Child Abuse Seen on N.C. Military Bases

[emad]

The Guardian
By EMERY P. DALESIO

Associated Press Writer


RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - One soldier is in prison for beating to death his 5-year-old son. Another killed his wife's daughter just weeks before her second birthday.

The cases exemplify new statistics showing that children from military families located in two counties are twice as likely to be killed by their parents or other caregivers than other children statewide.

Cumberland County is home to Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base, while Onslow County has Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base and New River Marine Corps air station.

Marcia Herman-Giddens, a researcher with the North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute, looked at child abuse homicides in North Carolina between 1985-2000.

In that period, Herman-Giddens found 378 child abuse deaths statewide in that period, which computes to an annual rate of 2.2 deaths per 100,000 children.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4514044,00.html

[soothsayer]

1. I think we need to close Ft Bragg, and sow the ground with salt

WTF goes on down there that makes those soldiers snap and kill their wives and kids? Isn't that where the milkshake bombers were from too?

Are they doing some kind of special experiments on Ft Bragg soldiers, or does the media somehow get ahold of more info thatn from other forts?

[donsu]

2. agree - and that's a LOT of murdered children!

what are the officers teaching the troops? what reactions do they praise.

[Tempest]

10. Isn't Ft. Bragg where the School of the Americas is located?

Isn't that where torture and terrorism techniques are taught?

[Radius]

12. Um No. That is Benning. and No again..(nt)

[Judi Lynn]

17. No doubt you remembered reading about torture being taught at the S.O.A.

They contend it's all different now, and that they aren't involved in it, but really! Suddenly they've changed their program which was in use for decades. I don't think so.

Torture Manuals in use at School of Americas, 1982-1991

On Sept. 20, 1996, Pentagon officials announced that U.S. Army training manuals used to instruct Latin American military officers and soldiers at the SOA from 1982 until 1991, advocated torture, blackmail, and executions as counter insurgency measures. Father Roy Bourgeois Gets Peace Award. LINK NO LONGER WORKS. The Pentagon snuck out an admission that the students at the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, once used manuals advocating torture, assassination, and kidnapping as tactics to be used against dissidents in Latin America. While the Army minimized the importance of the manuals, saying they "contained passages that did not represent U.S. Government policy," others, such as Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.), believed the manuals confirmed that the school's congressional supporters have blood on their hands. The New York Times editorialized that an "institution so clearly out of tune with American values should be shut down without further delay." Aaron Galegos and Jim Rice, Manual for Horror, Between the Lines, Sojourners, November-December 1996, Vol. 25, No. 6.

7 U. S. Army intelligence training manuals used by School of the Americas from 1982-1991 which advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion, inclding the kidnapping of a target's family members. The Pentagon began a review of these in 1991. Robert Parry, "Lost History: 'Project X' and School of Assassins. The Consortium for Independent Journalism
(snip)

http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/manuals.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If this source isn't too helpful, and it's quite possible, as I only scanned the first thing I saw in the search, there are 31,000 other entries for the S.O.A. in connection to torture and kidnapping.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=School+of+the+Americas+torture+kidnapping

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What the heck, I'm posting, at no additional cost, the second in the list of 31,000 entries for S.O.A. (torture,kidnapping)!

Remember how congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as "un-American"? Last Thursday, however, the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.'s most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years.

A relic of the Cold War, the SOA was originally set up to train military, police and intelligence officers of U.S. allies south of the border in the fight against insurgencies Washington labeled "Communist." In reality, the SOA's graduates have been the shock troops of political repression, propping up a string of dictatorial and repressive regimes favored by the Pentagon.

The interrogation manuals long used at the SOA were made public in May by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, and posted on its Web site after they were declassified following Freedom of Information Act requests by, among others, the Baltimore Sun. In releasing the manuals, the NSA noted that they "describe 'coercive techniques' such as those used to mistreat the detainees at Abu Ghraib."

The Abu Ghraib torture techniques have been field-tested by SOA graduates – seven of the U.S. Army interrogation manuals that were translated into Spanish, used at the SOA's trainings and distributed to our allies, offered instruction on torture, beatings and assassination. As Dr. Miles Schuman, a physician with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture who has documented torture cases and counseled their victims, graphically wrote in the May 14 Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline "Abu Ghraib: The Rule, Not the Exception":
(snip/...)

http://www.alternet.org/rights/19313/

[Judi Lynn]

19. I just saw something interesting about Ft. Bragg.

Not that it has anything to do with murdering children, but it's an interesting bit to know about Ft. Bragg:

"Military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, have until recently been working in CNN's hq in Atlanta. CNN is up in arms about our report in the last issue of CounterPunch concerning the findings of the Dutch journalist, Abe de Vries about the presence of US Army personnel at CNN, owned by Time-Warner. We cited an article by de Vries which appeared on February 21 in the reputable Dutch daily newspaper Trouw, originally translated into English and placed on the web by Emperor's Clothes. De Vries reported that a handful of military personnel from the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, part of the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, had worked in CNN's hq in Atlanta." Alexander Cockburn, from "CNN AND PSYOPS"
(snip/)

http://www.lkwdpl.org/wildideas/propaganda.html

[JoFerret]

3. Domestic collateral damage

from BushWorld.

[Rose Siding]

4. The new deaths, maybe, but the stats are from '85-'00

This problem is bigger than even Bush, although I imagine that his policies will exacerbate it.

The very word "values" has lost all meaning.

[NVMojo]

5. child abuse on military reservations has always been there

... just ask me or one of my sisters or many other who grew up in "The Fortress".

Or read a book that has been out for awhile "Military Brats" ...children of the Fortress ....

When all you are is "military issue", it leaves you with not much else but your own strong will to survive....

[sr_pacifica]

8. Absolutely

And the constant relocations, at least in my case, brought about isolation and instability. The military can be a rotten life for a kid.

[shanti]

11. thanks for the info

as an ex military brat, i find this of great interest. dad was af, so no fort bragg here, but i don't remember children being beat on base in japan, where dad was stationed. what i do remember though is that most kids lived in fear of their fathers and the frequent feelings of loneliness. most fathers (mothers too) were drinkers as well...lots of dysfunction.

peace

[Radius]

6. Bush wasn't president during the study(NT)

[sr_pacifica]

7. Alcoholism is rampant in the military

And this can be a contributing factor in the violence and abuse that occurs in the military. Also to be considered is untreated PTSD from those who've been sent to war.

[soothsayer]

9. And those go--no go drugs they give 'em. "go" to kill, and no-go to

unwind.

They're all screwed up.

[MountainLaurel]

13. Color me shocked

The military has a DV rate only second to that of law enforcement -- these are folks used to being in control of others, and not being questioned of disobeyed. Throw in some PTSD and voila, you've got an in-house Abu Gharib.

[mom cat]

14. I was "collateral damage" from world war two. I really worry about the

blow back when these traumatized troops return with the hair trigger reflexes that they have had to develop for survival. And all of this with the cutbacks in veterans services, just as the need is about to explode. But the war profiteers will be just fine. What a sick system we have.

[sr_pacifica]

15. A whole generation of "collateral damage"

the so-called baby boomers, the children of WWII vets, really suffered under the unacknowledged and untreated trauma of their dads, and moms as recipients of their husbands'rage.

[Amigust]

16. They're in the business of producing killers

Small wonder they turn on their own families when they do.

[selmo7]

18. Abu Ghraib got me reading news again

There's much being done to recognize non-state sponsored torture in the work of two beautiful ladies from Canada -

www.ritualabusetorture.org

They have begun to get the language of non-state sponsored torture into the United Nations finally. Funny we think only states can do this like the US against prisoners at Abu Ghraib manipulating the minds of newbies to do the bidding. It's not Lyndie England's fault and I think everyone knows it, but that white trash girl gonna fall huh? It's all black magic when you think of it, wherever it happens and whenever. Child abuse of any kind is the most important issue of our times...it's probably why we have some leaders that we have considering how dysfunctional their families are and have been and how poorly they have been raised without real Love.