[Vision2020] America’s Military Injustice

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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May 7, 2013
America’s Military Injustice By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html>

WASHINGTON

Along with a boosted Buick LeSabre, another incident listed on a crime
report Sunday in Arlington County, Va., was a creepy attack by a man on a
woman.

“On May 5 at 12:35 a.m., a drunken male subject approached a female victim
in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks,” the report read.
“The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and
alerted police. Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, Va., was arrested and
charged with sexual battery.”

Krusinksi’s mug shot, showing scarlet scratches on his
face<http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2013/05/07/us/07assault-web1.html>,
is a portrait in misery.

He knew his arrest on charges of groping a stranger would send the capital
reeling and his career at the nearby Pentagon spiraling. The Air Force
lieutenant colonel charged with sexual battery was the officer in charge of
sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force. (He had just finished
his sexual assault victim training.)

There was a fox-in-the-henhouse echo of Clarence Thomas, who Anita Hill
said sexually harassed her when he was the nation’s top enforcer of laws
against workplace sexual harassment.

Senator Jay Rockefeller issued a white-hot statement, calling Krusinski’s
arrest “further evidence that the military isn’t taking the issue of sexual
assault seriously,” and “a stain on the military” that “should shake us to
our core.”

President Obama was also lacerating on the subject of the Krusinski arrest
and the cases of two Air Force lieutenant generals who set aside sexual
assault convictions after jury trials.

He said training and awareness programs masking indifference will no longer
stand: “If we find out somebody’s engaging in this stuff, they’ve got to be
held accountable, prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed,
fired, dishonorably discharged — period.”

It has been a bad week for the hidebound defenders of a hopelessly
antiquated military justice system that views prosecution decisions in all
cases, including rape and sexual assault, as the private preserve of
commanders rather than lawyers.

“They are dying a thousand deaths,” said Eugene Fidell, who teaches
military justice at Yale Law School. CAAFlog, the leading military justice
blog, called it “the death knell” for the current system, at least for
sexual assault cases.

During the Thomas-Hill hearings, many powerful men here — even ones
defending Hill publicly — privately assumed that she was somehow complicit
in encouraging Thomas’s vulgar behavior. Feminists ranted “they just don’t
get it” so often that it became a grating cliché.

Yet, 22 years later, during another Senate hearing on Tuesday where the
topic of sexual transgression flared, it became clear that, as the
California Congresswoman Jackie Speier told me afterward, “people in
authority just don’t get it.”

Gen. Mark Welsh, the chief of staff for the Air Force, shocked the women on
the Senate Armed Services Committee when he testified that part of the
problem in combatting “The Invisible War,” as the Oscar-nominated
documentary feature on the epidemic of rape in the military was titled, is
that young women who enter the military have been raised in a society with
a “hook-up mentality.”

“We have got to change the culture once they arrive,” the general said.

Hook-ups may be stupid, but they are consensual.

“To dismiss violent rapes as part of the hook-up culture shows a complete
lack of understanding,” a fiery Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York told
me. “We’re not talking about a date gone badly. We’re talking about
criminal behavior by predators who often stalk their victims in advance.”

The hook-up comparison was especially jarring in light of the release of a
stunning Pentagon study estimating that 26,000 men and women in the
military were sexually assaulted in the 2012 fiscal year, a 37 percent
increase from the same period the year before. Only a small number of
incidents — 3,374 — were reported, showing that victims are still afraid of
payback or perverted justice. And a mere 238 assailants were convicted.

Wired.com reported that troops at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina
were issued a brochure advising potential victims of sexual assault that it
may be more “advisable to submit than resist.”

It was the sort of rare confluence of events that can actually lead to
change here, especially because it’s a nonpartisan issue and because the
Senate looks very different than it did during the Thomas-Hill hearings.
Three of the six Senate Armed Services subcommittees are now led by women.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a former prosecutor who is one of
seven women (five of them lawyers) on the Armed Services Committee, has
held up the nomination of Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to be vice commander of the
Air Force’s Space Command until she investigates why Helms overturned a
conviction in a sexual assault case.

“You don’t get to decide who’s telling the truth and supplant the judgment
of the jury you handpicked if you weren’t in the courtroom observing the
witnesses,” Senator McCaskill said. “You’ve got to put systems in place
where you catch these cowards committing crimes and you put them in
prison.”

The military brass cossetting predators are on notice. The women of
Congress are on the case.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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