Girl-child Just Ain't Safe in a House Full of Men

Sexual Assault in Military 'Jaw-Dropping,' Lawmaker Says

July 31, 2008

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A congresswoman said Thursday that
her "jaw dropped" when military doctors told her that
four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being
sexually assaulted while in the military.

A government report indicates that the numbers could be
even higher.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, spoke before a House
panel investigating the way the military handles reports
of sexual assault.

She said she recently visited a Veterans Affairs
hospital in the Los Angeles area, where women told her
horror stories of being raped in the military.

"My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41 percent
of the female veterans seen there say they were victims
of sexual assault while serving in the military," said
Harman, who has long sought better protection of women
in the military.

"Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their
military service. They spoke of their continued terror,
feelings of helplessness and downward spirals many of
their lives have taken since.

"We have an epidemic here," she said. "Women serving in
the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a
fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq."

As of July 24, 100 women had died in Iraq, according to
the Pentagon.

In 2007, Harman said, only 181 out of 2,212 reports of
military sexual assaults, or 8 percent, were referred to
courts martial. By comparison, she said, 40 percent of
those arrested in the civilian world on such charges are
prosecuted.

Defense statistics show that military commanders took
unspecified action, which can include anything from
punishment to dismissal, in an additional 419 cases.

But when it came time for the military to defend itself,
the panel was told that the Pentagon's top official on
sexual abuse, Dr. Kaye Whitley, was ordered not to show
up despite a subpoena.

"I don't know what you're trying to cover up here, but
we're not going to allow it," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-
California, said to the Defense official who relayed the
news of Whitley's no-show. "This is unacceptable."

Rep. John Tierney, the panel's chairman and a Democrat
from Massachusetts, angrily responded, "these actions by
the Defense Department are inexplicable."

"The Defense Department appears to be willfully and
blatantly advising Dr. Whitley not to comply with a duly
authorized congressional subpoena," Tierney said.

An Army official who did testify said the Army takes
allegations of sexual abuse extremely seriously.

"Even one sexual assault violates the very essence of
what it means to be a soldier, and it's a betrayal of
the Army's core values," Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle said.

The committee also heard from Mary Lauterbach, the
mother of Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, a 20-year-old
pregnant Marine who was killed in December, allegedly by
a fellow Marine.

Mary Lauterbach said her daughter filed a rape claim
with the military against Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean
seven months before he was accused of killing her.

"I believe that Maria would be alive today if the
Marines had provided a more effective system to protect
the victims of sexual assault," she said.

In the months after her daughter filed the rape claim,
she said, the military didn't seem to take her
seriously, and the onus was on "Maria to connect the
dots."

"The victim should not have the burden to generate
evidence for the command," Lauterbach told the
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.
"Maria is dead, but there will be many more victims in
the future, I promise you. I'm here to ask you to do
what you can to help change how the military treats
victims of crime and to ensure the victims receive the
support and protection they need and they deserve."

Another woman, Ingrid Torres, described being raped on a
U.S. base in Korea when she worked with the American Red
Cross.

"I was raped while I slept," she said.

The man who assaulted her, she said, was a flight
director who was found guilty and dismissed from the Air
Force.

Fighting back tears, Torres added, "he still comes after
me in my dreams."

The Government Accountability Office released
preliminary results from an investigation into sexual
assaults in the military and the Coast Guard. The GAO
found that the "occurrences of sexual assault may be
exceeding the rates being reported."

"At the 14 installations where GAO administered its
survey, 103 service members indicated that they had been
sexually assaulted within the preceding 12 months. Of
these, 52 service members indicated that they did not
report the sexual assault," the GAO said.

The office found that the military and Coast Guard have
established policies to address sexual assault but that
the implementation of the programs is hampered by an
array of factors, including that "most, but not all,
commanders support the programs."

"Left unchecked, these challenges can discourage or
prevent some service members from using the programs
when needed," the GAO said.

Tierney said, "what's at stake here goes to the very
core of the values of the military and the nation
itself.

"When our sons and daughters put their lives on the line
to defend the rest of us, the last thing they should
fear is being attacked by one of our own.

Vote for Paris!!

You knows how I do. First, I gotta stick it to John McCain.


What happened?


Ummm, yeah. McCain hasn't supported equal rights his whole career. He was public with his opposition to the Ledbetter Act just a few months ago. Take note, while the central issue is women's rights, the rights of minorities to receive equal pay is involved as well. But. Guess you can't blame the Alitos and Bushes and McCains of the government for being against such a bill. Not only will companies be forced to account for pay discrimination in the last generation, they may also have to account for all that "discrimination" from decades past.


Now for the woman of the hour. The incomparable Paris Hilton not having sex but still telling John McCain to . . . er . . . um. Let's just say she tells McCain not to accuse her of being vacuous anymore.

Some White Folks Is Crazy!

Crazy white folks. (Not all. Just some, of course. Cause, this isn't, you know, typical of them.) Acting like they can't tell the difference between being charged for having said or done something racist and being racist. They act like there're difference degrees of racism. For example, E.J. Dionne told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that there're some white people who aren't pure racist who may still have a problem with a black president.

Umm, yeah, E.J. That's call a racist.

But, I do agree with E.J. on this, "Like it or not, Obama's race is an issue, just as John F. Kennedy's religion was an issue in 1960 -- and racism runs deeper in our history than anti-Catholicism." And this, "Is this unfair? Yes, it is. But if our nation is to cast off the shackles of race this year, Obama will have to grapple more than he'd like with the burdens that our history and the past travails of liberalism have forced him to bear."

And I have to say that while I agree with Eugene Robinson's opinion, linked here and above, on the whole, the crimes against humanity committed against African Americans continued into the 1970s and today. Black folk aren't so much concerned about "racial sins" committed long ago so much as the "racial sins" committed nowadays. Like Texas State Republicans selling a button asking, "If Obama is president, will we still call it the White House?"

But other than that, I agree with Eugene's assertion that, "I'm confident that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the rest of John McCain's front-line surrogates know full well what messages they're sending about Barack Obama and race. On the off chance that they -- or, more likely, some of the white voters they're trying to reach -- don't know text from subtext from context, here's a deconstruction."

And there's one last thing I wanna touch on.

It would be unfair, however, for Obama's campaign to cry "racism" every
time Republicans try to define the Democrat in unflattering terms. It would also
be a mistake, likely to backfire with voters who won't take kindly to a relative
newcomer trying to exempt himself from the ordinary, if unfortunate,
rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign.

That's Andres Martinez's take on why Barack Obama is farther ahead of John McCain. I'm kinda tired now, so let me just tease the point . . . Martinez is wrong.

Slavery Wasn't Abolished in Actuality Until 1951

I have a lot on my mind. Bill Clinton's, "I never made a racist comment." Geraldine Ferraro's lame notion that if Barack Obama chooses any woman besides Hillary Clinton, it will be an insult to both Hillary Clinton and her supporters. I wrote about that a couple of days ago.

I'm also thinking about Obama's lead in a recent poll with the white working-class. I also wonder how long Pat Buchanan will be treated like a respectable voice on politics, race, and the politics of race. Video on all that below. Perhaps I'll post about that later. And I did see the phallic symbols. And white people don't always "see" racism.

What I know I'll address is this complaint from Republicans that they can't criticize Obama and engage in regular political discussion because any criticism of Obama leads to charges of racism. That complaint is unfounded, and I will certainly take it apart later. But for now, I have another issue on my mind.

What's on my mind is the fact that slavery wasn't really abolished until 1951, when Congress finally made clear that "any form of slavery in the United States was indisputable a crime" (Douglas A Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008.) The forms of slavery engaged in at the time, and by slavery I mean illegally enforced involuntary servitude, included peonage and the chain gangs. It included the illegal use of the justice system whereby a black man would be charged with some crime he either didn't commit or committed simply by virtue of being black and out in public; then he'd be charged with all kinds of fines he couldn't pay; a white man would pay the fines and have the black man as essentially a slave to work off his "debt." Then the so-called prisoners would be beaten and whipped and forced to live in condemnable conditions all the while chained. If a prisoner died, no one was charged with murder. Even if it were clearly murder.

Then there's the rape and sexual abuse of black women. White men felt access to black women's bodies was a birthright and used it frequently. With their lives being economically dependent on white men and no legal or extralegal recourse, neither the black women nor their families were in a place to fight back much. A preacher was even killed because he encouraged black women to say, "No" (ibid. 243).

Yes, the North had its issues. There were lynchings and redlining. But, there was no slavery. That's why so many African Americans left the South like children leaving school at the end of the year. The "Jim Crow" era would be better called "the age of Neoslavery." That's Blackmon's idea, but I like it.

That may not be of great concern to you. But it's something that always got to me. Before, questions about the Great Migration and the difference between the North and South would essentially end with the notion that Northern whites were equally racist as Southern whites, but on the whole, Northern racism was easier to deal with. But now, I know that Northern racism was easier to deal with because it wouldn't lead to forced labor. Of course, there remained the sexual abuse of domestic workers. But, there was no slavery.

I'll have more about Blackmon's book in the coming days. I don't know if I'll be writing a book review so much as I'll be going about my usual rants with more evidence.

It's Sunday, Y'all!!

I wish I could paste my brother's sermon, "This Kind of Love." He and his wife just dropped by and let us watch the DVD his church made. Even I felt the Spirit, and I'm usually just trying not to laugh. Well, I did laugh a couple of times but not inappropriately. And is it my fault if he's balding and his head shines in direct light because his hair isn't thick enough to prevent the glare?

So, anyway. He kept trying to sing, "Let's Stay Together," during his sermon. I said he had to hear this preacher I had seen online.

I'm still in a cheery mood. So, here's Bishop Lester Love!!