....the military establishment:


Veterans Testify on Rapes and Scant Hope of Justice
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — Choking back tears and in voices edged with rage, two women
and a man who served in the American military told a Senate panel on
Wednesday how they were raped by superiors and then ridiculed or ignored
by military officials from whom they sought help.

The three former service members, the first military sexual assault
victims to testify before a Senate panel, described a pervasive culture
of harassment and danger in which victims had little or no redress.

One spoke of a rape she endured during her first months of service, and
another told of a sergeant who stripped naked and danced on a table
during an official sexual harassment training session. After spending a
year repeatedly harassed, Rebekah Havrilla, a former Army sergeant
deployed to Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007, was raped by a superior a
week before returning home.

“I chose not to do a report of any kind because I had no faith in my
chain of command,” Ms. Havrilla said. When she sought help from an Army
chaplain, she said, he told her “the rape was God’s will” and urged her
to go to church.

The hearing, the first the Senate has held in nearly a decade on sexual
assault in the military, reflects the increasing attention to the issue
because of revelations about pervasive sexual harassment at Lackland Air
Force Base in Texas and throughout the military.

**The Pentagon estimates that roughly 19,000 service members are
assaulted annually. A small fraction of the incidents are reported
because most victims fear retaliation or ruined careers, and only about
10 percent of those cases go trial. One in three convicted military sex
offenders remain in the service, something many policy makers want
immediately corrected.**

“The issue of sexual violence in the military is not new, and it has
been allowed to go on in the shadows for far too long,” said Senator
Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who convened the hearing as
chairman of the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee.

Ms. Gillibrand delivered a blistering attack on the military for its
handling of sexual assault cases: “Congress would be derelict in its
duty of oversight if we just shrugged our shoulders at these 19,000 sons
and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, and did nothing.
We simply have to do better by them.”

The focus on the topic, which Ms. Gillibrand chose for the personnel
subcommittee’s first hearing in the current Congress, also demonstrates
the tenaciousness of the women on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
now at a record seven, who have worked to bring sexual misconduct in the
military to public attention.

For several hours the three service members told stories with remarkably
similar details to the senators and scores of military and other
observers at the hearing. The three said they either hid their assaults
or were subjected to further humiliations, distrust or protracted stabs
at justice when they reported them.

“I no longer have any hope that the military chain of command will
consistently prosecute, convict, sentence and carry out the sentencing
of sexual predators in uniform,” said BriGette McCoy, who was raped in
1988 when she was 18 years old and stationed in Germany.

The testimony of victims is “highly significant,” said Senator Susan
Collins, Republican of Maine, who from her seat on the Armed Services
Committee in 2004 grilled Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then a top commander
in Iraq, on the issue.

“One reason it has been so difficult to move forward against sexual
assault in spite of commitments in the Senate is because we’ve not put a
human face on this,” Ms. Collins said. “The victims make the violence
very real and compel you to act.”

Many members of the committee said they would like to see all sex
offenders in the military discharged from service and would like to
replace the current system of adjudicating sexual assault by taking it
outside a victim’s chain of command. The senators focused in particular
on a recent decision by an Air Force general to reverse a guilty verdict
in a sexual assault case with little explanation.

Military officials who testified appeared both chastened and defensive.

“The Air Force has zero tolerance for this offense,” said Lt. Gen.
Richard Harding, the judge advocate general of the Air Force, who
testified later in the day.

General Harding declined to address whether justice had been served in
certain cases brought to his attention by Ms. Gillibrand. She then told
the military officials that she was “extremely disturbed that each of
you believes that the convening authority is what maintains discipline
and order within your ranks.”

In the military, a “convening authority” is a commander in charge of the
military justice system within his or her own ranks. As an example, the
“convening authority” could be a commander of a victim’s base or unit.

“If that is your view I don’t know how you can say having 19,000 sexual
assaults and rapes a year is discipline and order,” Ms. Gillibrand said.
“I appreciate the work you are doing, I honestly do, but it’s not
enough. And if you think you are achieving discipline and order with
your current convening authority framework I am sorry to say you are wrong.”

One victim, Brian K. Lewis, a former petty officer in the Navy, said he
wanted to bring attention to male victims of sexual assault, who he said
were often overlooked. Mr. Lewis testified that he was raped in 2000 by
a superior officer, and when his command learned of the crime, “I was
misdiagnosed as having a personality disorder.”

- - -

While some individual military personnel obviously are pigs, the blame
for these thousands of sexual assaults lies squarely on the shoulders of
the military hierarchy/establishment, which obviously tolerates the
behavior, despite lip service to the contrary. Nineteen thousand sexual
assaults a year - mind boggling.