Wartime Rape

Rape was a weapon of terror as the German Hun marched through Belgium in World War I; gang rape was part of the orchestrated riots of Kristallnacht which marked the beginning of Nazi campaigns against the Jews. It was a weapon of revenge as the Russian Army marched to Berlin in World War II, it was used when the Japanese raped Chinese women in the city of Nanking, when the Pakistani Army battled Bangladesh, and when the American G.I.s made rape in Vietnam a 'standard operating procedure aimed at terrorizing the population into submission'.

 

Maria B. Olujic

Women, Rape, and War: The Continued Trauma of Refugees and Displaced Persons in Croatia

via ReligiousTolerance.org

 

Do you believe the following story?

 

US forces outraged by Iraqi teen rape claim. An Iraqi newspaper run by Sunni Muslims traded charges on Monday with the United States-led occupation authority over the alleged rape of two Iraqi girls by US soldiers, a claim denied by the coalition. According to the daily As-Saah, the girls, aged 14 and 15, were talking to American soldiers in Suwaira, 180km south of Baghdad, on Friday when the soldiers suggested they accompany them to their camp to take pictures but then collectively raped the pair. As-Saah said one of the girls died after she was raped by 18 soldiers while the other was killed by her family. Editor Naama Abderrazzak told AFP two of the daily's reporters had talked to residents of the area and seen the bodies of the two girls. This allegation is "absolutely false", the US Central Command said in a statement. "Let the coalition prove that our report is false and I will fire the two journalists (who wrote it). So far, they haven't," [As-Saah editor Naama Abderrazzak] said. [IOL, June 9, 2003]

 

What's your reaction?

 

• Would you be more or less inclined to believe that 18 U.S. soldiers participated in a gang rape if the source of the story were American -- or British, or Australian?
  
• Would you have any less difficulty believing that 18 Iraqi soldiers participated in a gang rape, no matter what the source of the story?
  
• Are you more or less inclined to believe the story of photos depicting British soldiers engaging in sex and torture of Iraqi POWs?
  
• Does your awareness of the U.S. Air Force Academy rapes influence your opinion on this story?
  
• What about Tailhook?
  
• What about these stories regarding American soldiers' treatment of and attitudes toward Iraqi civilians:

   

  US pilots "bask in glory" of bombing Baghdad. American pilots who bombed Baghdad on Friday spoke of the thrill of a successful attack in the teeth of fierce anti-aircraft fire. "It was exhilarating," Commander Jeff Penfield said after landing his F/A-18E Super Hornet back on the Abraham Lincoln, which is supporting the U.S.-led invasion force from the Gulf. "It was all nice and calm in the city," he said. "Once those bombs hit all hell broke loose. I bet we saw 15 SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), about three or four up our way so we had to defend a couple of times. "What I felt more than anything was exhilaration. ... you get an element of excitement because that's where the best targets still are and those targets have to go away so the ground forces can go in. ... I can't sleep yet," said Penfield. "I'll go down and get something to eat, unwind, bask in the glory a little bit." [Reuters, March 28, 2003]

   

  Take a Shot Or Take a Chance. The marines said they had little trouble dispatching their foes, most of whom they characterized as ill trained and cowardly. "We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people... We dropped a few civilians, but what do you do?" ... [M]ore than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down. "I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way." [New York Times, March 29, 2003]

   

  'Unlike the American troops, we look the Iraqis in the eye'. Every Iraqi is a potential troublemaker, a possible target. If one fails to stop at his checkpoint, his response will be to open fire. If more than 50 gather to chant anti-American slogans, he will likely flood the street with soldiers. If he so much as suspects that the crowd has weapons he may well consider a full-scale counter-attack. [Telegraph, April 5, 2003]

   

  US troops face children, and hard calls, in battle. When a young Iraqi boy stooped to pick up a rocket propelled grenade off the body of a dead paramilitary, U.S. Army Private Nick Boggs made a tough call. He unloaded machinegun fire and the boy, whom he puts at about 10 years old, fell dead on a garbage-strewn stretch of waste land. "I think they thought we wouldn't shoot kids. But we showed them we don't care. We are going to do what we have to do to stay alive and keep ourselves safe." The boy he killed was with another child of around the same age when they reached for the RPG and came under fire. Boggs thinks the second boy was also hit but other soldiers think he escaped and that he dragged his friend's dead body away. [Reuters, April 7, 2003]

   

• Has your confidence in the American credibility (in this case CentCom) increased or decreased in light of the Bush administration's failure to produce "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq?

 

• Does it feel somehow "unpatriotic" to entertain the idea that American soldiers are capable of rape and other assault?

 

My point is not to make U.S. troops out to be monsters.  It is, instead, an indictment of U.S. military culture, the goal of which is the complete desensitization of troops through the dehumanization of others.

 

Other stories to mull over:

 

Heat's on U.S. military in Korea, too. A series of highly publicized cases against U.S. soldiers, including accusations of sexual harassment and assault, have brought strong protests, with demonstrators marching through downtown Seoul to demand a U.S. apology. Women's groups and others say that crimes committed by U.S. forces in South Korea are on the rise. They also claim South Korean authorities are doing nothing. U.S. officials tell a different story. [CNN, October 30, 1995]

 

U.S. serviceman pleads guilty to rape. Despite guilty pleas Tuesday, the case of three U.S. servicemen accused of raping a 12-year-old girl on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa could continue for months. As the trial began, Navy Seaman Marcus Gill, 22, pleaded guilty to rape. Marine privates Rodrico Harp, 21, and Kendrick Ledet, 20, admitted to helping plan the September 4 attack but denied raping the girl. Harp also confessed to hitting the girl as she was abducted. In a written statement read in court, the girl said, "I hope they will be kept in jail as long as they live." [CNN, November 7, 1995]

 

Rape Attempt Alleged. A U.S. Marine has been arrested and accused of trying to rape a Japanese woman at a disco on the Japanese island of Okinawa, police said. Lance Cpl. Oswald McDonald, 29, dragged the woman into a corner of the disco Friday and attempted to sexually assault her, a spokesman for the Okinawa Prefectural police said. [Associated Press, January 16, 2000]

 

Marines Apologize to Okinawa Over Sex Case. Japanese and Western historians have said that in the aftermath of World War II, American troops raped thousands of Okinawan women without reprisals. The historians said that while hundreds of rape cases have been documented, most have gone unreported for fear of retaliation and shame. [New York Times, July 7, 2000]

 

U.S. troops questioned over Japan rape. Police in Okinawa are holding at least one U.S. serviceman for questioning over the alleged rape of a local woman, a spokesman at the Okinawa Prefectural Police Department has said. [CNN, June 29, 2001]

 

Okinawa Nights. According to the Okinawa prefectural government, U.S. military personnel were responsible for 5,006 crimes between 1972 and 2001. That's 1.7% of the 290,814 crimes committed in Okinawa during that period — perpetrated by a group that comprised 4% of the population. But locals have come to hold no faith in statistics. In the years following the war, they say rapes were shockingly rampant — and yet the U.S. military, which governed the island then, has no record of any such war crimes committed in Okinawa. [Time Asia, October 13, 2001]

 

The Human Rights of Children and Women under the U.S. Military Administration: Raped Lives. I was seven years old when Yumiko, who was 6 years old at the time, was raped and murdered by a 31-year-old American soldier. It happened on September 3, 1955, ten years after the war ended. The incident occurred in Ishikawa City in the central part of the Main Island of Okinawa. Yumiko went to kindergarten that day. ... [Azato-Eiko, Focus on the Global South]

 

New film accuses US of war crimes. The documentary describes how thousands of Taliban troops were rounded up after the battle of Kunduz in late November and transported in sealed shipping containers to Sheberghan prison, a jail then under US control in northwestern Afghanistan. The film alleges that large numbers of the prisoners died during the journey. US troops suggested the drivers take the bodies out into the desert at Dasht-i-Leili for burial. Two men said they were forced to drive hundreds of Taliban, many of whom were still alive, into the desert, and said that the living were shot. Footage showed large areas of compact red sand dotted with the traces of bones, including jaw bones, and pieces of clothing. [The Guardian, June 13, 2002]

 

Posted 9:18:26 PM   Send comment

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Pictures Worth a Thousand Lies

It is common knowledge that words can deceive, but most people believe that photographs speak the truth. Propagandists have, time and again, taken advantage of this innocent belief by altering photographs to accomplish their political purposes ever since advancements in photographic technology have made it possible to do so. In such cases, photographs can be more deceitful than words, and we dare not rely on them for the truth.

 

Fujioka Nobukatsu

Exploding the Myth:The Problem of Photographic "Evidence"

At the Frontlines

 

Living in a country with the second-largest movie industry in the world (if I'm not mistaken, India takes first place) does have its advantages -- bobbing about in a sea of celluloid sewage is a lot of truly fine, quality entertainment.  I'm proud to come from a place responsible for, oh, everything from The General to  Singin' in the Rain to The Sixth Sense to Chicago (which, come to think of it, are among the most American movies ever made).

 

And having once lived in Hollywood proper (or improper), I must admit that it's kind of fun to run into famous people now and then, and even get to know a few personally -- although the vast majority of "industry people" you meet are just waiting tables "between jobs".  Too, Hollywood -- despite the big send-up given to the new Kodak Theatre just down the block from Grauman's Chinese -- is still a slum.  A fun slum, mind you, but pretty dicey, even in broad daylight.

 

So everything's a trade-off. That's not such a big deal when the trade-off means you have to slog through a bunch of bad Eddie Murphy comedies before stumbling across The Green Mile, or waste three hours wishing Leonardo Di Caprio would just bloody well die already while waiting to watch half an hour of fairly impressive CGI as Titanic goes under.

 

But the trade-off is a big deal indeed when it means that all the wondrous things Hollywood has learned about making great entertainment is used to dupe the masses into believing that fiction is truth.

 

When a viewer knows it's "just a movie," and participates in the delusion for the purpose of entertainment, that's called "suspension of disbelief."  You must suspend your disbelief -- you must choose to pretend along with the creator of a work of fiction that the protagonists are in love, or the sun is exploding, or the monster is real; if you didn't, you could never enjoy a movie, or a novel, or a TV sitcom.

 

But when the viewer is not a voluntary participant in the process of "suspension of disbelief" -- when he is made to believe, for another's benefit, that black is white, white is black, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength, that's simply propaganda, of the worst kind.

 

Of course, there are some people who can't tell the difference between fiction and reality; ask any soap-opera star how many times he or she has been accosted in the street by a devoted fan who truly believes the actor is the character he or she plays on TV.

 

But the average looney is not the target audience for professional propagandists; instead, the people they want to reach are Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack, the folks whose daddies never taught them to believe only half of what they read, and even less of what they hear.

 

Perhaps not so coincidentally, the timing couldn't be better for anyone who wants to pass off fiction as truth -- or at least squeak by with "docu-drama"-style storytelling based on fact, but massaged and manipulated out of context in order to convey the desired message.

 

By "timing," I mean: Have you counted the number of "reality shows" on television lately?  Off the top of my head: American Idol, The Bachelor, Big Brother, Survivor, Fear Factor, Amazing Race, Blind Date, The Fifth Wheel, Cheaters, Extreme Makeover, Last Comic Standing, The Osbournes, Anna Nicole, The Real World, Road Rules, Anything for Love -- as well as those I'm thankful to have heard nothing abut lately, but which could threaten to return at any moment: Joe Millionaire, Celebrity Boxing, Making the Band, The Chair, The Chamber, The Mole, Murder in Small Town X, Temptation Island, Married by America, Chains of Love, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!...

 

As I said, that's just off the top of my head.

 

Quite a lot of drek to slog through to find just one Colonial House, isn't it?

 

Remember that these shows are on the air simply because they are popular.  Perhaps I don't need to remind you of that -- but we all at some time ask how such base idiocy as Married with Children managed to stay on the air for 11 years; that's as long as M*A*S*H was on the air, and two years longer than All in the Family.

 

Do you think a M*A*S*H or an All in the Family could be produced -- successfully -- today?  I don't.  It's not just the difference between quality and lack of quality; 1970s sitcoms like M*A*S*H and All in the Family -- as well as many of their contemporaries (Maude, Soap, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, et al.) -- were not really sitcoms as we've come to define the word; they were think pieces, written for thinking people. Certainly, there was plenty of idiotic junk (The Dukes of Hazzard and Charlie's Angels come immediately to mind), but we had plenty of alternatives.

 

If I sound like I'm longing for the good old days of the 1970s, I'm not, really; it was a lousy time to be a teenager, and, I expect, not much fun for the grown-ups either.  But I'll be the first to crow long and loud about the higher quality of entertainment -- and, more importantly, our far more diverse choice of entertainment -- produced during The Me Decade, next to which The New Millennium pales shamefully.

 

And it wasn't just television; the 1970s produced a huge crop of truly great films, across all genres.  Again, there was plenty of crap, but not as much crap to wade through before stumbling across something mind-blowing, that holds up just fine (and perhaps looks even better) 30 years later: The Godfather I & II, Jaws, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Alien, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Cabaret, Little Big Man, Deliverance, The Last Picture Show, Patton, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Apocalypse Now, Play It Again, Sam, Sleuth, Sounder, American Graffiti, Young Frankenstein, Shampoo, Swept Away, Network, Annie Hall, Grease...

 

By comparison...  Well, honestly, even as a devoted movie lover, I'd be hard-pressed to name half a dozen movies made over the past decade that even approach the quality and timelessness of the short list of 70s classics above.

 

It's easy enough to come up with numerous plausible reasons mass entertainment was just more intelligent 30 years ago, but my purpose here is not to write a thesis about the reflection of the American psyche in popular entertainment (at least, not at the moment).  The real point is simply that the American psyche is reflected in popular entertainment -- and the image being reflected is that of dumb and dumber -- and dumbest.

 

It's not that Americans are just in-bred stupid -- but we are, as a culture, shamefully lazy and willingly uneducated -- and we've all but lost our critical-thinking skills.  A frightening majority are lapping up a steady diet of visual and auditory junk food and loving it, without giving a damn whether their minds are rotting away from the effects of being indulged with what they want -- relief from the burden having to think for themselves -- instead of what they need: to feel, to question, to think.

 

Who's to blame?  The media for giving Americans what they want?  Or Americans, for enabling inferior media?

 

At this point, it almost doesn't matter.  What matters is that, in 2003, the American public is more primed than ever to accept virtually anything as truth.

 

Except, perhaps, the truth itself.

 

Now, here's the article (plus a handful of links that follow) which inspired the little digression above:

 

Cheering throngs take to the streets of Baghdad to celebrate the fall of Saddam Hussein, grateful Iraqis thank US-led forces for their liberation, food and medical aid pour into the port of Umm Qasr.

 

These images, broadcast around the world over the past two months, have largely been replaced by more skeptical reports questioning the rationale for the war on Iraq, but they remain a staple of US-government produced television "news" stories now available to the public over the internet.

 

In these professionally shot and edited spots, produced by the State Department and ranging from two to three minutes in length, good news is the only news as the altruistic virtue of the United States is extolled without a hint of irony.

 

The videos, intended for private viewing as well for rebroadcast by television outlets, incorporate news footage of events in Iraq, soundbites from US officials and "man-on-the-street" interviews and are edited together with narration from unseen speakers.

 

[They] come with transcripts with space for television stations to note timecodes for certain bites on a logsheet and a glossary of broadcast terms, including "nat snd" and "MetE" for "natural sound" and "music and effects." ...

 

"FREEDOM IN IRAQ," the department headlined its statement announcing the link to the eight fully edited, broadcast quality and ready-to-air reports, the latest of which were completed on May 22.

 

"The dawn of liberation: See historic footage of Iraqis toppling a statue of Saddam Hussein. Witness the jubilation in Saddam City as the spirit of freedom is realized," it says in its preview for "Baghdad Liberated" video, a three-minute report about events on the ground Iraq on April 9.

 

"As they rolled into Baghdad, the American Troops were cheered by hundreds of Iraqis gathering in the streets," an unseen male narrator intones over the now-famous footage of the toppling of a huge statue of Saddam Hussein.

 

"The act symbolizing the end of Saddams twenty five-year reign of cruelty and terror ... The fear of repression gone, jubilant Iraqis kicked the statue of the fallen dictator as they dragged it through the town," he says.

 

"Relief and joy were expressed throughout the city," the narrator continues as the screen fades to soundbites of Iraqis thanking the United States and President George W. Bush follow.

 

The scenes then shift to shots of Secretary of State Colin Powell vowing to rebuild Iraq and White House spokesman Ari Flesicher describing Bush's reaction to the toppling of the statue.

 

In a two-minute report, Iraqis in the United States are seen rejoicing at Saddam's ouster. ...

 

"Iraqis there seemed to revel in the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime as much as they did in Baghdad," the narrator continues, as snippets of reactions are shown including shouts of "We love the United States ... They helped us" and "I love Bush. I love USA because they give Iraqi people their freedom." ...

 

Five "reports" in the series are set in Umm Qasr where British and US forces re-opened Iraq's only deep-water port after seizing the city on March 25. ...

 

Another story about Umm Qasr ends with shots of ship-loading equipment as a female narrator speaks: "Cranes stretch to sky as if reaching for a dream and now, with Iraq's liberation, the dream is a step closer to reality."

 

Although eager to advertise the videos, the State Department seems unsure of its target audience.

 

Despite the fact that many of the interviews were conducted in Arabic, they have been translated for the all-English language soundtracks.

 

Bad news is no news in US government television reports from Iraq.

AFP

June 8, 2003

 

Now browse through these links (go ahead -- they're all well worth your time), and you tell me:  How much more are you willing to swallow?

 

Doctored Photo from the London Evening Standard
The Memory Hole
April 18, 2003

 

Staged "Liberation" media event?

SF Indymedia

April 10, 2003

 

Saga of the staged statue sacrifice

AlterNet

April 10, 2003

 

L.A. Times Fires Photographer for Altering Iraq Photo

Los Angeles Times

April 2, 2003

 

Spot the doctored photo

BBC News

January 23, 2003

 

Bin Laden Gets Makeover in New Leaflet

ABC News

Janury 4, 2002

 

'Machine' Politician Exposed By Photos

Washington Post

December 27, 2000

 

See also:

Spinning Private Lynch

Saving Private Lynch Installment of the Day

 

Posted 11:00:56 AM   Send comment

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Kos Analyzes Top Six Dem Candidates

Small wonder I love The Daily Kos -- just look at this latest must-read (a series, no less!):

 

How they could win: Edwards

 

Welcome to this six-part series "how they can win", featuring the six "serious" candidates: Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, Graham, Kerry and Lieberman.

 

For purposes of this scenario building, I'm assuming all six candidates are running strong, without the presence of a major scandal or foot-in-mouth incident.

 

Today we do Edwards, who is doing surprisingly poorly in all current polls. However, no deficit at this stage of the game is insurmountable. The guy has the ability to turn it on when he seems most out of it, and I'm not ready to count him out.

 

So for Edwards to win, it's going to have to look something like this...

 

Posted 10:47:26 AM   Send comment

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