a bird and a bottle

Not so shockingly, the US government has sold out American military women yet again. There’s news today (via Majikthise) that Congressional Dems have withdrawn legislation that would have required U.S. military bases to stock emergency contraception. Here’s a snippet:

For reasons that remain unclear, Michaud [the sponsoring Congressman] withdrew the legislation the next morning. According to [his press secretary], it was purely a logistical snafu: “Key supporters had to be in their districts.” But sources close to the issue tell a different story: The legislation, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, with bipartisan support, was dropped by a Democratic leadership unwilling to go to bat for pro-choice issues. Despite Michaud’s confidence that the votes were there, Democratic leadership wasn’t so sure, and they didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out. The legislation might not have sunk, but they jumped ship anyway.

Newsflash for all of you women in fatigues: if you are sexually assaulted by a fellow officer, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have access to EC. How’s that for supporting our people in uniform?

I don’t often post on the Iraq war around these parts. Mostly, that’s because there are many many many other bloggers saying what I would say already. And also because those bloggers, on the whole, know much more than I do.

But I did think this was worth pointing out: via C&L, check out this slide show the Boston Globe put together. The question the show tries to answer is this: What does $456 billion buy? Why that number? Because that’s how much has been spent on the war in Iraq.

Here’s the part I found most moving/shocking/eye-opening:

According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.

Go see the rest.

In a column in a recent Orlando Sentinel, columnist Kathleen Parker lights into Salon and the NY Times for their recent articles about women in the military, sexual assault, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Why is she so mad at the NYT and Salon? Well, because she thinks that the sexual assaults experienced by numerous women soldiers is “not quite rape.” Huh? Here’s Parker in her own words:

Both stories, however, contain enough errors to raise questions about whether the rape-assault rate is as high as suggested. The Salon story reports, for example, that one woman was “coerced into sex” by a commanding officer, which the Salon writer asserts is “legally defined as rape by the military.”

This is simply not true. According to the Manual for Courts-Martial, rape is defined as “an act of sexual intercourse by force and without consent.” The same woman also was prominently featured in the Times story, where she said she was “manipulated into sex.”

Not quite rape, in other words.

It’s funny that she’s going after two articles for their supposed inaccuracies when, as Salon’s Broadsheet notes, her definition of rape is “not quite” right.

Parker is right — the manual does define rape in those terms. But, reading just a few lines down from the manual’s upfront definition of rape, you’ll find this: “Consent, however, may not be inferred if resistance would have been futile…” The soldier was “coerced” into sex; meaning forced to do something that she didn’t want to do; meaning “resistance would have been futile”; meaning she was raped.

Galling, huh? But it’s not even the worst part. Parker goes on to blame not the patriarchal and chauvinistic military structure for the rapes, but the women victims and their feminist predecessors. I’m not kidding:

Clearly, some of what is considered sexual harassment falls into the category of harmless sport — the usual towel-snapping that is, in fact, a way to neutralize sex.

But more overt sexual aggression may be the product of something few will acknowledge, at least on the record: resentment.

Off the record, in dozens of interviews over a period of years, male soldiers and officers have confided that many men resent women because they’ve been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they’re not.

The lie breeds contempt, which leads to a simmering rage that sometimes finds expression in aggression toward those deemed responsible.

Targeting women isn’t excusable, obviously. It’s also not the women’s fault that they’ve been put in this untenable situation — exposed both to combat and to the repressed fury of sexually charged young men.

The fault lies with the Pentagon and others who have capitulated to feminist pressures to insert women into combat. Although women are prohibited from direct ground combat and are assigned primarily to support roles, the lack of clear boundaries in Iraq has eliminated the distinction.

Right. So men are excused because their resentment of women usurping their time-honored role as soldiers justifies these rapes. Don’t blame the perpetrators or their commanders who sanctioned such behavior. Blame feminists who dared to claim that women might not actually be equal to men (gasp!). Blame “feminist pressures” for equality (god forbid!). Yes, the distinction between combat and support has been erased by the unrelenting violence in Iraq. But that’s more an indictment of the war than a reason to point fingers at the brave women who enlisted to fight in it.

But, see, to Parker, not only are feminists and women soldiers to blame for their rapes, they’re responsible for the fact that this war has been such an unmitigated disaster.

Finally, our commanders and fighting men could focus on the business of war rather than tending to gender skirmishes that distract commanders and steal time, resources and energy from the military’s purpose.

Right-o. Because if the men could just focus on fighting the war and not getting killed (rather than tending to silly concerns like equality and rape), the war wouldn’t be going so badly.

This is propaganda in its lowest form.

I’ve been avoiding writing about Guantanamo.

I’m not sure exactly why, but I think it has something to do with the size of the can of worms I’d be opening.

Am opening.

There’s been a lot of fanfare over the last few days about the resolution of two cases at Guantanamo: David Hicks’s guilty plea and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions. Many people see it as a step toward resolution — toward the end of the indefinite detentions at Guantanamo.

Today, Adam Liptak, writing in the NY Times, puts the Hicks plea and the Mohammed confession in perspective. These resolutions, he writes, do not say much about the efficacy or fairness of the system that the Bush Administration has established for adjudicating cases at Guantanamo. In fact, says Liptak, in a regular criminal justice system, these processes would be aberrant. Critics of the Bush Administration policy (and I) agree:

To hear critics of the administration describe them, the conclusions of the two proceedings were tainted by past abuse and a justice system not worthy of the name.

“The proceedings themselves just demonstrate the absence of fixed rules,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law who represents other prisoners at Guantánamo. “This is justice on the fly.”

Of course, the administration’s defenders stand up for the procedures that are being implemented. But I’m left with the nagging feeling that no resolution that comes out of detention at Guantanamo can ever be considers just. I’m particularly concerned about the incentive system that detention at Guantanamo and labeling as an enemy combatant constructs. So is Liptak.

Guilty pleas are common in ordinary criminal cases, too, of course. But in a garden-variety criminal prosecution, the parties bargain, in the famous phrase, in the shadow of the law.

In the usual case, defendants make a rational calculation based on the strength of the evidence against them, the state of the law and, most important, outcomes in earlier cases. If defendants think a plea will result in a shorter sentence than the likely one at trial, discounted by the possibility of acquittal, they plead guilty.

None of that holds at Guantánamo. The incentives and calculations are quite different there.

Mr. Hicks, for instance, was bargaining in the shadow of many things — the conditions at the base, international diplomacy, homesickness and the possibility of indefinite detention without charge. But he was not, for the most part, bargaining in the shadow of the law.

The statute under which he was to be tried was brand new and untested. The relevant regulations are as yet largely unwritten. There is no body of similar trials to set the parameters for settlement discussions.

If the President (et al) want these “trials” and “pleas” to be taken seriously, they need to provide the same protections to alleged enemy combatants as are provided to American defendants; due process has got to mean something, and people need to be entitled to counsel from the beginning of the process. Currently, detainees are not entitled to an attorney for the hearings at which they are designated “enemy combatant.” I’m guessing that once that label is attached to a person, it tends to stick. The presumption of innocence vanishes. The trial, if there is to be one, becomes a farce. And a guilty plea becomes the only way out and is inherently coerced.

I, among many, believe Guantanamo should be closed, and was saddened but not surprised by Bush’s statement last week that the prison will remain open at least until the end of his tenure. But given that it’s sticking around, the administration has got to stop pretending that what’s going on there is acceptable and that Hicks and Mohammed are examples of how and why.

Senator (deleted: Ken) Sam Brownback (R-KS), who is running for the Republican nomination in 2008, hasn’t been annointed by the far right, but that’s mostly because his campaign has little chance of succeeding.

That’s why this is particularly ironic: In a move sure to inure him to the Wingnuts but make it even tougher for him to ever win the nomination (thank goodness), Brownback has come out in support of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace’s hateful (not to mention absurd) comments on homosexuality and morality.

Eric Kleefeld at TPM Cafe has the text of the letter Brownback has sent to fellow nutjob President Bush:

The moral behavior of members of the Armed Forces is of the highest importance, particularly during this time of war. The question is whether personal moral beliefs should disqualify an individual from positions of leadership in the U.S. military? We think not. General Pace’s recent remarks do not deserve the criticism they have received. In fact, we applaud General Pace for maintaining a personal commitment to moral principles. He has demonstrated great leadership during a very difficult time and he continues to do so today. We look forward to his continued service as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The other glaring irony? Moral beliefs (i.e. that being gay and out is not a bad thing) DO disqualify individuals from positions of leadership in the U.S. military. It’s called Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and it’s U.S. Government policy.

I mentioned in passing yesterday in my post about the NY Times’s article on Women in Iraq and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that I was a little put off by the article’s central photo — the one of Suzanne Swift lying on a beach, hand suggestively placed between her thighs.

This one:

My thought when I saw the photo was that the Times couldn’t resist being just the teensiest bit sexist, even with an article like this one.

Lindsay of Majikthise, who is a professional photographer in addition to being a powerhouse blogger, knows better than I (being a professional and all) and shares her thoughts on the photo spread.

Here’s what she has to say about this image:

If there’s a message here, I don’t get it. What is Grannan trying to say? Why would you get a woman in jeans and a t-shirt to pose like a swimsuit model on a beach in order to illustrate a story about how she got PTSD in Iraq and went AWOL? I’m not saying it’s a bad photograph. Actually, I think it’s very good technically and aesthetically. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Go ahead and read the rest.

Zuzu is also on the case.

I blogged the other week about Salon.com’s coverage of women in Iraq. The article, which focused on the sexual abuse of women soldiers, was a must-read, though it was painful at times.

One quote, particularly, in the Salon article caught my attention:

There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke,” said [Mickiela] Montoya, the soldier who carried a knife for protection.

Today on the plane home I read yesterday’s NY Times Magazine article covering much of the same territory as Salon’s. The Times article also discusses the various forms of PTSD from which many women who have seen combat and/or been sexually assaulted while enlisted suffer. Once I got past the strange, seduction-style photo that accompanies the story online, I was intrigued (the story is long, but it’s worth reading the whole thing).

And then I read this:

‘You’re one of three things in the military - a bitch, a whore or a dyke,” says Abbie Pickett, who is 24 and a combat-support specialist with the Wisconsin Army National Guard. ”As a female, you get classified pretty quickly.”

The statement struck me, and left me with a strong sense of deja vu. And then I realized: it is almost exactly the same thing the Salon article quotes another woman soldier as having said. How could it be that these two women, who presumably don’t know each other and assumedly did not serve together shared not only the same idea, but even in the same words?

The only think I can think of is this: that this problem — this harassment of women sexually, verbally, and physically — is so deeply entrenched and so broadly experienced that women hear those three words often. Bitch, whore, dyke. Bitch, ho, dyke. These three words must be so strongly associated with women in the military and so commonly used to describe peers and lower-ranking female soldiers that women expect to be a bitch, a ho, or a dyke depending on the day.

The name calling might be the least of it, but it’s pervasiveness is, I think, probably representative of the respect — or lack thereof — for women in the military. The woman a soldier calls a bitch, a whore, or a dyke one day might save his life the next.

I posted last week about Switzerland’s accidental invasion of Liechtenstein, which prompted some of the funniest newspaper headlines I have seen.

Today the NY Times published an opinion column by a Swiss novelist explaining the whole fiasco. And it is funny. Take, for example, this excerpt:

The Swiss Army has really been in crisis ever since a 1989 plebiscite in which more than a third of voters declared that Switzerland no longer even needed a military. That was the same year we lost our one halfway credible enemy — Communist Eastern Europe, which the army liked to call Redland during exercises.

Nowadays, the army tries to legitimize its existence by offering emergency relief and auxiliary support at sporting events. But compulsory military service remains as inviolable in Switzerland as the monarchy is in Liechtenstein, and so the only way to decrease the number of troops has been to shorten the time of service or declare as many draftees as possible unfit for service.

Perhaps my favorite part, though, is the conclusion, which might be construed as veiled advice to us wayward Americans.

Invading Liechtenstein was admittedly a foolish thing to do, but at least the Swiss Army has shown it knows how to bring a failed military action to a happy conclusion. You just turn around and sneak back home as quickly and quietly as you can before anybody notices.

And the next day you call on the head of the foreign territory and offer a formal apology.

Sigh. If only it were that easy.

Salon’s got a fascinating and disturbing article up about the experiences of American women soldiers in Iraq. These brave women face sexual assault and rape from fellow soldiers — so much so that they try to avoid going to the latrine at night for fear they might be attacked. For example:

There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke,” said [Mickiela] Montoya, the soldier who carried a knife for protection. “This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He said in Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don’t have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead.”

And though the Department of Defense has tried to address the problem by setting up a new website and holding classes, the assaults continue and women continue to face blocks to reporting.

Read the whole article here.

From the Associated Press (via the NY Times):

Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein

No, I am not kidding. Apparently some Swiss soldiers, carrying assault weapons but no ammunition, got lost last night while engaged in a practice drill and marched into tiny Liechtenstein, which has only 34,000 residents and no army.

At least Liechtenstein has a sense of humor about the incident. The Interior Ministry spokesperson remarked, ”It’s not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something.”

The feminist blogosphere was ablaze the other day with the story of the rape of an Iraqi woman by American-trained Iraqi security forces. The woman challenged taboos by speaking publicly — on Al Jazeera no less — about her rape. Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki denied that the rape had occurred, a claim that seems to be seriously undermined by news today that four Iraqi men have been arrested and allegedly confessed to the crime. While this woman is one of few to speak out publicly, we all know she was not the first woman to be brutally raped in connection with the war in Iraq.

Then today comes an article at TomPaine by MADRE Communications Director Yifat Susskind highlighting an issue that many of us have missed in our coverage of the case: during this war, military forces have used ritualized sexual violence as a form of torture of female detainees. At least nine Iraqi organizations as well as several international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have documented proof.

According to Iraqi human rights advocate and writer Haifa Zangana, the first question asked of female detainees in Iraq is, “Are you Sunni or Shia?” The second is, “Are you a virgin?”

And it’s not only Iraqi forces that are perpetration acts of sexual torture. In November 2006, a U.S. soldier was convicted of conspiring to rape and murder a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. U.S.-supported militias have been among the worst offenders, according to Susskind. Iraqi police forces have also perpetrated the rapes of many Iraqi women. Susskind says that this should not come as a surprise:

’s no surprise that we’re hearing allegations of rape against the Iraqi National Police, considering who trained them. DynCorp, the private contractor that the Bush Administration hired to prepare Iraq’s new police force for duty, has an ugly record of violence against women. The company was contracted by the federal government in the 1990s to train police in the Balkans. Human Rights Watch reports that DynCorp employees were found to have systematically committed sex crimes against women, including “owning” young women as slaves . One DynCorp site supervisor videotaped himself raping two women. Despite evidence, the contractors never faced criminal charges.

And Dyncorp? One of the U.S. government’s top 25 contractors.

I wrote earlier today about the dwindling coalition in Iraq. It’s not to hard to imagine why other countries are withdrawing. It’s certainly not because we’re winning this war so they can now pack up, wash their hands of the mess, and go home.

The U.K. pulled out at least in part because of ugly events like the gang rape by American trained Iraqi security forces of an Iraqi woman, Sabine Al-Janabi. Ms. Al-Janabi’s story is one of many ugly stories of violence, rape, murder, and torture from Iraq. But she is the first woman to appear under her own name to tell her story. River has a full report of the gory details of the rape - including the woman’s pleas that they stop - and the her subsequent appearance on TV to tell her story.

For those of you who don’t read other feminist or progressive blogs and so hadn’t heard about this story (hi dad), here’s a quick summary, in River’s words:

She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance. [...]

They abducted her from her house in an area in southern Baghdad called Hai Al Amil. No- it wasn’t a gang. It was Iraqi peace keeping or security forces- the ones trained by Americans? You know them. She was brutally gang-raped and is now telling the story. Half her face is covered for security reasons or reasons of privacy. I translated what she said below.

“I told him, ‘I don’t have anything [I did not do anything].’ He said, ‘You don’t have anything?’ One of them threw me on the ground and my head hit the tiles. He did what he did- I mean he raped me. The second one came and raped me. The third one also raped me. [Pause- sobbing] I begged them and cried, and one of them covered my mouth. [Unclear, crying] Another one of them came and said, ‘Are you finished? We also want our turn.’ So they answered, ‘No, an American committee came.’ They took me to the judge.

Those American trained Iraqi security forces Bush et al. are so proud of? This was them. And we were supposed to be making things better? Today, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed that in the 14 hours since the rape was reported he had ruled out that the rape occurred, despite a rape kit at the hospital that backs up Al-Janabi’s claims. THis is the man who is going to lead a new independent, democratic, and corruption free Iraq? River - in Iraq and witnessing the bloodshed firsthand - is unequivocal that any rosy prognoses are dead wrong:

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

This is why the American coalition of the willing is dwindling to only one. And why that one — the U.S. electorate — is not so willing anymore.

(Thanks to Tanya for motivating me to write about this).

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (former home to Chief Justice John Roberts) held today that detainees at Guantanamo cannot challenge their detention by filing habeas corpus petitions in U.S. courts.

A Justice Department official hailed the decision, which relied on the Military Commissions Act, which the Republican controlled Congress passed last year before the midterm elections.

Senator Leahy (D-VT), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is pushing for a law that would restore detainees’ rights. A similar bill was narrowly defeated last year, before Congress changed hands.

Which brings me to the title of this post. I think that until the D.O.J. really starts to promote justice, we shouldn’t call it the D.O.J. Of course its official title is not going to change. And maybe it shouldn’t (and can thus continue to be aspirational). But by labeling the D.O.J. something else (department of torture anyone?) we can call out just how far the federal government has strayed from treating people justly. And have a little fun at at the Attorney General’s expense the same time.

Suggestions? I’d be happy to hear ‘em in comments.

(via shakes)

update (2/20/07): The NY Times picks this up in an Editorial today and totally misses the point. (hat tip: prof plum)

—

The hypocrisy of the Bush Administration’s policies never fails to amaze me.

The War on Drugs has now become a tool of the military industrial complex.

U.S. Military recruiters are having trouble keeping up with their quotas. which is not surprising. American political opinion has turned sharply against he war and with 3,133 soldiers dead in Iraq as of Thursday (2/15) and an estimated 23,000 - 100,000 Americans wounded , enlisting is becoming less and less appealing. Soldiers are being redeployed in Iraq and Afghanistan for months or even years after they were supposed to have come home. And with Bush pushing for a surge, more bodies are needed (pun intended).

The Associated Press reports:

Defense Department data indicates that the Army and Marine Corps are granting more waivers to allow recruits with criminal backgrounds to enter the service. The Army, for example, granted twice as many waivers for felonies and misdemeanors in 2006 as it did in 2003. Felony waivers granted by the Army rose from 411 in 2003, at the outset of the Iraq war, to 901 in 2006; misdemeanor waivers increased from about 2,700 to more than 6,000 in the same span.

Most of the waivers are granted for so-called ‘moral’ offenses, like drug violations and traffic-related crimes. About three-quarters of the waivers granted by the Marine Corps are for drug use, partly because the Marines alone require a waiver for a single conviction for marijuana use.

The only way to get more soldiers, it seems, is to make more people eligible. So the government has started allowing men and women who have drug convictions on their records to enlist. Some have misdemeanor convictions only, but many have felonies on their records. These men and women convicted of drug felonies, most of whom can’t vote in elections that determine the country’s future, can now go off to fight in an ongoing war that is undermining that future.

One lawmaker who decried this action, Rep. Marty Meehan (D.-MA), said he was concerned that allowing such recruits to enlist would “endanger the rest of the armed forces.” (This guy is a Democrat?! Just shows how far to the right the entire American political spectrum has strayed). Meehan’s concern, in addition to being hateful and based on stereotypes that have little or no grounding in facts, makes clear why men and women who have been convicted of drug offenses are easier targets for military recruiters. In its desperation to fill its ranks, the military is preying on the most vulnerable — those who, because of their convictions, have few job prospects and who, because of the 2001 Pell grant cuts to educational programs in prisons, have likely received limited education.

It’s true that many of the men and women in the military have enlisted at least in part because of the financial incentives. But now the military is scavenging on who have been ensnared in the War on Drugs by allowing them to enlist for the War on Terror. I’m not blind to the fact that people are enlisting “voluntarily.” But we should ask: Is it really a choice to enlist if no other economic opportunities exist? I say, create real choices by giving back the franchise to men and women convicted of felonies, especially once they have “served their time” and been released*; by providing real job training and education in prisons; and by ensuring that formerly incarcerated men and women are not shut out of potential jobs because of their criminal records.

It’s impossible to base this decision in any consistent morality or logic. How can we with a straight face encourage American men and women who have been stripped of their franchise to go fight for democracy?

(via TalkLeft) (image source)

* I do not support mass incarceration, but given that it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, we have got to fight for the full citizenship rights of people who have been in prison, done the time to which they were sentened, and are paroled back into their communities.