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Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers' Deaths
by Marjorie Cohn, truthout
January 30th, 2006
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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.
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.
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. |
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