We're all relieved that 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart is back home with her family in suburban Salt Lake City after a nine-month sojourn with religious fanatics suspected of brainwashing her.
It will be up to a jury to decide his guilt or innocence, but I think it's safe to say that Brian David Mitchell, a self-styled prophet who calls himself Emmanuel -- though everyone knew him as Manny the Messianic nut -- won't be recruiting little girls at knife point for his harem anymore.
The Smart family and the cops are still piecing together the details of Elizabeth's nomadic wanderings with Mitchell and his equally strange wife, Wanda Barzee. We know that whenever she appeared in public with her adopted "family," the teenager wore disguises, spoke in biblical argot and said things she knew weren't true.
Elizabeth Smart would still be eating in homeless shelters and falling deeper into a life obscured by veils if not for her sister's sudden intuition about the kidnapper's identity. Thanks to "America's Most Wanted" and tips called in by a string of vigilant citizens from San Diego to Salt Lake City, the kidnappers were soon in custody and Elizabeth was sleeping in her own bed.
Given the drama swirling around this case, the Smarts were soon deluged with movie offers and book deals. Hollywood is salivating at the prospect of marketing the 15-year-old's story to audiences attracted by such gothic elements as brainwashing, cultic coercion and lost innocence.
But as strange as the case of Elizabeth Smart is, there's at least one other like it that I know of. Like the case of the Utah teenager, it involves the disappearance of someone whose personality was seemingly transformed over night after a lifetime of being defined in the opposite direction.
Like the Smart case, it involves the mysterious "disappearance" of someone who, having undergone emotional and psychological coercion, now subscribes to the logic of a man who uses apocalyptic Bible-speak for an aura of authority.
Of course, we're talking about last year's unsolved "disappearance" of Colin Powell, the once beloved secretary of state who went from being the Bush administration's leading voice of moderation and diplomacy to wearing a veil of hawkishness on the eve of a senseless war with Iraq.
The "old" Colin Powell was last seen on Nov. 8 at the United Nations. Having successfully strong-armed President Bush into giving an old-fashioned concept called bilateralism another shot, Secretary Powell engineered a historic 15-0 vote against Iraq by the U.N. Security Council. His reputation as a thoughtful soldier-turned-diplomat overcame a lot of international reluctance and suspicion, paving the way for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq.
But administration hawks were waiting for the jubilant secretary of state when he returned to the West Wing playing the harp of negotiation. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney were beating the drums of war and their chests simultaneously.
It was obvious to Powell that the president was humming along with his foes and that the U.N. resolution he helped bring about was nothing more than a "legal" pretext to begin a war with Iraq -- not avert it.
At the equivalent of knife point, Powell was stripped of his diplomatic dignity, wrapped in the robes of war and given a new script that eschewed sissy words like "bilateral cooperation." He was then escorted to a secret bunker in Georgetown and indoctrinated with the gospel of pre-emptive war.
Newly programmed, Powell returned to the U.N. in February with a power point presentation of Iraqi weapons violations -- some of them even true. The members of the Security Council listened to their old friend with dismay. Why was the most trustworthy man in the Bush administration wearing a veil and pretending to be someone else?
In the remaining days before an American plane drops the Mother of All Bombs on Baghdad, Colin Powell continues to huddle in the White House with men whose agenda for global hegemony is about to become obvious to even the blindest patriot. "Are you Colin Powell?" he'll be asked in the days to come. To which he'll shake his head and reluctantly reply: "Thou sayest."
Tony Norman can be reached at tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.
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