A Transsexual Vs. the Government
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1840754,00.htmlJohn Cloud
9/12/2008
Charlotte Preece wanted a cigarette. She was freaking out, and she
needed a moment outside her Capitol Hill building in Washington to
think about the odd turn her life had taken that day, Dec. 20, 2004.
Preece, who was 51 at the time, worked then — as she does now — for
the Library of Congress, where she helps make hiring decisions for the
Congressional Research Service (CRS), the U.S. Congress' analysis
agency. She had decided to recommend an ex-Special Forces colonel
named David Schroer to be CRS's terrorism specialist. Schroer was a
dream candidate, a guy out of a Tom Clancy novel: he had jumped from
airplanes, undergone grueling combat training in extreme heat and
cold, commanded hundreds of soldiers, helped run Haiti during the U.S.
intervention in the '90s — and, since 9/11, he had been intimately
involved in secret counterterrorism planning at the highest levels of
the Pentagon. He had been selected to organize and run a new,
classified antiterror organization, and in that position he had
routinely briefed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He had also
briefed Vice President Cheney more than once. Schroer had been an
action hero, but he also had the contacts and intellectual dexterity
to make him an ideal congressional analyst.
