Monday May 25, 2009, 12:48 am
"The issue of sexual assault in the military is very grave"...

Colonel Ann Wright.ret...

Do not view with your children present...But please do view...It will give you another perspective on the futility of war!

Monday May 25, 2009, 1:09 am
I agree this is something all should see and be made aware of. Sickening, vile and disgusting to say the least. I hope Lavena, and all the rest who suffered at the hands of monsters, who were killed or lived through it, will finally get justice. Thank you David for another eye opening article.

Monday May 25, 2009, 1:35 am
Thank you David! Thank you for not being afraid of the truth.

Monday May 25, 2009, 4:13 am
Thanks guys, I've never been afraid of the truth or trying to get the blind to see..."originality is not caring what others think of you"

It's a shame that this has to come to you via Oz tv...Did you ever see this in the US?

Monday May 25, 2009, 4:50 am
I think there have been similar reports in the U.S. media,but not that much.Of course they'd rather keep us locked inside our houses,afraid of the outside world because all I see on t.v. are rapes/murders going on right in my backyard,and the occasional death poll of who killed who in Iraq.I can't watch the news withut arguing with the t.v. looking like a madwoman.

Monday May 25, 2009, 5:55 am
Good topic, but as usual it does not count all of the victims, only one faction!!! Sexual predators have no bounds, and men get raped also, no one knows the percentage, because men don't tell!!! How many man get sexually ass-aulted in prison??? Is that not what they are sent there for??? Is not not why we put women in the military for??? War is about conquest, and so is rape!!! It is power it's self, that causes rape, and until you level the playing field, and treat power as an addiction, you will have power mongers, wanting to conquest all!!! I have been raped in the name of justice, as a pow of the war of drugs, but since I am not a woman, it just don't matter, so I am on the wrong side of the war of drugs, it just don't matter!!! It is 100%legal to rape men, ask any inmate!!! Hell it's the guards to sick the "BOOTIE BANDITS" on others for personal entertainment!!!
HOW MANY STUDENTS, GET RAPED, BY TEACHERS??? BOYS AND GIRLS ALIKE!!!
HOW MANY BOYS WERE RAPED BY PREASTS??? I know several, and one that took his own life over it, but that didn't count either!!!
Take the women out of war, and men out of prison, or rape will be business as usual...prisons have become "HOMO=SEXUAL FACTORIES",and that is just a twisted genocide, and I am quite sure that raped women have a chance of sterility!!! Our sex organs are under attack, and so our our families, buy it is all caused by the incompetence and unaccountability of our governments!!!
If prostitution war legal, and if prisoners, has sexual visits, rape just might become a thing of the past, but as long as we allow our government to right to rape, they will!!!

Monday May 25, 2009, 6:31 am
This is so upsetting. Thank you David...If I were the parents of any soldier woman or man that had been raped by another in the military I would go before the President and tell him I want this person put in prison. He is a disgrace to the uniform, our country and good service men that care about their fellow officers. This is quite disturbing. How can any man that has raped and violated a person expect them to have their back when needed.

Monday May 25, 2009, 7:45 am
Not surprizing at all. Can you imgine what they did to the female iraq prisoners. This is yet to be exposed.

Monday May 25, 2009, 8:04 am
Thank you David for pointing out the other side that is never talked about but everyone knows. It is all about power by the weak. I am sure our women veterans are not the only ones raped in the mid east or for that fact, in the world as rape goes unreported and is truly ignored, even by women. This is an ugly side of humans that I will never understand. I don't think rape in prison is a gay thing but a power thing.. The video will never get public showing as we stick our heads in the ground. As a parent and having a daughter that was raped, I know the feeling of wanting to murder someone. And like so many, she blamed herself, not the attacker. I am sorry David as no one should ever be humiliated this way and degraded to dirt,,, not man, not woman, not children.. Punishment for such crimes is minimal if you ask me

Monday May 25, 2009, 4:13 pm
Is there no honour in the American Military machine. The statistics are appalling. Is there no discipline or justice? Perhaps statistics should be posted about each unit, and the commanding officer, corpse and branch of the military. Shame the Bas****s.
My late father was in New Guinea during WW2. I recall one conversation where he stated that an American officer could walk into any of the female quarters, select a service woman and she could not refuse.. I believe this has been a traditional culture with the Officers in particular,within the American Military. When they became pregnant, they were shipped off back home on, what was termed, "pudding flights'. I wonder if there is anyone on care2 who can add further to this.
By the way, did you notice the sign of the illuminati on the forehead on the serviceman being hazed.

Monday May 25, 2009, 5:37 pm
This is so horrible. I did not know it was this bad. All of these evil monsters need to pay for what they have done. I don't see how they sleep at night. Noted with thanks David.

Monday May 25, 2009, 5:53 pm
One in three...I keep coming back to that quoted statistic...1 : 3, one third of all female solders...and how many of the male ones as well? And Anita's point...if that is how they treat their own and cover up command rape what the heck has been going on with the prisoners...and somehow the story of the pictures not being released makes all the more sense...as the committee pointed out the investigations are being hampered at all levels...cancelled meetings are normally part of this malaise...and those photos...what did they show that Obama went back on his word to release them...he has become part of the cover-up.

Monday May 25, 2009, 7:16 pm
And that saddens me David (G)...I believe that Obama is a seriously nice and well intentioned guy...But I really have to question how far he can go when beholden to his many corporate sponsors?...

'Death before dishonour' is a phrase that crosses my mind on this topic...Who could possibly live a happy, usefull life knowing they had commited such attrocities?...Perhaps this brings me to another much hackneyed expression 'hell on earth'

These women deserve better...Their assailants deserve NOTHING!

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 12:03 am
David, my dear friend, with all
due love and respect to you, I
refuse to watch the video. There
are simply some images I will not
allow into my mind.
But, as to the topic, I totally agree
with the Chief up there. What did they
expect, making the military co-gender?!
This isn't rocket science! What I'm wondering,
aren't these women (allegedly) trained to fight
off such an attack?!
I don't know, nor do I want to know.
Thanks, David.
noted.

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 1:18 am
Thanks for calling atention to ths grave issue, David.

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 1:32 am
Just another thought. When we send people out to possibly be killed or to murder other human beings, this is the darkest of situations. It's tricky to flip a switch off and on in this situation or that and either be a sensitive caring human being or not. Lots of base and ugly things are bound to happen.

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 4:06 am
That I know of, only Color of Change has spoken out about this and we sent letters to our congress members with regards to the abuse and ill treatment of one soldier in particular. This was years ago and I'm sure it was not one in three. This sucks and keep in mind that very often our fighting men and women come home and are assimilated into our society as law enforcement officials, not to mention back up domestic law enforcement while on active duty. What can we expect from their experience as far as their view of justice? Dark times indeed. Sadly noted.

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 4:11 am
Misogyny and abuse of women seem to go hand in hand with war, the military ethos, abuse of power, aggression, killing, conquest, invasion, racism towards the people being invaded -- all so brutal, dehumanising and cruel.

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 6:07 am
"I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just."
Thomas Jefferson 3rd President of the United States 1743 - 1826

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 2:11 pm
"[...]Violence against women is a problem in the U.S. military, and other slayings and suspicious deaths similar to Johnson's are being classified as suicides. And Johnson is not the only woman to die a suspicious death on the Balad military base.

Retired Army Reserve Col. Ann Wright said 1 in 3 women who join the military will be raped or sexually assaulted by servicemen. Of the 94 military women who died in Iraq or during Operation Iraqi Freedom, 36 died from injuries unrelated to combat. While a number of them were ruled as suicides and homicides, 15 deaths remain that smell suspicious. For example, eight women from Fort Hood, Texas, died of "non-combat-related injuries" at Camp Taji, three of whom were raped before their deaths.[...] [...]youth of color, lacking opportunities at home and in need of money, look to the military as a career option and a way to pay for school.[...]"

LaVena Johnson: Raped and Murdered on a Military Base in Iraq

By David A. Love, The Black Commentator. Posted March 3, 2009.

Military authorities claimed she committed suicide in her tent in Iraq, but autopsies revealed she had been brutally attacked and raped.

Have you heard the story about LaVena Johnson?
LaVena Johnson, a high school honor student, decided to enlist in the Army to pay for college. On July 19, 2005, after serving eight weeks in Iraq, she was killed, eight days short of her 20th birthday.

Pvt. Johnson -- she was posthumously promoted to private first class -- was found dead on a military base in Balad, Iraq, in a tent belonging to military contractor KBR, a spinoff and former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney's company. She was the first woman from Missouri to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army officially ruled her death a suicide, saying she shot herself in the head, case closed. But this is where the story begins.

Johnson's family knew something was wrong. They had talked to her on the phone a few days earlier, and she was in a great mood as usual, and was planning to come home for the holidays, earlier than expected.

Questions were raised when Johnson's family viewed her body. There were suspicious bruises, and while the military claimed that this right-handed soldier had shot herself in the head with an M-16 rifle, the gunshot wound was on the left side of her head.

But the truth began to make itself known when the family received the autopsy report and photos they had requested under the Freedom of Information Act:

The 5-foot tall, 100-pound woman had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument, probably a weapon. Her nose had been broken, and her teeth knocked back. There were bruises, teeth marks and scratches on the upper part of her body. Her back and right hand had been doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire. Her genital area was bruised and lacerated, and lye had been poured into her vagina. The debris found on her suggested her body had been dragged.

And despite all this mutilation, she was fully clothed when her body was found in the tent, with a blood trail leading to the tent.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Army has refused to investigate. Through an online petition, ColorofChange.org demanded an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Johnson's story is really several stories in one, and is about more than an individual Black woman who was raped and killed by her fellow soldiers. African Americans have fought in every war since the Revolutionary War, and often their country has been a far more formidable foe to them than the so-called enemy they were told to fight.

Often, youth of color, lacking opportunities at home and in need of money, look to the military as a career option and a way to pay for school. But in light of all the death and destruction of the unjust and immoral war in Iraq, fewer of them took the bait this time, and opposition to the war among Black youth has posed a challenge for Army recruiters.

Perhaps these young people were channeling war resisters of a prior generation, such as Muhammad Ali, who once said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. ... They never called me nigger." That war was devastating to poor communities of all races, and the black community in particular, as their young men came home in the thousands in body bags, or maimed, traumatized, as dope fiends or completely insane.

It was this "cruel manipulation of the poor," as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called it, one that united people of different races "in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit."

Forty years later, we find ourselves in another unjust and senseless war. This "home invasion" of Iraq, as Philadelphia veteran journalist Reggie Bryant aptly characterized it. And Johnson is a symbol of this war, as a casualty who risks being swept under the rug.

We may never know how many crimes have been hidden in Iraq. War is good for that sort of thing and little else, concealing the rapes, murders, shooting of children, bombing and pillaging of homes, the money stealing, and other crimes that are committed -- including the crime that is war itself. People are taught to kill like animals, to dehumanize and humiliate others.

But the case of Johnson raises yet another issue: Violence against women is a problem in the U.S. military, and other slayings and suspicious deaths similar to Johnson's are being classified as suicides. And Johnson is not the only woman to die a suspicious death on the Balad military base.

Retired Army Reserve Col. Ann Wright said 1 in 3 women who join the military will be raped or sexually assaulted by servicemen. Of the 94 military women who died in Iraq or during Operation Iraqi Freedom, 36 died from injuries unrelated to combat. While a number of them were ruled as suicides and homicides, 15 deaths remain that smell suspicious. For example, eight women from Fort Hood, Texas, died of "non-combat-related injuries" at Camp Taji, three of whom were raped before their deaths. Camp Taji is an Army base about 10 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Also, a number of female employees of Halliburton/KBR have been sexually harassed, assaulted and gang raped in Iraq. Their employment contract calls for such cases to be decided through arbitration rather than in a court of law. Halliburton and KBR, these war profiteers awash with money, even wanted one alleged rape victim to pay for their costs to defend themselves in arbitration. Lord have mercy ...

It is clear that under President George W. Bush, no friend of justice, the cases of these brutalized and slain women could not see the light of day. But we are living in a new time, so it seems, and perhaps now is the time that the family of LaVena Johnson, and all those other nameless women killed by the military, will find the justice they deserve.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/129646/lavena_johnson%3A_raped_and_murdered_on_a_military_base_in_iraq/?page=entire

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 11:03 pm
I wouldn't stand the video. I am not surprised at all. These men are trained to be violent... frankly, do you expect something different???

Tuesday May 26, 2009, 11:07 pm
Chief Dude - very well said!

Cheers,
Josh