Rape & the U.S. Millitary

As Deist pointed out; you might actually be taken seriously on occasion if you could focus on a topic, instead of using all as a springboard for wingnut nonsense. (Daily troll feeding, check.)

(Daily troll feeding, check.)

...

In the afternoon of December 2, Donovan and Dorothy Kazel picked up two Maryknoll missionary sisters, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, from the airport after the pair arrived from attending a Maryknoll conference in Managua, Nicaragua. They were under surveillance by a National Guardsman at the time, who phoned his commander for orders. Acting on orders from their commander, five National Guard members changed into plainclothes and continued to stake out the airport.

The five members of the National Guard of El Salvador, out of uniform, stopped the vehicle they were driving after they left the airport in San Salvador. Donovan and the three sisters were taken to a relatively isolated spot where they were beaten, raped, and murdered by the soldiers.[4]

At about 10:00 the night of Tuesday, December 2, three hours after Donovan and Kazel picked up Clarke and Ford, local peasants had seen the sisters' white van drive to an isolated spot and then heard machine-gun fire followed by single shots. They saw five men flee the scene in the white van, with the lights on and the radio blaring. The van would be found later that night, on fire at the side of the airport road.[4]

Early the next morning, Wednesday, December 3, they found the bodies of the four women, and were told by local authorities"a judge, three members of the civil guard, and two commanders"to bury the women in a common grave in a nearby field. Four of the local men did so, but informed their parish priest, and the news reached the local bishop and the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, the same day.[4]

The shallow grave was exhumed the next day, on Thursday, December 4, in front of fifteen reporters, Sisters Alexander and Dorsey and several missioners, and Ambassador White. Donovan's body was the first removed; then Kazel's; then Clarke's; and last, Ita Ford. The next day, a Mass of the Resurrection was said by the bishop, Arturo Rivera y Damas; and on Saturday, December 6, the bodies of Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel were flown out for burial, Donovan to her parents in Sarasota, Florida, and Kazel back to her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. The bodies of the Maryknoll sisters, Clarke and Ford, were not repatriated and were buried in Chalatenango.[4] The U.S. State Department charged the Donovans $3,500 for the return of their daughter's body.

Subsequent history

As news of the murders was made public in the United States, public outrage forced the U.S. government to pressure the El Salvador regime to investigate. The earliest investigations were condemned as whitewash attempts by the later ones, and in time, a Truth Commission was appointed by the United Nations to investigate who gave the orders, who knew about it, and who covered it up.

Several low-level guardsman were convicted, and two generals were sued by the women's families in the federal civil courts of the United States for their command responsibility for the incident. U.S. foreign policy, which had shored up the right-wing government through the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Administrations, was forced into the public eye.

The head of the National Guard, whose troops were responsible for the murders, Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, went on to become Minister of Defense in the government of José Napoleón Duarte.[1] After their emigration to the U.S. state of Florida, Vides Casanova and his fellow general, José Guillermo García, were sued by the families of the four women in federal civil court. The case is styled Ford v. Garcia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Donovan

Quote:

GOB1 says that the military's job is to defend the country. If you think it's anything else, please tell us what it is. He's right about the statement, but you've just got too much fight in your fingers to think about what it is you actually disagree with him about.

Since you find GOB1's reason for the military to be idiotic, why don't you tell us what the purpose is, and other's can decide the intelligence of your answer.

The statement obviously is an accurate description of the military's role for every country. The fact of the matter is that that's not how it's been used by the USA in the vast majority of cases.

When was the last time that the US military was used to defend the United States?

Flooded with responses, I was not.

How many countries are lined up to launch an invasion of the homeland?

Same degree of response. Hell, even through the whole Cold War, there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that any country would have tried to invade the USA.

I have to note that even with all the research skills that a young academic like you possesses, you have a paucity of threads and postings on the "not all good" aspects of the US military/government, though there's no paucity of those aspects to be discussed.

This is exactly the point: Every military has this role, including ours. Your objections to the military's actions that are extraordinary to this role does not make the statement that the military is for the USA's defense a incorrect statement.

You're right. I can't think of a time since Pearl Harbor. I guess post WW2, we didn't need a military then. I mean, knowing what we know now (that the USA was never invaded), I guess it's kind of silly to think of all that money we spent. I mean having that military probably had nothing to do with the fact that we we never invaded...

Right now: Zero. Take our military away today. You won't see me get in your way. I'll ask you the same question about lines forming tomorrow.

You see, the problem here is that the paranoid fear of inevitable war has been so exaggerated and used to exploited that you've come to reject that their might be any truth in the statement after removing all agenda. Certainly the truth is somewhere in the middle.

You know, this part isn't unique to the USA at all. Name me a country without some form of military. We can discuss it's state.

How many people are lining up to invade Canada? Canada has an army.

What? I've got no notion that the USA is perfect, and my posts have never promoted anything resembling that. Just because I express myself differently than you does not make the way I express or act inferior to you, or that I care less about these issues.

There's really no need to go to the ridiculous, TKO. There's plenty of evidence that the USA has terribly abused the notion of what a military is for. The money spent is the least of it. The millions of innocent lives lost is what you might want to consider.

And it's pretty clear, but I'll state it for you once more, the USA has used its military not for defense, by your own admission, but for active offense against innocent nations solely for the purpose of allowing American business interests access to markets and in many or most cases to allow them to function in such a manner that it was the equivalent of stealing the wealth from those countries.

There have been far too many innocents butchered to worry about something as insignificant as that. Wouldn't you agree?

I never said that the military's authority hasn't been abused, nor have I said that individuals in the military haven't committed crimes. Who says I'm not considering innocent lives lost?