As Libya Buries Victims, Hints of Deception

Then, in minutes, the few hundred mourners who had gathered in this city melted away into a perfect spring day, ending another funeral — this time for the victims of a Friday bombing in the eastern oil town of Brega — that had been transformed into a pageant for denouncing the NATO forces whose bombs are taking a regular toll in Libyan lives.

For the officials who shepherd the small band of foreign journalists covering the war from here to such events, seeing them as powerful propaganda tools to be used against the Western powers, the burials on Saturday provided a moment that even the most accomplished propagandists could not have written into their script.

Just before the coffins arrived, two high-flying aircraft — NATO planes, for sure, since others are banned under a United Nations-imposed no-fly zone — wrote vapor trails high above.

As one aircraft circled back to the northeast, another flew on to the southwest, toward the western mountains along the Tunisian and Algerian borders where there has been intense fighting between Libyan rebels and the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. At the sight of each aircraft, mourners pointed in agitation to the sky, demanding that foreign TV crews capture the moment and shouting choruses of support for Colonel Qaddafi.

The moment captured the anger and futility felt by Libyans still loyal to Colonel Qaddafi as NATO aircraft pound targets in Tripoli and other government-held areas night after night, day after day, with the total of sorties flown since the air raids began now cresting 2,500.

Western defense officials have said that 40 to 50 percent of the Qaddafi forces’ striking power has been degraded, and with it almost all the capability, in fighter aircraft, missiles and antiaircraft batteries, that Libya had to confront an aerial invader. So far, only one NATO plane has crashed, and that was early in the conflict, after what NATO officials said was a technical failure.

If the funeral on Saturday was planned as a moment to strike a moral blow against the West, it was only modestly successful. Other messages pressed in.

The cemetery chosen for the burials was not one of the city’s most prestigious, but one set on a windblown stretch of shoreline across from a bleak highway overpass. A mile or two to the west, the idle cranes of the Tripoli port and the anchored ships stood like sentinels, testament to an oil-based economy that has been paralyzed by the war.

The 10-minute bus ride from the journalists’ hotel passed by several of the long lines for fuel that are a telltale feature wherever the government still holds sway. Dwarfing the lines in Baghdad in the final months of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the ones here run for miles, often four lines abreast, sometimes with more than one snaking corridor of vehicles approaching a single gas station. The waits can last days, a week even, and they have added to an air of demoralization that weighs even on officials appointed to mind foreign reporters.

Against this background, the funeral promised a powerful counterpoint, one with the potential to rally faint hearts. On Friday, officials gathered reporters at a Tripoli mosque to announce that 11 Muslim clerics had been killed in a NATO strike at Brega, 500 miles east of Tripoli, and the government’s easternmost point of control. The officials said 45 others had been wounded in the bombing of a former oil company guesthouse, and gave the platform to a cleric who called for the dead to be avenged in terrorist attacks against the West.

Earlier in the week, the propaganda apparatus had been focused on a gathering of tribal leaders in support of Colonel Qaddafi. Now, the deaths of the imams appeared to lay the ground for marshaling an even wider body of opinion. Calling the NATO attackers “crusaders” set the tone, as did the assertion, common in all the bombings, that NATO was lying when it identified the Brega target as a “command-and-control” center for pro-Qaddafi forces.

But the funeral itself seemed strangely flat, at least in political terms. For one thing, despite the location being broadcast on Libyan state television, and circulated in cellphone text messages, barely 500 people showed up, in a city of two million. No important government officials attended. For all the browbeating directed at foreign reporters by mourners who vowed their love for Colonel Qaddafi and their hatred for NATO, the event, taken as a whole, seemed underwhelming.

Part of the problem lay in the contradictions and uncertainties that flowed from official accounts, and those given by the mourners.

According to officials, the nine coffins, with bodies wrapped in the green of Islam, were those of the dead Muslim clerics. But some mourners offered differing counts. Two men whispered that their uncles, among those being buried, were soldiers, and one of those said the man concerned had been dead for weeks. Another identified one of the dead as a driver.

There was a man who said that he was in the guesthouse when it was attacked, and that 7 of the group of 16 he had led to the Brega gathering from Sirte, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, had been killed, 4 of them imams. The man, who identified himself as Attiya Ali Ahmed, 25, appeared to have suffered no injury in the attack. He said that the gathering had been called for a public reading of the Koran and to rally morale in Brega against the rebels, and that he had seen no sign of any military activity in or near the guesthouse. And he warned reporters to accurately convey his account.

“The Koran does not permit anything but the truth,” he said.

 

Gender Games: College Teams, Relying on Deception, Undermine Gender Equity

At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.

At Marshall University, the women’s tennis coach recently invited three freshmen onto the team even though he knew they were not good enough to practice against his scholarship athletes, let alone compete. They could come to practice whenever they liked, he told them, and would not have to travel with the team.

At Cornell, only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men. Texas A&M and Duke are among the elite women’s basketball teams that also take advantage of a federal loophole that allows them to report male practice players as female participants.

Title IX, passed in 1972 at the height of the women’s rights movement, banned sex discrimination in any federally financed education program. It threw into sharp relief the unequal treatment of male and female athletes on college campuses.

Over the next 40 years, the law spawned a cultural transformation: the number of women competing in college sports has soared by more than 500 percent — to 186,000 a year from fewer than 30,000 in 1972.

But as women have grown to 57 percent of American colleges’ enrollment, athletic programs have increasingly struggled to field a proportional number of female athletes. And instead of pouring money into new women’s teams or trimming the rosters of prized football teams, many colleges are turning to a sleight of hand known as roster management. According to a review of public records from more than 20 colleges and universities by The New York Times, and an analysis of federal participation statistics from all 345 institutions in N.C.A.A. Division I — the highest level of college sports — many are padding women’s team rosters with underqualified, even unwitting, athletes. They are counting male practice players as women. And they are trimming the rosters of men’s teams.

“Those of us in the business know that universities have been end-running Title IX for a long time, and they do it until they get caught,” said Donna E. Shalala, the president of the University of Miami.

Each year, institutions must report their male and female participation numbers to the Department of Education. And even though the numbers would not be used in a formal investigation, many colleges manipulate them to avoid bringing about one. The embarrassment that comes with a public inquiry or a lawsuit can motivate them to do what it takes to stay under the radar.

Shrinking budgets also spur universities to use these tactics, said Jake Crouthamel, a former Syracuse athletic director. “It’s easier to add more people on a roster than it is to start a new sport,” he said.

Yet football, the pride of many universities and a draw for alumni, rarely faces cuts. The average Division I football team went from 95 players 30 years ago to 111 players in 2009-10.

“Football is the elephant in the whole thing,” Mr. Crouthamel said. “That’s the monster.”

Advocates for men’s teams say roster management hurts their cause as well, because colleges tend to eliminate men’s sports rather than increase women’s sports to reach parity. Officials have also cut the size of men’s teams, compromising their competitiveness.

“I think roster management is almost a cuss word,” said Tommy Bell, the athletic director at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. He wants to restore a men’s track team, he said, but to do so, he must trim men’s spots elsewhere. “I hate doing it,” he said.

According to the most current federal numbers, women make up 53 percent of the student body at Division I institutions yet only 46 percent of all athletes. And that discrepancy does not take into account all the tactics used to boost the numbers artificially.

Roster management came under scrutiny last year when a federal judge ruled that Quinnipiac University in Connecticut had violated Title IX by engaging in several questionable practices, including requiring that women cross-country runners join the indoor and outdoor track teams so they could be counted three times. The judge found earlier that Quinnipiac had been padding women’s rosters by counting players, then cutting them a few weeks later. Quinnipiac athletic officials declined to comment, but in its appeal, the university said the judge’s conclusion that women were required to be on all three teams was not supported by evidence.

Russlynn H. Ali, the assistant education secretary who heads the Office for Civil Rights, which is charged with enforcing Title IX, said the Quinnipiac case was “a check on what some were doing, either knowingly or unwittingly.”

Karen Crouse, Griffin Palmer and Marjorie Connelly contributed reporting.