Now men are victims of military sex assaults
Male-on-male attacks up since repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
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The newest reports, for Fiscal Year 2011, have just come out, and Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, immediately noted that sexual misbehavior is on the rise.
She has completed an analysis of the the reports, including the overall military assessment of sexual assaults as well as the
army’s Gold Book report, and it cites 515 rapes, 414 aggravated sexual assaults and 349 forcible sodomies documented by just the Criminal Investigation Command in 2011.
“Pentagon officials regularly praise their own work and proclaim undeserved ‘success,’ even though evidence of sexual misconduct, both consensual and non-consensual, continues to accelerate, year after year,” she said.
“It is time to reconsider and change flawed policies that are weakening the culture of the only military we have.”
In December 2010, Congress repealed the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy established by President Clinton that allowed homosexuals to remain in the military on the condition they not make a public issue of their sexual lifestyle.
The new law, for first time in U.S. history, allows homosexual members to openly acknowledge their sexual choices.
Among the details in the reports: While, since 2006, 5 percent of the violent sexual assaults have been against men, recent reports now put that figure at 12 to 14 percent.
The Army said it is “currently monitoring same-gender sex crime for a potential increase in forcible sodomy and other sex offenses related to the disassociation of homosexuality from the crime itself.”
Non-consensual sodomy attacks for fiscal 2011 totaled 7 percent of the nearly 2,500 attacks cited on one military report.
In several cases “the victim ceased cooperating with the military justice proceeding and the subjects were given no judicial punishment for consensual sodomy.”
Other case descriptions from the Department of Defense included:
- “Male victim alleged that male subjects groped him through clothing and attempted sodomy with a broom handle.”
- “Male victim alleged that male subject performed oral sodomy on him in bar bathroom while he was passing in and out of consciousness from drinking.
- “Male victim alleged that the male subject, National Guard soldier, took out his penis, and straddled his thigh in the motor poll while in Iraq.”
The more than 700 pages of the compiled reports, however, did not mention homosexuality.
Donnelly told WND that the statistics show a more than 20 percent increase in reported sexual assaults on males.
And she said researchers specifically announced plans to track numbers to monitor the increase, since “this category of homosexual conduct no longer is illegal.”
“It’s way too soon,” she said, to come to definitive conclusions. But she said the “numbers have gone way up.”
She said the military’s efforts to deal with the complications of women in the ranks, which have been around for years, as well as the new issues of open homosexuality, are failing.
“What they need to do is get rid of gender-integrated basic training,” she said. “That conclusions was drawn that it did [increase] and still is increasing disciplinary issues.”
“If you don’t learn the basics of discipline [in basic training], it won’t happen later,” she said.
Donnelly’s organization just released its policy analysis drawing information from the Army “Gold Book” report on wartime personnel stress, the most recent annual report of the Defense Department Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Office, and a 2010 report on ship captain firings from the Navy.
“Both the Army ‘Gold Book’ released in January and the Defense Department SAPRO report released last Friday hid the bad news in plain sight. Instead of reconsidering social policies known to increase disturbing disciplinary problems, the Pentagon is pressing ahead with costly, time-wasting programs that are not working,” she warned.
Take a guided tour into the future of the U.S. military once homosexuality is welcomed with open arms. Read Whistleblower’s special issue, “DROPPING THE ‘H’-BOMB.”
She said teams of professional sexual assault response counselors, untold hours of mandatory training, preemptive punishments, bureaucracy, conferences, meetings and feel-good gimmicks have produced:
- A hike of 22 percent since 2007 in the sexual assaults in all branches
- A doubling since 2006 of the number of violent attacks and rapes in the Army, from 663 in 2006 to 1,313 last year
- A “chilling trend” of violent sex crimes rising at the rate of 14.6 percent annually, “and the rate is accelerating”
- A 28 percent increase in the offense rate and a 20 percent increase in offenders from 2006-2011 in sex crimes in the active-duty Army
- A jump in male sexual assault victims from 10 percent in 2010 to 14 percent in confidential reports for 2011
- The need to fire senior enlisted Navy officers at the rate of nearly two per month because of sexual misconduct.
But the advice was ignored, she said.
And Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, even while noting that the military branch experiences three sexual assaults every day, called for observance of a “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” that included “adult interactive plays.”
“Despite tangible evidence of failure, the same officials expect free-rein to implement policies that would worsen the situation. On Feb. 9, 2012, Pentagon briefers announced their intent to promote ‘diversity’ by incrementally implementing controversial recommendations of the Military Diversity Leadership Commission,” she said.
The report said, “More than 20 years ago, male and female naval aviators partied wildly at the 1991 post-Persian Gulf War Tailhook convention in Las Vegas. The highly publicized scandal ruined the careers of hundreds of officers.”
Now, “we are starting to see a military resembling Jenga Blocks – a table-top tower constructed of smooth wooden planks,” the report continued. “Players remove planks from the bottom of the tower and load them on the top, destabilizing the structure until it buckles and falls. In the same way, severe budget cuts combined with social burdens loaded on top could irreparably weaken the culture and strength of our military.”
The report said the next White House administration, to minimize damage and reverse course, should “put the needs of the military above ‘diversity metrics.’” And the military should reinforce core values and policies that are known to reinforce personal discipline, it said.
Basic training also needs to be separate for genders, women should be exempt from direct ground combat units, and military policies should be “based on reality, not ‘social fiction.’”
CMR has reported previously on the manipulation of government data that contributed to the Obama campaign to remove the ban on open homosexuality. It cited an inspector general’s report marked “For Official Use Only” that said numbers were combined to present the image that members of the military approved of Obama’s plan for open homosexuality.
It was the military’s original and now-suspect report that famously was quoted as affirming “70 percent” of the nation’s military members believe the repeal of the long-standing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” practice of allowing homosexuals to serve as long as they kept their sexual lifestyle choices to themselves would have either “a neutral or positive impact on unit cohesion, readiness, effectiveness and morale.”
However, the IG in documents uncovered by Donnelly revealed the actual figures for military members were: those who believed the change would impact units “very positively” (6.6 percent), “positively” (11.8 percent), “mixed” (32.1 percent), “negatively” (18.7 percent), “very negatively” (10.9 percent) and “no effect” (19.9 percent).
The only way the 70 percent figure can be reached is to combine “very positively,” “positively,” “mixed” and “no effect.” But this combination counts people with “neutral positions” as favoring the change, Donnelly argued.
Donnelly explained that taking the same figures and lumping them on the other side with “negatively” and “very negatively” would produce a total of almost 82 percent of the soldiers who believe the results of the change would be “negative or neutral.”
The IG report uncovered by Donnelly said exactly that:
We considered that the primary source’s
likely pro-repeal sentiment was further demonstrated by his/her
inclusion of the key 70 percent figure in the information provided to
the Washington Post. … Had [the source] desired to further an
anti-repeal bias for the article, he/she could likewise have combined
four results categories from that same survey question to conclude that
“82 percent of respondents said the effect of repealing the ‘Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell’ policy would be negative, mixed or no effect.”
The Thomas More Law Center
announced a federal FOIA lawsuit against the Navy, seeking to obtain
records that are expected to show intentional deception by the Pentagon
“to gain congressional support for repeal of the 1993 law regarding open
homosexual conduct in the military, usually called ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell.’”The lawsuit is based on the IG report obtained by Donnelly, “which suggested that a distorted Pentagon study of homosexuals in the military was produced and leaked solely to persuade Congress to lift the ban on open homosexuality.”
Erin Mersino, the attorney handling the blockbuster case, said the organization already has tried to obtain information.
“The Department of Defense and the Department of the Navy have failed to produce a single document despite numerous FOIA requests over the last two years for information to uncover the truth surrounding the congressional repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” she said.
In one side effect that rebounded on the White House, a Senate committee, in an attempt to ensure the law conforms to the new policy, voted to repeal the ban in the military on bestiality, an issue that White House press secretary Jay Carney didn’t consider a serious question.
The Senate quickly backtracked when its vote was revealed.
WND previously reported on CMR’s uncovering of the Inspector General’s report.
That documents how the co-chairman of the commission working on the assessment of the impact on the military, Jeh Johnson, “read portions of ‘an early draft’ of the executive summary … to a former news anchor, a close personal friend visiting Mr. Johnson’s home” three days before service members even were given the survey.
“Contrary to most news accounts, the ‘Comprehensive Review Working Group’ process was not a ‘study,’” Donnelly told WND. “Its purpose was to circumvent and neutralize military opposition to repeal of the law.”
She described the study “was a publicly funded pre-scripted production put on just for show.”
“The … report, completed on April 8, 2011, reveals improper activities and deception that misled members of Congress in order ‘to gain momentum in support of a legislative change during the ‘lame duck’ session of Congress following the November 2, 2010, elections,’” she wrote.
Donnelly explained that days before the survey was distributed, Johnson “was seeking advice from a ‘former news anchor’ on how to write the report’s executive summary more ‘persuasively.’”
Further, “The DoD IG report concluded that someone who ‘had a strongly emotional attachment to the issue’ and ‘likely a pro-repeal agenda’ violated security rules and leaked selected, half-true information to the Washington Post,” she explained.
Within days of the military’s repeal of its ban on open homosexuality, two members of Congress pointed out that the Department of Defense had failed to fulfill its obligations to prepare for the change.
The letter was from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., and Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., the chairman of the personnel subcommittee.
It was addressed to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, whose media office declined to respond to a WND request for comment.
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