"US Uses Rape As An Instrument Of War"

I think Moowalkerv was trying to make the point that the USA constantly tells other countries that they have human rights violations, or interferes in other countries state of affairs, all while proclaiming the high moral ground.

And this points to the US not having that high moral ground.

There are other facets to this story (CIA destroying two enhanced interrogation instruction videos before the ACLU gets the FOIA to release them, Abu Ghraib torture, etc) that illustrates that the US doesn't really have that high moral ground.

But maybe I'm reading his statements wrong.

I didnt and wouldnt lump all americans into the category of being "Dumb", i know alot of American people as well too many years on FF and my working career would show me otherwise but it is common knowlage that the American infantry is recruited from lower class and therfor less educated people within the US.


The americant military has a very bad reputation world wide for being uneducated and untrained. AJ, Army Jerk is a very common term for them in Australia

Courts-martial, non-judicial punishment, and administrative reprimands:

Eleven soldiers have been convicted of various charges relating to the incidents, all including dereliction of duty—most receiving relatively minor sentences. Three other soldiers have either been cleared of charges or were not charged. No one has been convicted for murders of detainees.

Colonel Thomas Pappas was relieved of his command on May 13, 2005, after receiving non-judicial punishment on May 9, 2005, for two instances of dereliction, including that of allowing dogs to be present during interrogations. He was fined $8000 under the provisions of Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (non-judicial punishment). He also received a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR) which effectively ended his military career.

Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan became the highest ranking officer to have charges brought against him in connection with the Abu Ghraib abuse on April 29, 2006.[55] Prior to his trial, eight of twelve charges against him were dismissed, two of the most serious after Major General George Fay admitted that he did not read Jordan his rights before interviewing him in reference to the abuses that had taken place. On August 28, 2007, Jordan was acquitted of all charges related to prisoner mistreatment and received a reprimand for disobeying an order not to discuss a 2004 investigation into the allegations.[56]

Specialist Charles Graner was found guilty on January 14, 2005 of conspiracy to maltreat detainees, failing to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty, and maltreatment, as well as charges of assault, indecency, adultery, and obstruction of justice. On January 15, 2005, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, dishonorable discharge and reduction in rank to private.[57][58] Graner was paroled from the US military's Fort Leavenworth prison on August 6, 2011 after serving six-and-a-half years.[59]

Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick pled guilty on October 20, 2004 to conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees, assault and committing an indecent act in exchange for other charges being dropped. His abuses included forcing three prisoners to masturbate. He also punched one prisoner so hard in the chest that he needed resuscitation. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, forfeiture of pay, a dishonorable discharge and a reduction in rank to private.[60]

Sergeant Javal Davis pled guilty February 4, 2005 to dereliction of duty, making false official statements and battery. He was sentenced to six months in prison, a reduction in rank to private, and a bad conduct discharge.

Specialist Jeremy Sivits was sentenced on May 19, 2004 by a special court-martial to the maximum one-year sentence, in addition to a bad conduct discharge and a reduction of rank to private, upon his guilty plea.[61]

Specialist Armin Cruz was sentenced on September 11, 2004, to eight months confinement, reduction in rank to private and a bad conduct discharge in exchange for his testimony against other soldiers.[62]

Specialist Sabrina Harman was sentenced on May 17, 2005, to six months in prison and a bad conduct discharge after being convicted on six of the seven counts. She had faced a maximum sentence of five years.[63] Harman served her sentence at Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar.[64]

Specialist Megan Ambuhl was convicted on October 30, 2004, of dereliction of duty and sentenced to reduction in rank to private and loss of a half-month’s pay.[65]

Private First Class Lynndie England was convicted on September 26, 2005, of one count of conspiracy, four counts of maltreating detainees and one count of committing an indecent act. She was acquitted on a second conspiracy count. England had faced a maximum sentence of ten years. She was sentenced on September 27, 2005, to three years confinement, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, reduction to Private (E-1) and received a dishonorable discharge.[60] England had served her sentence at Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar.[66]

Sergeant Santos Cardona was convicted of dereliction of duty and aggravated assault, the equivalent of a felony in the US civilian justice system. He served 90 days of hard labor at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was then transferred to a new unit where he trained Iraqi police.[67] Cardona was unable to re-enlist due to the conviction, and left the army in 2007. In 2009, he was killed in action while working as a government contractor in Afghanistan.

Specialist Roman Krol pled guilty on February 1, 2005 to conspiracy and maltreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib. He was sentenced to ten months confinement, reduction in rank to private, and a bad conduct discharge.[68]

Specialist Israel Rivera, who was present during abuse on October 25, was under investigation but was never charged and testified against other soldiers.

Sergeant Michael Smith was found guilty on March 21, 2006 of two counts of prisoner maltreatment, one count of simple assault, one count of conspiracy to maltreat, one count of dereliction of duty and a final charge of an indecent act, and sentenced to 179 days in prison, a fine of $2,250, a demotion to private, and a bad conduct discharge.

link

I didnt and wouldnt lump all americans into the category of being "Dumb", i know alot of American people as well too many years on FF and my working career would show me otherwise but it is common knowlage that the American infantry is recruited from lower class and therfor less educated people within the US.


The americant military has a very bad reputation world wide for being uneducated and untrained. AJ, Army Jerk is a very common term for them in Australia

This part is pretty good.


This part isn't so much. Killing machines? Right. The US military is compassionate and considerate to the point that it hinders their objectives. If we were training killing machines, there wouldn't be any rape: we would kill everyone. But the reality of the situation is that (whether we succeed in it or not) we're not conquerors, but trying to give a country to the people we think will take care of it best. That's where we get our super-restrained rules of engagement. That's how we wind up with soldiers having no food intended for themselves, but plenty of humanitarian rations.

Tied into that is respect for the enemy. Surely, I'd be an idiot if I said that every individual member respects their enemy. But institutionally, absolutely. That is the kind of training that actually takes place. Both tactically respecting the enemy to prevent being caught off guard, but also respecting them as humans. Mercy, compassion, empathy.

"train people into killing machines they have no regard or respect for 'the enemy'" is pretty offensively ignorant.

All that being said, yeah, war is a hugely complicated, stressful, and imperfect situation for almost any person, and things get messed up. That's not an excuse for that kind of behavior - provided that the very best effort has been made to provide the correct training and support - the military ought to hold its members to a higher standard. (And very often do, despite the tragic and terrible exceptions like this situation.)

yeah, war is a hugely complicated, stressful, and imperfect situation for almost any person, and things get messed up. That's not an excuse for that kind of behavior

US military recruits under/uneducated people because very few want to join the military who have a bachelor's degree in anything that can net them a decent job. Some use the US military to pursue their education and move on.

This is very very wrong. Your part of the problem spreading the false impression that the US Military is full of dumb folks.

#1 recruiting demographic is middle class white HS graduates. #1 recruiting tool is the 100% tuition covering while in the service coupled with the GI bill which is now transferable to your children. Following that is the college loan repayment program. The US Military will pay back your college loads prorated over the four or six years of your initial enlistment. If you have a 4 year degree then you start off as E-4 (SPC) which allows you to accumulate Time In Grade (TIG) for E-5 (SGT) starting at enlistment. Becoming a senior NCO practically requires a degree due to the strong competitive nature of the centralized DA board. Becoming an Officer mandates a four year degree and you'll need to get a masters to home to see future progression. While Warrants aren't "required", its one of those things that is expected.

Later I can provide deeper information seeing as one of my duties during active service was brigade retention NCO (poor *** who gets to track and convince people to reenlist as an additional duty).

But everyone please feel free to argue as ignorant uninformed liberals with the experienced former NCO.

I guess so. I did see that, but I guess I misinterpreted it. I'm sorry :(

More relevant is the rape situation going on within the military amongst our own forces.

When warmonger John McCain says that he can't in good faith recommend women enlisting you know you've got a major problem.

More relevant is the rape situation going on within the military amongst our own forces.

When warmonger John McCain says that he can't in good faith recommend women enlisting you know you've got a major problem.

WARNING: Images contained in this articule, although censored, are still very disturbing and might offend some.

Source:
http://www.asiantribune.com/news/2009/10/03/rape-iraqi-women-us-forces-weapon-war-photos-and-data-emerge


Article:
Washington, D.C. 03 October (Asiantribune.com):

In March 2006 four US soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division gang raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl and murdered her and her family —including a 5 year old child. An additional soldier was involved in the cover-up.

One of the killers, Steven Green, was found guilty on May 07, 2009 in the US District Court of Paducah and is now awaiting sentencing.

The leaked Public Affairs Guidance put the 101st media team into a "passive posture" — withholding information where possible. It conceals presence of both child victims, and describes the rape victim, who had just turned 14, as "a young woman".

The US Army's Criminal Investigation Division did not begin its investigation until three and a half months after the crime, news reports at that time commented.

This is not the only grim picture coming out of Iraq U.S. forces being accused of using rape as a war weapon.

The release, by CBS News, of the photographs showing the heinous sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi POW's at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison opened a Pandora's Box for the Bush regime wrote Ernesto Cienfuegos in La Voz de Aztlan on May 2, 2004.

Journalist Cienfuegos further states “Apparently, the suspended US commander of the prison where the worst abuses took place, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, has refused to take the fall by herself and has implicated the CIA, Military Intelligence and private US government contractors in the torturing of POW's and in the raping of Iraqi women detainees as well.”


Brigadier General Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade, described a high-pressure Military Intelligence and CIA command that prized successful interrogations. A month before the alleged abuses and rapes occurred, she said, a team of CIA, Military Intelligence officers and private consultants under the employ of the US government came to Abu Ghraib. "Their main and specific mission was to give the interrogators new techniques to get more information from detainees," she said.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He later confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in May 2009.

The London newspaper further noted “graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President Obama’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.”

Maj. Gen. Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

In April, Mr. Obama’s administration said the photographs would be released and it would be “pointless to appeal” against a court judgment in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

But after lobbying from senior military figures, Mr. Obama changed his mind saying they could put the safety of troops at risk.

In May, he said: “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

In April 2004, new photographs were sent to La Voz de Aztlan from confidential sources depicting the shocking rapes of two Iraqi women by what are purported to be US Military Intelligence personnel and private US mercenaries in military fatigues. It is now known, Cienfuegos wrote in May 2004, that hundreds of these photographs had been in circulation among the troops in Iraq. The graphic photos were being swapped between the soldiers like baseball cards.


Asian Tribune carries here three of the ‘Rape’ photographs which have brought criticism that the U.S. forces in Iraq have used rape as a weapon of war.

- Asian Tribune -

Also, when citing sources for information, you may want to consider something other than Wikipedia if you want to be taken seriously.

The Dark Side of Liberation
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: May 20, 2013

The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American G.I.’s were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light.

Mary Louise Roberts has written “What Soldiers Do,” a book about sexual assaults by Americans fighting in France.

An American soldier and a Frenchwoman kissing in a picture that raised eyebrows after appearing in Life magazine in 1944.
In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.”

This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity.

“I could not believe what I was reading,” Ms. Roberts, a professor of French history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recalled of the moment she came across the citizen complaints in an obscure archive in Le Havre. “I took out my little camera and began photographing the pages. I did not go to the bathroom for eight hours.”

“What Soldiers Do,” to be officially published next month by the University of Chicago Press, arrives just as sexual misbehavior inside the military is high on the national agenda, thanks to a recent Pentagon report estimating that some 26,000 service members had been sexually assaulted in 2012, more than a one-third increase since 2010.

While Ms. Roberts’s arguments may be a hard sell to readers used to more purely heroic narratives, her book is winning praise from some scholarly colleagues.“Our culture has embalmed World War II as ‘the good war,’ and we don’t revisit the corpse very often,” said David M. Kennedy, a historian at Stanford University and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.”

“What Soldiers Do,” he added, is “a breath of fresh air,” providing less of an “aha” than, as he put it, an “of course.”

Ms. Roberts, whose parents met in 1944 when her father was training as a naval officer, emphasizes that American soldiers’ heroism and sacrifice were very real, and inspired genuine gratitude. But French sources, she argues, also reveal deep ambivalence on the part of the liberated.

“Struggles between American and French officials over sex,” she writes, “rekindled the unresolved question of who exactly was in charge.”

Sex was certainly on the liberators’ minds. The book cites military propaganda and press accounts depicting France as “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,” as Life magazine put it. (Sample sentences from a French phrase guide in the newspaper Stars and Stripes: “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”)

On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque. In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.)

In France, Ms. Roberts also found a desperate letter from the mayor of Le Havre in August 1945 urging American commanders to set up brothels outside the city, to halt the “scenes contrary to decency” that overran the streets, day and night. They refused, partly, Ms. Roberts argues, out of concern that condoning prostitution would look bad to “American mothers and sweethearts,” as one soldier put it.

Keeping G.I. sex hidden from the home front, she writes, ensured that it would be on full public view in France: a “two-sided attitude,” she said, that is reflected in the current military sexual abuse crisis.

Ms. Roberts is not the first scholar to bring the sexual side of World War II into clearer view. The 1990s brought a surge of scholarship on the Soviet Army’s mass rapes on the Eastern front, fed partly by the international campaign to have rape recognized as a war crime after the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, gender historians began taking a closer look at “fraternization” by American soldiers, with particular attention to what women thought they were getting out of the bargain.

“The standard story had been that the Soviets were the rapists, the Americans were the fraternizers, and the British were the gentlemen,” said Atina Grossmann, the author of “Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany.”

Work that looked at sexual assaults by American soldiers, even on a small scale, remained controversial. J. Robert Lilly’s “Taken by Force,” a groundbreaking study of rapes of French, German and British civilian women by G.I.’s, based on courts-martial records Mr. Lilly uncovered, drew a strong response when it was published in France in 2003. But the book, which emphasized the grossly disproportionate prosecution of black soldiers, struggled to find an American publisher amid tensions between the United States and Europe over Iraq.

“American presses wouldn’t touch the subject with a 10-foot barge pole,” said Mr. Lilly, a sociology professor at Northern Kentucky University. (Palgrave Macmillan published his book in the United States in 2007.)

Today the seamier side of liberation is not entirely absent from popular accounts. “The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945,” the final volume of Rick Atkinson’s best-selling trilogy about the war, published this month, includes a brief discussion of the Army’s campaign against venereal disease (“Don’t forget the Krauts were fooling around France a long time before we got here,” an Army publication warned soldiers in December 1944), as well as a reference to Mr. Lilly’s work.

The few scholars who have looked more closely at rape by G.I.’s have attributed its racially skewed prosecution to “the Jim Crow army,” which was happy to depict rape as a problem only among the noncombat support units to which black soldiers were mostly limited.

“White soldiers got a pass because of their combat status,” said William I. Hitchcock, author of “The Bitter Road to Freedom” (2008), a history of the liberation of Western Europe from the perspective of often traumatized local civilians. “The Army wasn’t interested in prosecuting a battle-scarred sergeant.”

Ms. Roberts, who closely studied transcripts of 15 courts-martial in Northern France, certainly sees American racism at work. “Let’s Look at Rape!,” a 1944 Army pamphlet credited to “a Negro Chaplain,” contained a prominent illustration of a noose — a clear suggestion that the Army was going to “protect the color line,” she writes. (Among the soldiers hanged for rape and murder was Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till.)

But her analysis is hardly more flattering to the French, whose often shaky accusations, as she sees them, reflected their own need to project the humiliations of occupation onto a racial “other.” (“We have no more soldiers here, just a few Negroes who terrorize the neighborhood,” one civilian remarked in April 1945.)

Ms. Roberts said the book has attracted strong interest from French publishers, where willingness to explore the darker side of liberation jostles with a lingering fear of seeming ungrateful. At home, she insisted, her goal is not “to sour the story of Normandy.”

“I truly believe what we did there was amazing,” she said. “But I’m interested in providing a richer and more realistic picture.”