver in to briefly clutch him — as if to ensure the man, clad in a tight-fitting, pink flamingo costume, is no mirage. Like the 5-foot-tall, green freak bike that hoists him high above the crowd, his reputation among these Bike Night revelers is the product of his own hands. Rory is a builder. He always has been — since he was a curious teen enrolled in ceramics, woodshop, metalshop and photography at Encinitas’ “arts-oriented” high school — until now, in the last quarter of an undergraduate career that has produced more art, more machines and more friendships than most do in a lifetime.
THE STUDENT WHO’S
PROPEL THEM
BUILT TO
Three worn-in sofas crowd the open-air porch. Rory reclines in one of them. A woodsy, almost-black glaze of beard frames his face. Each piece of clothing on his body seems plucked from a different decade: black-andwhite striped swoop neck, fluorescent purple hoodie, maroon jeans. “Whenever you do anything, you’re just caught up in your own mind, your own thought processes, especially if you work alone or with one group,” Rory says. “Until you actually start telling people about it, until you start trying to describe something concisely, you really don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You’re going with the flow.” The previous night, Rory started telling people about his latest project when he applied for the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s San Luis Obispo HotHouse Summer Accelerator Program. If chosen, Rory and his startup teammates would receive professional counseling, funding and office space to get their concept off the ground. Their concept: a digital platform to make people do. “That is something that I see a big problem with,” Rory says. “People are not engaged. People are not active. People are all talk, no show, no action.” So the mechanical engineering senior and three recent Cal Poly graduates posed a question: How do you get people engaged? Their answer was simple: positive reinforcement. “Perhaps giving them a little bit of a push, with a little bit of incentive, will get people to take action and do cool things,” Rory says. Rory and friends drew blueprints for a digital platform dubbed “Propelem.” Propelem has two main components: a digital marketplace on the web to purchase goods for other people and a mobile app on which they can redeem said purchases after completing certain actions. For example, a corporate manager could incentivise healthy living for employees by pre-purchasing Jamba Juice smoothies that only become available after checking in at the gym. After satisfying the activity requirement, the giftee can present his or her smartphone to the retailer, and
BUILD
see BUILD, pg. 4
BICYCLE BUILDING
One of Aronson’s many passions is immediately evident upon entering his house (top): Aronson is a mastermind when it comes to bike building. His numerous creations dot the property. — Photos By David Jang
CHECK OUT
SPORTS, pg. 10
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MDnews 2
Thursday, May 9, 2013
VP of admin, finance to retire for family MUSTANG DAILY STAFF REPORT
news@mustangdaily.net
Larry Kelley, the Cal Poly vice president for administration and finance, is set to retire at the end of the school year, according to a Cal Poly press release. He will be retiring largely to be with family, Cal Poly Interim Director of Marketing and Communications Matt Lazier said. Kelley has five children and 14 grandchildren, as well as his parents — all of whom live in Ohio — who he wishes to spend more time with. According to Lazier, Kelley also felt the time was right to retire because the worst of the school’s budget woes seem to be over. Kelley, who also serves as Cal
Poly’s chief financial officer, has been with the university since 2002. During his time at the school, he has overseen multiple large-scale construction projects: the most notable being the Poly Canyon Village and Cerro Vista Apartments projects, according to the release. Kelley has also served as the Cal Poly Corporation chairman of the executive board since 2007, and the Cal Poly Foundation treasurer since 2011. He is the last remaining member of the president’s leadership team that was in place when University President Jeffrey Armstrong took office in 2011. Since then, all other members have retired or been replaced. He will temporarily be replaced by Stan Nosek, the for-
LARRY KELLEY
mer University of California, Davis vice chancellor for administration, until a replacement can be found. Nosek was recommended by Kelley for his previous experience in budget planning for a California university, as well as seeming to be a good fit for Cal Poly, Lazier said.
MAGGIE KAISERMAN / MUSTANG DAILY
According to Director of Environmental Health and Services Dave Ragsdale, Campus Dining faces stricter inspections now than when he first came to Cal Poly.
Cal Poly official responds to campus dining allegations SARA NATIVIDAD
snatividad@mustangdaily.net
Rat infestations. Raw meat stored at high temperatures. Safety inspectors with conflicting interests. A recent New Times article investigated these claims about Cal Poly Campus Dining using anonymous sources who said their accusations occurred within the past six months. The article made an impact among students for its depiction of on-campus dining, but the Cal Poly officials’ responses included in the article were misleading, said Director of Environmental Health and Safety Dave Ragsdale, who was interviewed in the New Times article. One of the controversial aspects was Ragsdale’s comment that “zero students have complained about food quality in recent years, not since an E. coli outbreak in the 2000s that affected the whole county.” Ragsdale said the word “quality” was misused — his office only receives complaints concerning the safety of food, not the quality. For example, if a doctor diagnoses a person for food poisoning, then the doctor must pass along the information to the dining facility, Ragsdale said. It was this type of complaint that Ragsdale was referring to. As far as being a Cal Poly employee inspecting Cal Poly facilities, Ragsdale said there are no conflicting interests in performing his job responsibilities. Before working for Cal Poly, Ragsdale was a registered environmental health specialist and worked for the county health department. Part of his job entailed inspecting restaurants, he said.
Our first goal is always health and safety of students and employees. We are very tough on Campus Dining ... DAVE RAGSDALE DIRECTOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH AND SAFETY
“Our first goal is always health and safety of students and employees,” Ragsdale said. “We are very tough on Campus Dining and they take our corrections very seriously.” There were many reasons that influenced his switch from county inspections to internal safety inspections, Ragsdale said. At that time, the county only inspected Cal Poly dining facilities approximately once a year, Ragsdale said. Since the switch, the restaurants are inspected up to four times a year. The most important aspect, however, is the power of authority. San Luis Obispo County does not have legal authority over Cal Poly since it is a state facility. This made it difficult to enforce any changes on the school, Ragsdale said. Since Environmental Health and Safety is an internal program, it has the power to enact changes and correct safety violations. “If we direct them to do something and they don’t do it, we can make them comply by using our connections with higher administration,” Ragsdale said. Though some of the notes from inspections are merely suggestions, any type of violation requires immediate action and the Environmental Health and Safety Department makes sure the facilities follow the correct
protocol, Ragsdale said. Despite the department’s focus on safety, some students are still unsatisfied with Campus Dining. History freshman Carl Lehman said he is most disappointed with the lack of healthy options. “The food here just makes me really fat,” Lehman said. Lehman and biomedical engineering freshman Kristen Limos said they were recently discussing their frustration with the food options. “Besides salad, there really aren’t any healthy options,” Limos said. “And eating salad all the time gets old.” Both of the students said they would not miss anything about on-campus food and were thrilled to move off campus next year and eat “quality healthy food.” Students who do live off campus, such as industrial technology senior Tim Romley said they are more satisfied with Campus Dining, however — especially since the addition of Subway. Aerospace engineering sophomore Ian Peterson, who also lives off campus, doesn’t eat on campus often, but does enjoy the occasional meal from Ciao! or Jamba Juice, he said. “If you mix it up, it’s not that bad,” Peterson said. “But if you eat it consistently, you’re not going to like it.”
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Thursday, May 9, 2013
‘Big bully’ charged with rape, kidnapping MICHAEL MUSKAL ALANA SEMUELS Los Angeles Times
Ariel Castro, described by police as a “big bully,” was charged Wednesday with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape after three women, missing for about a decade, escaped from his house this week. Castro, 52, the owner of the house at 2207 Seymour Ave. in Cleveland, was charged in connection with the kidnappings that have shocked the city. His brothers, Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50, who were arrested Monday along with Ariel, were not charged in connection with the disappearances, prosecutor Victor Perez said at an afternoon news conference. All three are scheduled to appear in court Thursday, Perez said.
Ariel Castro will be arraigned on the seven charges related to the missing women. His brothers face outstanding warrants on misdemeanor charges. Castro is charged with kidnapping and raping three women, Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, about 23, and Michelle Knight, 32. The fourth kidnapping count applies to Amanda Berry’s 6-year-old daughter, who was born in captivity. Officials will do tests to determine the paternity of the child, Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba said. After the news conference, Tomba described Ariel Castro as “the big bully. ... This guy, he ran the show ... He acted alone. These guys (the brothers) didn’t have anything to do with it.” Tomba at the news conference defended the decision to arrest Pedro and Onil Castro and the
decision not to press charges. “We had enough probable cause to bring them into custody,” Tomba said. “We found no facts to link them to the crime There is nothing that leads us to believe they were involved or they had any knowledge of this, and that comes from statements of our victims, and their statements and their brother’s (Ariel’s) statements. Ariel kept everybody at a distance.” Officials also said they had removed 200 items of evidence from the Seymour Avenue house. But the charges are mainly based on statements from the women and from Ariel Castro, who waived his rights to stay silent and talked to investigators. “He did speak with us and provided us ... with a detailed statement,” Tomba said. Asked about possible links to other missing-person cases,
Tomba said, “As of right now we don’t anticipate any other victims where he is the suspect.” One such case involves Ashley Summers, who disappeared in 2007 when she was 14 years old. Berry and DeJesus returned to their families Wednesday. Their relatives asked for privacy to allow the women to heal. DeJesus was 14 when she disappeared 2004. Berry was just shy of her 17th birthday when she vanished in 2003. Knight, who was reportedly receiving medical care in a hospital, was 20 when she disappeared in 2002. All were held in harsh conditions in the Seymour Avenue house, officials said, COURTESY PHOTO until Berry managed to break through a screen door Ariel Castro (above) was charged with the rape and Monday and with the help of kidnapping of three Cleveland women who were freed after more than a decade in captivity Tuesday. neighbors called police.
Help is on the way for student loan debt RENEE SCHOOF McClatchy Washington Bureau
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau suggested possible ways to make private student loans more affordable and easier to refinance on Wednesday. The bureau’s report was based on 28,000 comments from members of the public about private student loans. The contributors described their own difficulties and suggested ways to make student loan debt more manageable. The consumer agency analyzed the comments and highlighted some of the pros and cons in a report. “Consumers told us how high monthly payments have left them trapped by their private student loan debt,” Richard Cordray, the director of the consumer bureau, said in Miami at a hearing where he outlined the report. “They told us how this debt has forced them to sacrifice many of the features of middle-class American life.”
Cordray said the problems of student borrowers could have a domino effect on the economy, hurting housing, car sales and other sectors. Private loans generally are riskier than federal student loans because they tend to have higher interest rates and come without flexible repayment schemes, such as income-based repayment. Some of those who commented told the consumer agency that they had to use large chunks of their incomes to repay their loans. Many asked about refinancing. The rates are high when lenders are teenagers entering college, because there’s no guarantee they’ll get jobs. But even when they land jobs and dutifully make payments, many can’t find refinancing options, the report said. Rohit Chopra, the consumer agency’s student loan ombudsman, said some smaller financial institutions had started to offer some refinancing but that the opportunities would have to be greatly increased to help
Consumers have told us how high monthly payments have left them trapped by their private student loan debt. RICHARD CORDRAY DIRECTOR OF THE CONSUMER BUREAU
more borrowers and make the market more efficient. Other recommendations were for borrowers who got into trouble with payments. Suggestions included plans similar to the income-based options that are available with federal loans. “Most borrowers aren’t looking to get off the hook,” Chopra said. “They just need a payment plan that works.” The report looked at ways that the market and federal policymakers might be able to spur changes, including congressional action. For example, it said that if further study showed there wasn’t enough capital for a refinance market, lawmakers perhaps might authorize the use of the
Federal Financing Bank, a government corporation. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced a bill Wednesday that would allow students to pay a much lower interest rate for one year. It would equal the rate that banks pay when they borrow from the Federal Reserve, about 0.75 percent. Warren said that would give Congress time to figure out a long-term plan on interest rates. Unless Congress steps in, federal student-loan rates will jump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1. Warren is a bankruptcy expert who, before serving in the Senate, helped create the consumer protection bureau and served as its temporary chief.
Quick facts: Student loan debt $1.1 trillion: Approximate amount of outstanding student loan debt, second only to mortgages in household debt. 1 in 5: U.S. households with student loans. $26,682: Average outstanding balance for a borrower with debt. 1 in 8: Share of borrowers who have more than $50,000 in student debt. 40 percent: Share of American households headed by someone under 35 who has student loan debt. 25 percent: Share of borrowers younger than 30 who spend more than 10 percent of their income on student loan payments. 6.7 million: Number of borrowers who are more than 90 days delinquent on student loans. 31 percent: Percentage increase in the number of student loan borrowers from 2007 to 2012.
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the app will provide proof of purchase. In addition to GPS location, the requirements could involve taking pictures, tweeting specific hashtags, scanning QR codes and other smartphone capabilities. Or — if it’s someone’s birthday, say — there could be no requirement at all. “But it would be more fun to give someone a gift and say, ‘Oh, but you gotta do something — check in at the beach,’ or make them do something fun or ridiculous,” Rory says. The platform itself has been a call to action for the Propelem team, which consists of Rory, Aaron Rowley, Joseph White and Daniel Hall. “It’s looking very promising that that could be a job after school,” Rory says. “The team definitely plans on working on it after school, regardless of whether we get into the Accelerator or not.”
LIFE ON TWO WHEELS Rory gives a hypothetical application of Propelem: rewarding someone with coffee for biking to work. This comes as no surprise, considering Rory’s lifestyle. “I’ve always been a bike advocate,” he says. Rory bikes everywhere he goes. He rarely misses a Bike Night. A bike is the only way he’s gotten to and from campus for five years. And he builds his own — some of them Frankensteinian hybrids. His campaign video for a recent contest to become the city’s social media ambassador features him almost exclusively on two wheels. Three summers ago, Rory biked alone from San Luis Obispo to his native town of San Diego (more than 300 miles). This past summer, he one-upped himself with a Seattle-to-San Francisco trip (more than 800 miles) with two roommates. “There’s some people that bike tour and they stay at hotels and whatever,” Rory says. “But I’m the one who’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll just have a sleeping bag and jump in the bushes.’ So there’s always the worry of, ‘OK, where the hell am I going to sleep?’ I’ve definitely had some sketchy nights in parks, in the ice plant, on the beach, on these random cliffsides, kind of in people’s backyards, almost.” On these extended journeys, Rory finds no greater joy than the “reward” that comes with cresting a tall hill — sometimes after an hourlong battle with the incline. “You get to basically fly down this thing,” he
says. “I mean, it really is flying. It’s the closest thing to flying under your own power, I’d say, where you can just lean forward and let your hands go and feel the wind.”
‘THE UPHAM HOUSE’ The primary seedbed for Rory’s bicycle evangelism has been his house at 880 Upham St., which the residents affectionately call “The Upham House.” Bike culture once defined The Upham House for anthropology and geography senior Donald Shin, who moved in this past fall to become Rory’s sixth roommate. “It’s a big part of the bike community,” Shin says, crossed-legged on the living room couch. “Even when I was not living here, I just knew that this house was where it was for fixing bikes or making bikes.” In every corner of the place, this is evident. A mutant vehicle, half grocery cart and half bicycle (Rory: “This is kind of my groceryshopping-mobile”), stands parked in The Upham House’s narrow side yard. A little farther down, a double-decker BMX bike (Rory: “There’s really no purpose to a tall bike other than the fact that it’s fun.”) leans against the house. Farther still, four bike frames welded into a crescent (Rory: “The remains of the Bike Arch — it’s so sad.”) collect cobwebs on the ground. The Bike Arch was once the grand entryway to this tinkerer’s paradise, but the landmark had to be dismantled following a complaint filed with the city. Other two-wheelers-turned-sculptures remain in place, though. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” Rory says about the sphere dangling above his head. Constructed from shards of sawed-up bike wheel frames, the fitness ball-sized object resembles a metallic tangle of yarn. “I decided, ‘Hey, I have all this material, I have this tool (an angle grinder, he later clarifies matter-of-factly). Let me try and make something.’ It turned into this cool orb, and I just decided to hang it up.” Add these creations to a long list of reasons why Rory’s life would not fit in an apartment. He makes too many things, has too many friends, has too big of a personality. He couldn’t be boxed in the typical college den, decorated with empty booze bottles, discount posters and other telltales of a temporary dwelling. When Rory’s customary dorm-bound first year came to an end, he needed a home. It was fortunate, then, that his sister Kendra had just graduated from Cal Poly and was vacating the house their parents purchased for
Thursday, May 9, 2013
It’s the closest thing to flying under your own power. her to live in during college. In the four years since, Rory has built The Upham House into something akin to a commune. He attributes the house’s countless projects to “us” — never “me,” and says the steady flow of couchsurfers, bike tourists and other temporary residents “gives the house a life.” Of all the things he’s built, Rory calls this community the most important. “Rory’s just really good at connecting people,” Shin says. “Most of the people that come together at this house are through Rory, and a lot of friendships happen because of this.” And The Upham House community extends beyond its four walls. Anthropology and geography senior Georgia Suter casually struts up to the front of the house. She needs nails, she says, and knows who likely has some. “Rory is the guy with all the stuff,” Suter explains. “If I need a knickknack or something, or I’m just looking for something random, it’s probably here.”
A SEEDBED Don’t ask to see all of Rory’s stuff without a clear schedule — it calls for an extensive tour. In front of the house, there’s the Community Cabinet — a handmade, wooden box for local residents to freely trade things. According to Rory, word of mouth has so popularized the chest that he finds new items — including laptops, toys and, one time, a salad — inside it every day. The cabinet has also produced roughly half of Rory’s wardrobe. At the core of The Upham House, a full bathroom houses one murmuring computer tower. The oddly placed device hosts every kilobyte of WikiSLO.org, a communitybased information nexus that Rory created. Beyond the back door, one finds an inelegant hose system protruding from the house’s backside. With this contraption installed, all gray water from The Upham House’s kitchen sink and dishwasher funnels into a French drain under the backyard. A third of this backyard is a freshly tilled garden. Watermelons, beans, tomatoes and peppers silently take root below. Above the dirt, a length of twine suspends several compact discs with Sharpied labels such as “BEAT CD” and “Jazz Mix.” These silver rings ricochet daggers of light at would-be feathered thieves. The intermittent babble of chickens — four live in a small coup erected by Rory and company — obscures the notion that this house sits smack-dab in suburbia. Many of these projects share an ultimate
goal: sustainability. Rory, president of Cal Poly’s Zero Waste Club, strives to live off the grid. Though eggs from the chickens and homegrown produce account for a small percentage of the household’s diet, Rory wants to see that self-reliance grow. These sustainability efforts have earned Rory the admiration of Peter Schwartz, an associate physics professor and admitted champion of efficient living. “Rory’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met — on every level: technologically, socially, what he’s doing with his house, with his friends,” Schwartz says. The two met in 2011 on a study abroad trip to Guatemala. The trip, led by Schwartz, took a team of students to the small mountain village of San Pablo with the mission of adapting technology to better the locals’ lives. Rory’s group sought to harness the warmth of chimney exhaust (“The villagers have their stoves on constantly,” Schwartz explains) to heat water in the often-frigid, two-mile-high town. It worked. “A (Guatemalan) guy from his group actually disassembled the machine when they were done and took it home,” Schwartz says. “So he’s got one of the only places in San Pablo where you can have a real good, hot shower.” Now that Rory’s back in the United States — home, yet still building — Schwartz says San Luis Obispo is lucky to have him. It might not for long, though. Rory’s ready to go all-in on Propelem after he graduates this spring, and most of the team is already stationed in San Francisco. A month after submitting to SLO HotHouse, Rory received a phone call telling him Propelem was shot down. The same phone call, however, informed him the project was accepted by Kauffman Fasttrac, a similar program that Rory says offers everything SLO HotHouse does besides the money and office space. The turn of events has done little to shake the maker’s confidence. Rory’s always been a builder. Constructive toys such as Legos and K’Nex occupied him as a young boy in fair-weathered San Diego. And he’ll always be a builder, he believes — not because he feels a need to succeed, but because creating is his natural state. “There’s always going to be this constant stream of ideas,” he says. “I think I will never lose the mindset of, ‘Hey, if you have an idea, go for it. Why not? It’ll be fun.’”
PHOTOS BY DAVID JANG/MUSTANG DAILY
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MUSTANG DAILY
STUDENT OPINION
Campus Dining: Cal Poly’s troll toll If you were given the option to either take a meal plan for this quarter or $1,564 in cash, which would you choose? The meal plan that I was required to purchase in the beginning of the year for $4,693 has granted me 1,575 Plu$ Dollars and eight meal credits per week that do not roll over if I fail to use all of them. During a threequarter, 34-week academic year, this translates into 272 meal credits which, after subtracting the Plu$ Dollars, I pay $3,118 for. That means, with the Freedom plan, I am paying $11.46 per meal. If I use seven meals on dinner, and the leftover credit on lunch, the second most economical use of a meal credit, I suffer a net loss of $7.43 per
week. That means, if I just spend my meals on lunch and dinner for the entire year, I give away $252.62 to Campus Dining. This loss may not seem like much, but that’s using every meal point per week. And this isn’t exclusive to the Freedom plan. The Flexibility plan provides a loss of $4.85 per week, while the Security plan equates to a loss of $8.99 per week. But this is only one flaw in the structure of Campus Dining. In addition to the inequality of cost, the mealtime periods favor Campus Dining immensely, the food put out by Campus Dining is incredibly poor, and by being given the money up front, Campus Dining’s income is not affected by the market they
serve. In the economics courses on this campus, a free market is taught to be the best way to obtain the most total surplus. How is it that we permit a controlled market to exist on campus? With all of these negatives I’m inclined ask, why did I purchase a meal plan? At most, it should be presented as a choice for incoming freshmen, not a requirement; it would provide the security that students could take advantage of if they so pleased, without forcing it on those who don’t feel the need to overpay for it. Even then, the plan itself needs to be reworked to increase the students’ benefit. A simple system of converting extra meals into Plu$ Dollars, extending breakfast by an hour and
a half, or even allowing meal credits to roll over, would provide a massive improvement to the current system, and would not cause a student such as myself to closely examine a meal plan he blindly accepted. This paper is a fraction of what I originally wrote, but it still holds merit. Please Campus Dining, reform this, if not for me but for the incoming freshmen. I love Cal Poly and am proud to be a student of this school. With our incredibly intelligent and driven community, the dining plan is a poor reflection of how great we are and has become a school-wide joke. It needs to be changed. Thank you, Matt Fagan Business administration freshman
The ugly truth: in defense of torture GLENN GARVIN
The Miami Herald
John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that “the enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.” And events have finally caught up with the oft-repeated claim that torture doesn’t work and that it especially didn’t work in tracking down Osama bin Laden. The more journalists probe into the hunt that ended in bin Laden’s death at the hands of a Navy SEAL team a year ago, the more apparent it is that the first clues leading to his Pakistan hideout were beaten and bullied out of captured alQaida members. Two books published last year — Peter L. Bergen’s “Manhunt” and Mark Bowden’s “The Finish” — were the first to suggest that the trail to bin Laden began with information obtained with what the CIA euphemistically refers to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And now a TV documentary based on “Manhunt,” which includes on-the-record interviews with several members of the CIA team that hunted bin Laden, is airing on HBO. The basic tale is well-known: Hiding away from surveillance in a Pakistani compound that had neither telephone nor Internet service, bin Laden was tracked down only after the CIA identified and followed a courier known as Ahmed the Kuwaiti, who carried his messages to and from al-Qaida. The question has always been, where did the CIA learn the identity of that courier? And the answer, we now know, is from victims of some of the most brutal interrogations of the CIA and its allies: — The first mention of Ahmed the Kuwaiti came from a young al-Qaida member held at Guantanamo named Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Slahi, before giving up the name, was tortured so grievously — beaten, deprived of sleep, exposed to extreme heat and cold, and threatened with the arrest of his mother — that the U.S. Marine colonel assigned to prosecute his case before a military commission quit. — Slahi didn’t offer much more about Ahmed the Kuwaiti except that he existed. (Or had — Slahi thought he was dead.) But the next Guantanamo prisoner to talk offered much more: that
Ahmed was a member of bin Laden’s inner circle and sometimes functioned as his courier. That disclosure came after the prisoner, al-Qaida militant Mohammed al-Qahtani, was interrogated 20 hours a day for 48 straight days, subjected to a mock execution, forced to perform dog tricks, drugged and given enemas until he hallucinated. His treatment was so brutal that the Pentagon decided it couldn’t prosecute him,
even though he was scheduled to be one of the hijackers on Sept. 11. — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, also confessed to knowing Ahmed the Kuwaiti at some point during the 183 waterboardings given him by U.S. interrogators. But Mohammed insisted that Ahmed was an unimportant member of al-Qaida and had left the group years before. The CIA knew he was lying — by that time, Ahmed the Kuwaiti’s senior status in alQaida had been
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
widely confirmed — but found the attempted deceit even more interesting than the truth. They must be getting close to something important, the CIA trackers concluded. — Ahmed the Kuwaiti’s real name — Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed — was finally supplied in 2004 by a bin Laden aide caught slipping into Kurdish territory with bomb-making documents. In the TV documentary “Manhunt,” one of the CIA’s trackers is asked what the Kurds did to make the aide, Hassan Ghul, talk. She just offers a sly smile that slowly broadens in a Cheshire-cat grin. Once the CIA had Ahmed the Kuwaiti’s real name, it was able to zero in on his cellphone, his vehicle and the Pakistani compound where he lived with a tall, mostly unseen man who would eventually prove to be bin Laden — a process that took an additional seven years. Torture may not have led U.S. forces right to bin Laden’s front door, but it surely pointed the way to the first steps. Many Americans imagine torture as a kind of replay of some old drive-in movie where a fat redneck sheriff sticks a gun in a longhaired kid’s ear and shouts, “Admit it! Admit it!” And sometimes that is no doubt accurate. I’ve certainly never been able to figure out what the soldiers at Abu Ghraib hoped to learn from their random torment of luckless peasants. But in the world of intelligence, interrogations are aimed at eliciting information rather than confessions of guilt. The bits of data, once verified, are pieced together with others — electronic intercepts, credit card receipts, surveillance reports — into a mosaic that reveals a bigger, hidden, picture. Does the fact that torture helped us find bin Laden mean that it’s just one more tool to pack into our bags? Not at all. There are plenty of good arguments against the use of torture. Employed regularly, it’s bound to claim some innocent victims. And it surely is not good for either the soul of the person doing the torturing or those in whose name he does it. But these are moral questions. As long as we pretend that the question of torture is a utilitarian one — that it doesn’t work — we will never confront its morality.
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MDsports 9
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Willie Tucker is ‘The Natural’ ARYN SANDERSON
arynsanderson.md@gmail.com
If his life had gone according to plan, Cal Poly wide receiver Willie Tucker would be a shortstop for the Boston Red Sox right about now. MLB teams, including the Red Sox and Rockies, were scouting Tucker during his junior year of high school until he burned out. “I was bored, and I started dreading baseball,” he said. “Every hour at practice felt like days.” When Tucker told his parents he was quitting baseball, his mom, Jennifer Tucker, said she and her husband were devastated. “Oh my God, I thought I was gonna die,” she said. “He’d done baseball since he was 4, and he was getting letters of interest from huge colleges all across the nation, and we saw those scholarships and college educations go down the drain.” Tucker just couldn’t do it anymore, he said, so his parents got on board. With the support of his parents, he decided to focus on football. Now, Tucker is a wide receiver for Cal Poly and has become one of the best playmakers for the Mustangs. The comeback kid During the first play of the first football game his junior year in high school, Tucker tore his medial collateral ligament (MCL) — a huge setback that ended his season. Tucker came back his senior year determined to put up “some dumb good numbers,” he said. And that’s what he did. The next season, Tucker led the CIFSac Joaquin Section in receiving yards per game, catching 55 passes for 1,257 yards (a 22.9 yard per catch average) and scoring 14 touchdowns. His single-season school records at Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado Hills, Calif. for yards and yards per catch surpassed school records held by wide receivers who went onto NFL careers — Austin Collie of the Indianapolis Colts and Seyi Ajirotuto
of the San Diego Chargers. His numbers were more than “dumb good” enough to land Tucker multiple college offers, including one from the Division I Nevada Wolf Pack after their 13-1 season in 2010. But when Tucker got the offers, his dad’s best man and close family friend, Pete Magnusson, was in critical condition with terminal cancer. Magnusson, a former Cal Poly football player, died right before Tucker signed with the Mustangs. “Pete was a big man, you know, he was an ex-lineman,” Tucker’s mom, Jennifer, said. “And he really filled the room with his personality too. He loved Willie, and Willie loved him. He had a big impact on Willie.” When Magnusson was in the hospital, he shared a room with another patient who gave him a George Crowe Topps baseball card that he passed along to Tucker. Now, before each game, Tucker reads Psalm 28 out of his orange pocket Bible and uses Magnusson’s old baseball card as a bookmark. Another loss Tucker has read Psalm 28, which asks for God’s strength, before every game since freshman year of high school, but this pre-game ritual became more significant last season. On the bus home from a 3417 loss to Eastern Washington, Tucker found out his grandpa had passed away. “I immediately broke down on the bus,” the almost 6-foot-3, 200-pound player said. After taking a week off for the funeral, Tucker returned to score the Mustangs’ first touchdown in a 70-14 win against Idaho State. “I dropped to my knee after, and I said a blessing,” he said, and pointed up toward the sky. “It was for him.” Soon after, Tucker found out that his favorite psalm, the one he read before every game, was one of his grandpa’s favorites too. In a move his mom called “awesome,” Tucker got the psalm tattooed on his bicep. “When I read (the psalm) before a game, it helps me reflect because my grandpa’s big thing
was giving back,” Tucker said. “I use the card as a bookmark, because he (Magnusson) played at Cal Poly. It reminds me that I have him looking down on me when I get on the field.” The field is Tucker’s “real home,” he said. There, Tucker feels like he’s part of a family. “The best thing is being out there with the brothers,” he said. “I turned down Nevada, which had a nicer facility and all the hookups, but I got a brotherhood here, where we’re playing for each other. Everyone’s not just playing for themselves, looking for their shine.” Tucker lives with sophomore quarterback Chris Brown. The two are housemates, teammates and best friends. “We pretty much feed off each other’s energy on and off the field,” Brown said. “We share the same religion pretty much, our families are really involved with what we do academically and athletically, and we share a common goal — we both wanna make it to the (NFL).” Tucker’s hoping his focus and determination will get him there — and if that doesn’t, his natural instincts just might. ‘The Natural’ “Oh, look, it’s ‘The Natural,’” fellow wide receiver Keishawn Rowe yells out, as he passes by Tucker in the Julian A. McPhee University Union Starbucks. One of the coaches nicknamed Tucker “The Natural” when he effortlessly picked up new drills. The title stuck. Despite a triple-option offense that runs more than it passes — the Mustangs averaged more than 323 rushing yards per game this past season — Tucker has stepped up. His quick feet and physicality, particularly his ability to block, make him a standout role player even when he doesn’t have the ball. Although opportunities have been limited, the Mustangs ranked No. 1 in the Big Sky in passing efficiency with a 175.7 rating last season. Tucker averaged fewer than three catches per game in the 2012 season, but he scored seven touchdowns. “I go into a game with an atti-
Fun facts about Tucker A guy at a party once bet Tucker $50 that he wouldn’t get to play as a freshman at Cal Poly. Tucker played his first game as a true freshman, but he still wouldn’t pay up. Quarterback Chris Brown lives with Tucker and shared some of Tucker’s stranger living habits. “One thing you’ll catch Willie doing is eating salad,” Brown said about his housemate. “He won’t have dinner without a salad or some sort of greens.” Tucker has the Cherokee flag tattooed on his back. His greatgreat grandma was a Native American princess, he said. IAN BILLINGS/MUSTANG DAILY
tude like, ‘This is war. This is for my family. This is it. I know what your job is, and I’m not gonna let you do your job,’” he said. Tucker’s high school coach, Mark Watson, said Tucker has had that mentality since his early career. “He’s always been a really heady player,” Watson said. Tucker loves watching film and really understands running the correct reads against opposing defenses. “He’s so instinctual on the field,” Watson said. “He just gets the game which makes him a great competitor. For the really good ones, they have to be passionate about it, and Willie’s passionate.” It’s a passion that Tucker wholeheartedly admits. “I’m trying to get to the next level,” he said. “I’m ready to play until they steal my pads and kick me out of the locker room.” But until it’s time to move up to the professional level, Tucker is taking college ball seriously. “I consider this my job, and I want us to bring this school a national championship,” Tucker said. Although some consider him a rarely used talent in Cal Poly’s triple-option attack, Cal Poly wide receiver and quar-
terbacks coach Juston Wood said fans will see Tucker get more passes this year. “He was better out of high school than probably anyone I’ve ever had come out here,” Wood said. “Guys either have it, or they don’t, and Willie is one of those above-average guys. If the balls in the air, he’s gonna find a way to make a play on it, but that chemistry needed to be demonstrated for us to have confidence.” As last season progressed, Tucker matured as a player, Wood said. “He had to get the game experience to grow from a good player to a great player,” Wood said. “Receiver is one of those positions that, historically, people think is for guys who don’t want to get dirty. But Willie is both physically and mentally tough. By the end of the year, we walked away like, ‘Willie’s not just a good player, he’s got the ability to be a playmaker for us.’” After a season in which he led the Mustangs with 28 catches, 517 yards and seven touchdowns, the team is “going to try to continue to get him the ball more,” Wood said. This season, the team seems to be moving toward a more
efficient, hybrid offense, but which quarterback will be throwing the ball to Tucker is still up in the air. “I ain’t even mad about it,” Tucker said, with a half-smile and a shrug. “It’s not my job to worry about that.” Tucker still admits that it’s easier creating a partnership and managing timing when “you know who your guy is.” Redshirt freshman Tanner Trosin, sophomore Dano Graves, junior Vince Moraga, senior Kenny Johnston and Brown, Tucker’s roommate and best friend, are all vying for the position. “I think it’d be fun,” Brown said, of working on the field with Tucker. “He’s my roommate, so I feel like, to be honest, it’d be a major help because we’d get to hear the critiques, and then have a chance to talk about things and work on them at home too.” But no matter who will be throwing him passes, Tucker expects big things out of his team, and himself, this year. “People haven’t seen what I can do yet,” Tucker said. “I had haters saying ‘Cal Poly wasn’t a good enough school to play for.’ But I said, ‘Screw that, then we’ll change it.’”
MDsports 10
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Wild times at Wildflower triathlon HOLLY DICKSON
hollydickson.md@gmail.com
Despite wind that made the usually smooth Lake San Antonio seem like a choppy ocean and the bike race feel like a stationary bike at the gym, Cal Poly’s triathlon team took second place at the 31st Annual Wildflower Triathlon on Sunday. Two seniors, Scott Kolofer and Kaori Funahashi, placed third in the collegiate male and female classes, respectively. After struggling through
the waves during the swim, Kolofer said he was able to work his way up from 10th place to lead most of the bike and run portions with the first and second place finishers. “I managed to hold on to third place overall and make a podium spot, which I was really happy with,” Kolofer said. Kolofer finished the Olympic distance course, which consists of a 0.9-mile swim, 24.9mile bike and 6.2-mile run, in 2 hours, 8 minutes. Two other Cal Poly men fin-
ished in the top 20: Connor Sousa placed sixth and Ben Burford came in 15th. There were four top-20 finishers on the women’s side, including Funahashi, who finished the race in 2 hours, 30 minutes. “I was pretty happy with (coming) in third,” Funahashi said. “It was the best race I’ve ever done in my collegiate racing career.” Despite temperatures that reached the mid-90s on Friday and Saturday for the long course and sprint races, Sunday saw cool, windy weather for the
Olympic distance triathlon. “The swim was really choppy (and) I didn’t expect it to be,” Funahashi said. “But I’m more of a swimmer, so that’s good for me.” Funahashi finished the swim portion of the race in 22 minutes, 52 seconds — faster than the top two finishers in the collegiate female class. Funahashi and Kolofer agreed that the Cal Poly volunteers at Wildflower make the triathlon a special race for the Cal Poly team.
“It’s fun having all the Cal Poly volunteers,” Kolofer said. “The excitement is a good thing. (At) every single aid station, you get priority over the other racers because you’re wearing a Cal Poly jersey.” Nutrition senior Giorgia Guidicelli joined the triathlon team this fall and competed in the Wildflower triathlon for the first time this weekend. She stopped to give herself a mental pep talk during the swim portion because she was getting kicked in the face and
jostled by the waves, she said. She persevered through the swim, but biking turned out to be just as hard. “I felt like I was on a stationary bike because the winds were super strong,” Guidicelli said. “But it was better than it being super hot.” Guidicelli said seeing all the Cal Poly volunteers cheering the Mustangs on after the swim portion was encouraging. “It helped me through the race a lot,” she said. “Especially through the run at the end.” Pre-Wildflower
PHOTO COURTESY OF KAORI PHOTO
Scott Kolofer (front left) and Kaori Funahashi (right) finished the Olympic distance course in third place in the men’s and women’s collegiate classes, respectively.
Wildflower marked the culmination of a successful season for the Cal Poly team. The Mustangs finished second in the West Coast Collegiate Triathlon Conference championship in March, falling only to California, which went on to finish second in the USA Triathlon nationals. “The team performed phenomenally there as well,” Kolofer said. Cal Poly came in seventh at nationals on April 13 in Tempe, Ariz., but Kolofer was sick during the triathlon and didn’t race well, he said, “but the rest of the team picked up the slack.” Funahashi took 49th overall at nationals, a place she was pretty happy with in a pool of more than 400 other triathletes, she said. Although her college triathlon career culminated at Wildflower, Funahashi doesn’t see an end in sight. “It’s so inspiring to see these 80-year-old grandmas racing at Wildflower,” she said. “I don’t think I could ever stop racing.”