The Latest BS Rumor(Welcome
Freepers!)
This story is
starting to get some play in the Lefty blogs:
Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.
The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview. It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw "dehydration" listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights.
My BS detector was pinging like crazy on that one. Fortunately, the Left has been careful to keep a catalog of all soldiers who died, and break it down in quite a bit of detail,
including women.
First, and most obviously, no female master sergeants died in September 2003. A female sergeant died in July of 2003, but at least according to the website, she died of a non-hostile weapon discharge. Indeed, looking down the list there are only a few women where the cause of death is not pretty specific; so much for protecting privacy.
So I suspect this whole story is nonsense. Oh, and who is Janis Karpinski?
Karpinski was the highest officer reprimanded for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, although the details of interrogations were carefully hidden from her. Demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel, Karpinski feels she was chosen as a scapegoat because she was a female.Chris notes in the comments that she was originally demoted for several charges including shoplifting of cosmetics. She's also made wild charges before, as in
this CNN story where she claims that she met an Israeli interrogator in an Iraq prison.
