COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Counter-Recruitment: General
Editor of Paper in Controversy Over Anti-Bush Curse Led Army
Recruitment 'Sting' Two Years Ago
E&P Staff, Media Info
September 23, 2007
NEW YORK Colorado State University's student newspaper has lost
$30,000 in advertising and had to cut pay and other budgets by 10
percent due to fallout from the use of a four-letter word in an
editorial about President Bush, the paper reported Saturday.
In large type, the Collegian editorial included the words "Taser this
(expletive) Bush." The editorial said it had the support of the
Collegian's editorial board.
The editor says he will not step down. His name has a familiar ring.
Two years ago, David McSwane drew national attention when, as a high
schooler, he carried out an elaborate "sting" operation to expose how
the U.S. Army was lowering its wartime standards in recruitment.
McSwane pretended he had a marijuana habit and secretly taped the
conversations with recruiters. The two recruiters were later
suspended and Army recruitment shut down temporarily across the country.
Here is a profile of McSwane written by Graham Webster for E&P on July 1, 2005.
*
David McSwane had seen the military recruiters around town. He had
seen them at the high school. And he knew that with recruitment rates
down due to the Iraq war, they were working hard to attract new
cadets. And it gave him an idea.
"I wanted to see how far they'd go to get another soldier," says
McSwane, a reporter for the Westwind at Arvada West High School in
Arvada, Colo. So he set up a sting investigation, posing as a high
school dropout with a marijuana habit and went down to his local
Colorado Army recruitment station to enlist. It would lead to a
national shutdown of such recruitment and fame for him in The New
York Times and other national news outlets.
McSwane, 17, knew he would have to document his conversations with
the recruiters, so he taped the telephone conversations, enlisted his
sister to pose as a proud sibling so she could photograph parts of
the process, and asked a friend to operate a video camera across from
a local head shop.
But how did McSwane get an recruiter to visit a head shop with him?
Simple. The honor student, pretending to have a ganja habit he
couldn't kick, went there to score a detoxifying kit the Army office
claimed had helped two previous recruits pass drug tests, according
to a taped phone conversation broadcast on local TV. McSwane told his
recruiter he didn't know what the detox formula looked like, so the
man agreed to go to the store with him.
Aside from his drug problem, McSwane said he had no high school
diploma which at that time was true, as he graduated about two
months later and that he had dropped out of high school. No
problem, the recruiters told him. There are Web sites where anyone
can order a diploma from a school they make up. "It can be like Faith
Hill Baptist School or whatever you choose," one recruiter can be
heard saying on one of the taped exchanges.
After the fruits of his investigation ran in the Westwind, there was
a brief lull.
Then a Denver TV station picked up the story and ran with it, first
airing McSwane's findings on April 28. Within a few days the boy's
sting had made national headlines, and the U.S. Army froze recruiting
operations nationwide for a day. (His two would-be recruiters were suspended.)
"It's been kind of cool to see a reaction from the Pentagon on a
story done in a high school paper," the teen reporter says. He has
appeared on local and national TV, and articles on his investigation
have appeared in the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and The New York
Times. One could understand if the school was a bit unaccustomed to
all the media attention.
Rick Kaufman, a spokesman for Jefferson County Public Schools, said
that after the initial report ran in Westwind, "the principal was
very clear with David that the articles could not go any further into
his undercover actions." Because the school paper is produced as part
of a class, the principal reviews the paper prior to publication and
has the power to spike any story.
McSwane says his scrupulous documentation has for the most part
prevented naysayers from calling his investigation false. Still, he
says, some have questioned the ethics involved in a deceptive
operation like the one he orchestrated: "Any undercover
investigation, you're going in there as a lie. And a lot of people
don't like it."
In the fall McSwane plans to start on a journalism degree at Colorado
State University in Fort Collins. But he's not taking it easy in the
meantime. "I work retail graveyard shifts right now, because I've got
to make money for college," he says, upon waking in the
mid-afternoon. On his days off, he interns at the Arvada (Colo.) Press.
Like any good romance, McSwane's love of journalism started with
something of an accident. "I guess I've always had a knack for
writing," he says. "One day one of my English teachers just put me in
newspaper class without my permission."
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen material relevant to the work of Eugene, Oregon’s Committee for Countering Military Recruitment that we think may be of use to others individuals and groups with similar goals.
Because our web site is public, personal comments about the articles and (frequent) corrections of reporters’ errors are also not included. If an article interests you, we encourage you to return to the Counter-Recruitment List Serve and put the article’s headline into the search line, which should bring up (often wise and useful) commentary and corrections. If you do not belong to the List Serve, it can be found at counter-recruitment@yahoogroups.com
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the articles on this site are posted without profit to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposed.