[Mb-civic] Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers' Deaths - Marjorie Cohn - TruthOut

[William Swiggard]

 Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers' Deaths
    By Marjorie Cohn
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Monday 30 January 2006

    In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison 
testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military 
commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some 
female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

    Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the 
Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush 
Administration <http://www.bushcommission.org> in New York that several 
women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late 
in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male 
soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

    The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near 
their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the 
bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women 
were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told 
retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview. It 
was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the 
women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late 
afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get 
raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

    Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task 
force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours 
of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not 
drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat 
or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the 
facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

    "And rather than make everybody aware of that - because that's 
shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not 
much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those 
details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can 
provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore."

    For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in 
Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death 
certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders 
from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, 
Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the 
women's privacy rights.

    Sanchez's attitude was: "The women asked to be here, so now let them 
take what comes with the territory," Karpinski quoted him as saying. 
Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to 
the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely 
that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was 
passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be 
released. "That's how Rumsfeld works," she said.

    "It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at 
Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number 
women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she 
added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United 
States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a 
recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a 
six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still 
answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

    "There were countless such situations all over the theater of 
operations - Iraq and Kuwait - because female soldiers didn't have a 
voice, individually or collectively," Karpinski told Hackworth. "Even as 
a general I didn't have a voice with Sanchez, so I know what the 
soldiers were facing. Sanchez did not want to hear about female soldier 
requirements and/or issues."

    Karpinski was the highest officer reprimanded for the Abu Ghraib 
torture scandal, although the details of interrogations were carefully 
hidden from her. Demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel, Karpinski 
feels she was chosen as a scapegoat because she was a female.

    Sexual assault in the US military has become a hot topic in the last 
few years, "not just because of the high number of rapes and other 
assaults, but also because of the tendency to cover up assaults and to 
harass or retaliate against women who report assaults," according to 
Kathy Gilberd, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild's Military Law 
Task Force.

    This problem has become so acute that the Army has set up its own 
sexual assault web site <http://www.sexualassault.army.mil>.

    In February 2004, Rumsfeld directed the Under Secretary of Defense 
for Personnel and Readiness to undertake a 90-day review of sexual 
assault policies. "Sexual assault will not be tolerated in the 
Department of Defense," Rumsfeld declared.

    The 99-page report was issued in April 2004. It affirmed, "The chain 
of command is responsible for ensuring that policies and practices 
regarding crime prevention and security are in place for the safety of 
service members." The rates of reported alleged sexual assault were 69.1 
and 70.0 per 100,000 uniformed service members in 2002 and 2003. Yet 
those rates were not directly comparable to rates reported by the 
Department of Justice, due to substantial differences in the definition 
of sexual assault.

    Notably, the report found that low sociocultural power (i.e., age, 
education, race/ethnicity, marital status) and low organizational power 
(i.e., pay grade and years of active duty service) were associated with 
an increased likelihood of both sexual assault and sexual harassment.

    The Department of Defense announced a new policy on sexual assault 
prevention and response on January 3, 2005. It was a reaction to media 
reports and public outrage about sexual assaults against women in the US 
military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing sexual assaults and 
cover-ups at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, Gilberd said. As a 
result, Congress demanded that the military review the problem, and the 
Defense Authorization Act of 2005 required a new policy be put in place 
by January 1.

    The policy is a series of very brief "directive-type memoranda" for 
the Secretaries of the military services from the Under Secretary of 
Defense for Personnel and Readiness. "Overall, the policy emphasizes 
that sexual assault harms military readiness, that education about 
sexual assault policy needs to be increased and repeated, and that 
improvements in response to sexual assaults are necessary to make 
victims more willing to report assaults," Gilberd notes. 
"Unfortunately," she added "analysis of the issues is shallow, and the 
plans for addressing them are limited."

    Commands can reject the complaints if they decide they aren't 
credible, and there is limited protection against retaliation against 
the women who come forward, according to Gilberd. "People who report 
assaults still face command disbelief, illegal efforts to protect the 
assaulters, informal harassment from assaulters, their friends or the 
command itself," she said.

    But most shameful is Sanchez's cover-up of the dehydration deaths of 
women that occurred in Iraq. Sanchez is no stranger to outrageous 
military orders. He was heavily involved in the torture scandal that 
surfaced at Abu Ghraib. Sanchez approved the use of unmuzzled dogs and 
the insertion of prisoners head-first into sleeping bags after which 
they are tied with an electrical cord and their are mouths covered. At 
least one person died as the result of the sleeping bag technique. 
Karpinski charges that Sanchez attempted to hide the torture after the 
hideous photographs became public.

    Sanchez reportedly plans to retire soon, according to an article in 
the International Herald Tribune earlier this month. But Rumsfeld 
recently considered elevating the 3-star general to a 4-star. The 
Tribune also reported that Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the Army's chief 
spokesman, said in an email message, "The Army leaders do have 
confidence in LTG Sanchez."

 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/013006J.shtml

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