Rapes in Olso

Recent photo of Oslo, Norway by Asbjørn Floden. Right now, it looks very similar to Saint Louis, MO!

Since the last post dealt with the crime of rape, let's continue that thought for a moment. Here's some very shocking information from Oslo, Norway.

According to official police reports, in 2009 there were twice as many rapes reported as in 2008. Just as shocking - in 2007, 2008 and 2009, every single rape case involved a perpetrator who was a non-western immigrant. (Let that sink in for just a moment). And in 9 out of 10 of these cases, the victim was an ethnic Norwegian woman. I don't understand Norwegian very well, but this information was also reported by the Brussels Journal. I also ran the article through a machine translation, and it checks out. If any Norwegian speakers here have anything to add, I would love to hear it.

Incidentally, nearly 10% of Norway's population is foreign-born, by far the greatest number in it's history. The largest non-European immigrant groups in the country are Pakistanis, followed by Iraqis and Somalis. And they are almost entirely concentrated in Oslo. In other words, it doesn't sound very polite to say this, but this is part of a pattern of Muslim men committing rapes and sexual assaults against European women. This not just a recent trend either, and the problem is not just in Norway alone.

It's also difficult to find this data. When the charges are against Muslims rather than US Soldiers, suddenly no one wants to write about it.

Why does this happen? It's likely a consequence of the culture in which they were raised. When you have men (immigrants tend to be mostly male) from an extremely conservative country which is ashamed of their women, suddenly thrown into a country of liberated women, it probably causes all kinds of consternation. It doesn't help that Mohammed, known as the "perfect man" (Al-Insan Al-Kamil) set his own example by allowing his officers to make slave girls of women captured on the battlefield.

But whatever the reason for it, it is unacceptable, and those who try to apologize for it should be driven out of polite society while those who attempt it should be immediately deported. I know that sounds obvious, but it doesn't always happen! There have also been too many cases in Europe where people are afraid to speak out about it, lest they be accused of "hate speech" or where police are reluctant to prosecute for fear of starting a riot.

Incidentally, you can go here to read some of this week's hilarious antics of immigrants in Norway.

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"1/3 of Women in US Military Raped"

So goes the headline of an article today on Newsjunkie. It's actually very old news, but it's causing a lot of commotion on social networking sites like Digg and Reddit all the same.

I can't believe we are going through this again. Starting with an author named Helen Benedict who used it to generate her book/article sales, every couple years someone pulls out this statistic once again. Jenn Q. Public already wrote about this at length and rightly took Ms. Benedict to task for it.

The actual number is 30%, not "one-third", and it orginally came from a study published in the 2003 print version of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. The interviewees were a self-selected group of military women who served between 1961 and 1997 (so it has nothing to do with the current war on terror). Since the participants volunteered to come forward, it's possible that may have skewed the results - I don't know.

But it was the only study to have a number anywhere near that high, and for that reason, certain people (when it fits their political agenda) love to quote it all the same. Most authors though, are at least able to attribute it to it's source - Newsjunkie simply refers to NPR - so it's actually a quote of a quote.

I don't mean in any way to deny or dismiss the problem of rape in the military. But if we're going to have this discussion again let's have an honest discussion, starting with putting the information in it's proper context and quoting it accurately.

My own view from my admittedly non-perfect experience is that it's incredibly rare. I have heard about exactly 4 rapes/attempted rapes/sexual assaults in all the units I have served in during my 16 years of service. Even if 90% were unreported, it still would nowhere near equal "1/3" of all military women I've known.

And just to give a little perspective on where the military is at today: During my 15 months serving in Korea on my last tour, no less than four times, I (as well as everyone else) had to sit through an hours-long series of classes and discussion on rape/sexual assault prevention, prevention of sexual harassment (POSH), and prostitution/human trafficking. Moreover, at a minimum of battalion level and above, each unit has a SARC (sexual assault response coordinator), whose specifically trained to deal with these complaints. This isn't your grandpa's Army any more.

In fact, all this training has gone to the point where it may actually be counterproductive. It's actually demoralizing for soldiers (like myself) who have never committed any of these offenses, to constantly have to sit through these classes as if we've done something wrong. Long before I joined the military already I knew that Rape/Sexual Assault/Sexual Harassment were wrong - humans have had the ability to know right from wrong ever since Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

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Charles Johnson under the lens

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (see here, if you aren't familiar with his site or my history with him) recently gave an interview to the New York Times, and isn't too happy with the results (probably because the finished article was actually objective). On his own site, Johnson is used to calling all the shots - he's noticeably insecure when stepping out of his comfort zone; i.e. when he's not in complete control.

There's plenty of interesting analysis about it elsewhere, but I'll just focus on one paragraph:

THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson’s tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from within. Readers both casual and loyal spoke up in the comment threads to ask, sometimes diplomatically and sometimes not, whether all this casual flinging of epithets like “fascist” wasn’t maybe an overreaction. Johnson’s response, in thousands of cases, was to block their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. “Get off my Web site” was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not true — that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him — but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records against his.)

In my case anyway, anyone can, right now, see for themselves that Johnson is lying. I was banned from his site merely for asking questions, and I didn't break any of the site rules. As of now, my last (and really only) comments are still there in one thread, and I wrote nothing hateful or threatening. And even if Johnson decides to erase the evidence (as he has done to others), I still have the screen captures to prove what I wrote.

I could write about this all day, but I will just say this - I comment quite a bit on very liberal web sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, Reddit, and others. I have never, ever been banned from any of them, even when I strongly disagreed with the hivemind. Kim Jong-Il could take some lessons from Johnson's state-of-the-art paranoia.

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"How I fought to survive Guantánamo"

This is the title of a recent Guardian article about Omar Deghayes, a former detainee at Guantanamo who claims he is innocent of terrorism yet was horrifically tortured, including having an eye gouged until he was blinded. Unlike the writer of the article however, I'm a bit skeptical of some of his claims.

First, a little background: Deghayes is a Libyan national whose family claimed asylum in the UK in the 1980s. After studying law in the UK, he moved to Afghanistan, got married and settled down there. In 2001, during the US invasion, he fled to Pakistan, and was arrested there in 2002 on charges of terrorism. He was turned over to US military authorities and eventually sent to Guantanamo. He was released in 2007. He is a cause célèbre for many anti-war groups, and has had interviews on television. He was also the subject of a documentary, called "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo". He is currently suing the government of the UK for "complicity" in his capture and not doing more to help him get released while he was there.

The Guardian article (actually every media piece about him) accepts his claims without question. Well, let's look at a few of them more closely:

1. Guards blinded him by gouging his eyes

Well, in other articles he instead claimed he was blinded by both beatings and pepper spray. But I guess pepper spray didn't sound quite as sensational as "gouging". But that would still be rather outrageous, except nearly all articles about him fail to mention one crucial fact: His right eye has been crippled since an injury in childhood from a toy sword (I guess another thing that disturbs me is that Newsday only bothered to mention that fact much later in the story, and even then only to help demonstrate his innocence, to show he wasn't the same man as one shown in a terrorist videotape). You can also see Mr. Deghayes noticeably sunken right eye in his passport photo, taken before his capture. Moreover, no one has released his medical records, either from Guantanamo or the UK.

Additionally, as someone who has dealt with prisoners on many occasions, it just doesn't fit. Even if guards wanted to torture Deghayes, no soldier is trained on the rather medieval technique of eye-gouging, nor would they want to put their fingers in someone's body. Especially they wouldn't want to invite the extra attention and scrutiny from medical officials (eye injuries in particular require a very high level of care). The article mentions he regularly violently resisted the guards. If he did lose his eyesight while at Gitmo, it was more likely from being hit during one of his many struggles. That wouldn't excuse it, but it's a far cry from deliberate maiming.

2. He wasn't involved in terrorism.

That's possible, but I still have questions. Starting with, why would someone move from a comfortable life in the UK to one of hardship in Afghanistan? Here was the very brief explanation in the Guardian article:

[in Afghanistan] he saw business oppor­tunities and the chance to use his ­languages (Farsi, Arabic and English)

One big problem. Putting aside the fact that Afghanistan was one of the worst places in the world in 2000 for "business opportunities", none of these languages are used by Afghanis! According to the CIA World Factbook, the country's languages are: Dari (official) 50%, Pashto (official) 35%, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11%, 30 minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai).

In fact, Farsi is the language of Iran, and while Arabic is prevalent throughout the Middle East, it isn't used in Afghanistan (not all Muslim countries are Arab countries). And it doesn't even occur to this journalist to ask about the discrepancy? Of course a few people in Afghanistan use Arabic, most notably Al-Qaeda members who are hiding there...

I could point out other inconsistencies, such as the "NGO"s he claimed to work for (none of which are named), or his relatives saying he moved to Afghanistan because he failed his law courses, while the Guardian claimed he completed his law studies.

Finally, most of these articles mention it only as a footnote, but he is not officially cleared yet. He is currently free on bond while under investigation from Spain on terrorism related charges (the same accusations that started the whole process in the beginning).

3. The UK is guilty for not doing more to get him out of Guantanamo

Omar Deghayes only has residence rights in the UK (meaning that he is allowed to live there), not citizenship. He is still a Libyan citizen. Moreover, he rejected the UK for a life under the Taliban, the most strict Islamic government in the world. Leaving aside any legalities here, exactly why did the UK have any moral obligation or national interest in bringing him back?

Of course, he lives in the UK now, enjoying his fame. It also makes it much easier to pursue any multi-million dollar settlement against the government.

If Mr. Deghayes is as innocent as he claims, and if he was blinded by his treatment in Guantanamo, I would certainly offer him an apology. But I can't help but be skeptical - and I need to be, since the fawning media accept stories like this without question.




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Here I am - Washington University in Saint Louis

Photo of Brookings Hall, by Hjelle

One good thing about having a not-so-heavily trafficked web site - less people miss me while I've been away. But I have had a few people write me with their concerns. I promise I am OK. My life has now changed a bit. I am still on active status in the US Army, but under a special program I am now allowed to take some time away from my military duties to complete my master's degree, and am now enrolled at Washington University in Saint Louis. I should be here about 18 months. After that, it's likely I will deploy again, possibly to Afghanistan.

In the last few months since this blog slowed down, I've dealt with my crazy job as an intelligence officer in Korea (which I can't really talk about), and traveled back and forth between Korea and the US twice. Moreover, I lost my father this fall during a very sad period. These are some of the reasons my blog hasn't been very active. But I've been away too long - and there is just too much misinformation out there for me to ignore any more.

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