Rape fears lead women soldiers to suicide, death:

Karpinski said Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, the top deputy to Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the former senior U.S. military commander 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, Wojdakowski directed that the cause of death no longer be listed. The official explanation for this was to protect the women’s privacy rights, she said.

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 Cohn that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did, Cohn reported.

“It was out of control,” Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October, according to the Truthout report. Although there was a toll-free number women could use to report sexual assaults, no one had a phone, and no one answered the U.S. number when it was called. 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, Karpinski told Cohn.

Karpinski, a brigadier general, was assigned to Iraq in July 2003 to oversee 17 prison facilities including Abu Ghraib. She was demoted to colonel after news broke of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib when the prison was under her command. Karpinski subsequently resigned from the military, and in October she published a book, One Woman’s Army, the Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story, in which she claims the prisoner abuses were carried out under orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The commission in New York heard testimony from Karpinski and others about indefinite detention, rendition for torture, destruction of the environment, attacks on public health and reproductive rights, and actions and inactions leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina, Cohn wrote.

Harry Belafonte, a participant and keynote speaker, said, “When a government fails to protect justice it is the responsibility of the people to rise up and change the guard, change the regime. Those who fail to answer that call should be charged with patriotic treason.”

posted February 8, 2006
https://www.vermontguardian.com/dailies/022006/020806.shtml#top