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

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 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.

http://www.bushcommission.org/

   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."

   Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law,
President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the
executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. She writes a weekly
column for t r u t h o u t.

http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/2006/01/military-hides-cause-of-women-so
ldiers.html

Firebird

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