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The latest Iraq war urban legend:
Several female service members have died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day due to fear of being raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.
This is absurd for countless reasons - the most obvious being that death by dehydration takes a little longer than a couple hours without fluids, even in the hottest conditions.
But this fabrication has an interesting source: Col. Janis Karpinski, former commander of the unit responsible for torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And she's found a sympathetic forum in which to tell the story: The "Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration" - a mock trial sponsored by "Not in Our Name", a group originally founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party to protest the US-led war in Afghanistan.
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.If you're still reading, that's good - you didn't smash your computer screen in anger. Now let's take this apart.
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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."
Like any other urban legend, this one has it's basis in truth.
Dark? Few lights? - True. Light tends to help terrorists aim mortars.
Latrines are located away from sleeping quarters - also true. In 120 degree heat you don't want to sleep next to the latrine. And there are health concerns beyond the unpleasant (to all but the flies) smell. But this means that when nature calls, you must walk. And if nature calls in the middle of the night, you get out of your bunk, don all your gear (including Kevlar and armor, depending on the threat level) and take a moonlight stroll.
There are a couple ways to avoid this. One is the (forbidden) empty widemouth Gatorade bottle by the bed (hopefully capped and disposed of daily. This solution doesn't work as well for females. The other is one I used myself - stop drinking after a certain hour, depending on sleep cycle and workload. Having used this method myself I can testify that I never once died of dehydration in my sleep while I was in Iraq.
But Colonel Karpinski testifies that not only did this happen, but that it was covered up by the Army:
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.Note that a plausible cause of death - heat stroke - is not cited here. The very specific "dehydration" is. According to this rather grim article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, it takes "several days to a few weeks for death to occur by this means" - if no liquid is ingested at all. At some point prior to that time, someone would have noticed the individual's deteriorating condition and complete inability to function.
Note also the victim described above. A Master Sergeant is an E8 - one rank short of the highest possible rank an enlisted member can achieve. To reach that requires skill, intelligence, desire, ability, and knowledge of "the system" - plus significant time in service. Further, those grades are limited by law to just 3% of the entire enlisted force - the "top 3 percent". To believe Karpinski's account you must accept that a mature individual who had achieved a place of great significance and responsibility in the US military had foregone all fluids for several days without anyone noticing her failing health before her death - because she was afraid of being raped on her way to the latrine at night.
And oh by the way, she also had either an M16 or a 9mm at her disposal.
Which brings us to allegations of rape. Let's establish this point right now: rape is serious business. But Karpinski's account diminishes this to absurdity and robs legitimate victims of credibility. Fortunately, the Department of Defense has a very determined and aggressive policy against sexual assault, and a zero tolerance policy for predators. No military unit could maintain cohesion and be able to function with a "see no evil" approach to such crime within the ranks. We are talking about people who often must depend on one another completely in order to have any chance to survive. While individual predators can indeed exist within this society - as they can in any - for obvious reasons those discovered are dealt with quickly and severely within the confines of the law.
But therein lies yet another element of truth in this myth. There has been at least one unit where discipline had broken down to the point where stories of such behavior become plausible - and that unit was commanded by then-General Janis Karpinski, the highest ranking individual to be punished for the crimes at Abu Ghraib. Relieved of command and reduced in rank, her own defense in the subsequent months has been that while everyone above her in rank knew what everyone below her in rank was doing, she had been kept in the dark.
She launched her strongest assaults on those above her - and this case is no different:
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.One could almost feel pity for someone who has fallen this low. But her accusations have now sunk to a level of absurdity that bring additional discredit to any previous actions, statements, or accusations she's ever made - not to mention a tremendous discredit to the United States military. And while no one capable of a few minutes of coherent thought could possibly consider such fables as truth, we live in a world where cartoons spark riots and a hit film describes how US soldiers bring prisoners to a Jewish doctor to harvest their organs at Abu Ghraib.
And even in the US considerable numbers of people desperately want to "believe".
Update Tony B notes another small problem with Karpinski's story: No female master sergeants have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Why it matters: Because the Left believes what they're told to believe. Random Lefty blog response via technorati:
Female soldiers in Iraq are having to make an impossible choice: Risk being raped , or risk dying of dehydration. Many of them have ended up dead.
Nicole in London: Tales of Los Angeles Expat
If I get one comment from ANYONE saying that this proves that women don't belong in the army. . . Grrrrrr.The "American Constitution Society" blog:
Female soldiers' fear of being raped is not a new phenomenon; indeed, the problem has become so severe that the Army has established its own sexual assault website.supercrisp (who lists his Industry as "Education"):
Having said all that, Sanchez has a point. If women want to join the army, let them. But it’s like joining a gang. You’re always going to be someone’s bitch, doubly so if you’re a woman. I mean, what do you expect from an organization of killers? Murder is something society works hard to eliminate in all of us, except in certain sanctioned areas of killing. There, with the loosening of stricture against slaughter, all mores are loosened. And, remember, we’re talking about people who haven not been well acculturated in the first place because they find the army their best alternative. Rape and pillage do not follow armies; they are of the nature of armies, despite America’s fantasies about its greatest generations.Kathy Kattenburg ("a future New York City English teacher"):
The only functional option for a woman at Camp Victory would be to get together with a few friends and arrange to frag several of these rapists.
So the attitude of the senior military commander for U.S. forces in Iraq about the rape of female American soldiers by men who are supposed to be their comrades, their buddies, their fellow soldiers, on the same side of this ghastly war, is no different from the attitude of the Taliban toward women: They wanted to cast off the burka [go to Iraq]; they wanted to go outside unaccompanied by a man [fight alongside men], go to school, have a job [go where they don't belong] -- now let them take what comes with the territory."L-Girl" is "american by birth, canadian by choice":
Of all the hypocrisy and lies perpetrated by the US government, for me the worst, the absolute lowest, is the shameful treatment of the armed forces. Lie to these people, betray their trust, cut off their options so the military is one of the only ways to get an education, use them for propaganda - then spit them out. Cut funding for the ongoing medical treatment they'll need long after their dues have been paid, give their families only partial benefits because they were reservists, deny them even proper protection in combat - it's a long list.Guess she never used the military "to get an education".Within that context, what could be worse than this?
Naturally, the US government is doing everything it can to cover it up.It's hard to treat a human being more like a piece of shit than the US government treats the members of its military (and, sadly, that has been the case since the founding of the republic).
I guess "General Washington" must be military:
How the hell do you allow the cover-up of something like this? What rationale do you use to cover-up women soldiers not drinking fluids - and dying from dehydration - just so they don't have to risk being raped? Who the hell would allow such a cover-up to go forward?Or maybe not.Could it be the Commander in Chief?
Now, considering that (a) most soldiers don't have reliable access to a phone, and that (b) statistics have shown that only one in ten rapes gets reported, one could easily extrapolate that there over 1,500 rapes per year being forced upon our female soldiers.It doesn't take much mathematical knowledge to figure out that our female soldiers are at a FAR GREATER risk of being raped by their colleagues than of being killed by the enemy insurgency.
This is the last straw.
I'm tired of supporting our troops.
There, I've said it.
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But it's time more people wake up to the fact that a significant portion of our "brave, fighting men and women" are social miscreants and degenerates who would, more likely than not, be serving prison time if they hadn't joined the military and been given almost blanket immunity from being punished for gross misdeeds.
I propose the following theory: Regardless of the number of individuals in the group, the combined IQ of people who believe this story will never exceed 10.
With that, I'll close by stealing the closing line used on every post from Iraq by fellow milblogger/Iraq vet Phil: "Be safe - drink water"
