<div dir="ltr">
<div class="">
<div class="">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0"></a>
</div>
<div class="">
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><hr align="left" size="1">
<div class="">June 4, 2013</div>
<h1>Cut the Strings to George III</h1>
<h6 class="">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by MAUREEN DOWD"><span>MAUREEN DOWD</span></a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
WASHINGTON — You see glistening mermaid sightings on Animal Planet more
than you catch glimpses of vintage John McCain on Capitol Hill. </p>
<p>
But there he was on Tuesday, succinctly saying what needed to be said
about the scourge of sexual assault cases in the military. Looking
grimly at the ribbon-bedecked white male heads of all the services
testifying before the Armed Services Committee, McCain scolded: “Just
last night a woman came to me and said her daughter wanted to join the
military, and could I give my unqualified support for her doing so. I
could not.” </p>
<p>
Are women who want to join the military now more afraid of being raped
by their brothers in arms than dying for their country? </p>
<p>
The seven women on the committee are driving the mission to curb the
plague of sexual transgressions in the military, with 26,000 service men
and women assaulted in 2012. </p>
<p>
“Women are not going to be turned away on this one,” Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri told me. </p>
<p>
But men on both sides of the aisle were also pressing the top generals
and admirals, even though some, like Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican
of Georgia, still seemed to be getting up to speed on the issue.
“Several years ago, when we had the first females go out on an aircraft
carrier that when they returned to port,” Chambliss said he recalled, “a
significant percentage of those females were pregnant.” Was any
investigation done, he asked, to determine whether those pregnancies
were the result of “consensual acts”? </p>
<p>
The brass agreed there was a “cancer” in the military, but their rigid,
nonsensical response boiled down to: Trust us. We’ll fix the system,
even though we don’t really believe it’s broken. </p>
<p>
They were unanimously resistant to the shift that several of our allies
have made, giving lawyers, rather than commanders, the power to take
cases to court. This even though they were having a hard time coming up
with examples of any commanders who had been removed from their posts
for allowing a toxic climate on sexual assault. </p>
<p>
In fact, the military honchos made it clear that, after months of public
dismay, they hadn’t even gotten around to studying the systems our
allies put in place to achieve objective decision making, where
commanders can’t protect buddies or Top Gun criminals. “Talking to
people who have managed this problem longer than we have seems to me the
very easiest place to start,” chided Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of
Missouri. </p>
<p>
Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, told me
the arguments of the brass “boiled down to an almost mystical notion of
the commanders’ responsibility. Why can’t we cut the strings to the
British system we inherited from George III? The British are baffled by
us. They gave control over major crimes to professional prosecutors
years ago. It’s an institutional structure that has outlived its utility
and credibility.” </p>
<p>
As Sarah Plummer, a beautiful ex-Marine who served in Iraq and says she
was raped by a fellow Marine who was never prosecuted, explained to NBC
News’s Jim Miklaszewski: “Having someone within your direct chain of
command handling the case” is like “your brother raping you and having
your dad decide the case.” </p>
<p>
The military big shots admitted that they had taken their eyes off the ball, but blamed it on a decade of two wars. </p>
<p>
“Commanders having the authority to take a case to trial hasn’t gotten
rid of the large number of sexual assaults and rapes or encouraged more
people to come forward and report crimes,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
told me. “In fact, it has had the opposite effect.” She told the
military chiefs that “not every single commander can distinguish between
a slap on the ass and a rape.” </p>
<p>
There’s no excuse for permitting a system to allow commanders to sweep
things under the rug and allow threats of retaliation. The Naval Academy
is reeling from a case of a female midshipman who reported she was
raped by three Navy football players at an off-campus party last year.
The men were not charged, but the woman was punished for underage
drinking. </p>
<p>
West Point is roiled by two cases: a sergeant first class in charge of
the welfare of some cadets has been accused of illicitly videotaping
female cadets as they disrobed in the bathroom or shower; and the men’s
rugby team was temporarily disbanded after players exchanged e-mails
that were degrading to women. </p>
<p>
On the Hill, the brass argued that they could not retain “cohesion” and
“order” if commanders were not calling all the legal shots. But Nancy
Parrish, the president of a victims’ rights group, told a chilling story
about a young woman in a combat zone who had tried four times to report
a soldier she says raped her. She saw him coming toward her truck as
she got ready for a mission and recalled her feelings: “I shut down
inside. I was lead driver in our convoy, and I kept hoping to hit an
I.E.D. after that.” </p>
<p>
As Parrish sardonically asked, you call that “unit cohesion” and “good order and discipline”? </p>
<div class="">
</div>
</div>
<br>
<center>
</center>
<div id="upNextWrapper"><div style id="upNext"><div class=""><br style="clear:both"></div></div></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>
<br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
</div>