This was a report published in August 2009 - here which were from responses collected from 2,500 Pakistanis interviewed between July 26 & 27th 2009. During that immediate time the SWAT operation was in full swing and even then Pakistanis felt that the US was a bigger threat to them as compared to Talibans
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How can the US military save Afghan women, when 1 in 3 of its own female members are raped by their fellow soldiers and Marines?
I was in Times Square today as Sandra Lee, her voice shaking, and with great courage, told what she's gone through since being raped in Iraq in 2004. She is an Army staff sergeant, and the attacker was a fellow soldier. She spent years not knowing what to do, and wanting to die, but somehow found her voice and spoke publicly about the attack for the first time today. VIDEO
Her story is much more common than the military admits. Veterans for Peace today launched a week of events to raise the issue, quoting a former soldier, "There are only three things the guys let you be if you're a girl in the military - a bitch, a ho, or a dyke."
here
Elaine Brower wrote today, "Sexual assault and rape of women and men in the US military increased so dramatically during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that in 2005 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld formed a task force on sexual assault; however, the task force did not meet until 2008. Nearly one-third of a nationwide sample of women veterans who sought health care through the Veterans Administration said they experienced rape or attempted rape during their service. Of that group, 37 percent said they were raped multiple times and 14 percent reported they were gang-raped. The Department of Defense has been reluctant to release statistics on sexual assault of men in the military, but anecdotal evidence indicates that the statistics are alarmingly high. Over the past 10 years, more than 700 US Army Recruiters have been accused of sexual misconduct or rape. Sixty years of US military studies and task forces since women began entering the military in larger numbers have not lessened the incidents of assault and rape."
here
One can't talk about the rape of American soldiers without looking at the war crimes perpetrated on Iraqi and Afghan women in the course of these occupations. Veterans report that pornography is encouraged in the war zone; women are de-humanized. There's speculation that the photographs of detainee abuse the Obama administration now refused to release are of rapes. The rest of the world knows this; it's the American people who are largely blind to this. To glimpse the reality of US rape in Iraq...and it's gruesome...look at these photos, which may be among those suppressed by Obama.
Remember that George Bush, and Laura, Hilary Clinton and feminist leaders sold the invasion of Afghanistan to the world as a mission to "save" the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban and the burka. I heard Zoya, from the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women, speak last week. She said that under the Americans, Afghanistan is a "free country...a free country for rapists, opium runners, warlords and foreign troops." She spoke bitterly of the Taliban years, but said that Hamid Karzai's government has notorious warlord ministers he pardoned for notorious rapes. "In the past few years, only some cosmetic changes have been made regarding women's rights," Zoya said, critiquing eight years of occupation by U.S. and NATO troops. "The burka is not any more in the papers, in the law, but because there is so much insecurity, so much rape and violence, many women still wear the burka."
PBS is showing a piece called Obama's War tonight on the fighting this summer in Afghanistan. As I write, I'm watching US troops meeting with Afghan men twice their age, in a culture they don't begin, or try to understand, trying to instruct them in how to "cooperate" in stopping the Taliban. here
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