Content Warning: Discussions of child sex abuse
If you want technicolor nightmares, you need look no further than what’s happening in Ukraine right now—particularly in Mariupol. Or you could read this 2006 VICE story about brutal hazing of conscripts in the Russian army.
Of course, as savagely evil as Vladimir Putin and the Russian army have been—and continue to be—they hardly have a monopoly on military malfeasance. The difference is, at least the U.S. occasionally makes an effort to address the horrors that occur in our armed services. And we have a free press that—for the moment, anyway—doesn’t seek to criminalize alleged “fake news.”
This story is equal parts stomach-churning, sad, and alarming, but at least the perpetrator was finally caught.
According to the Associated Press, David Frodsham, a top civilian commander at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan during the war, was accused of running a child sex abuse ring after being arrested in 2016 following his reassignment to Fort Huachuca, an Army installation in Arizona. But that’s not the end of the story.
The Associated Press:
Frodsham pleaded guilty to sex abuse charges in 2016 and is serving a 17-year sentence. But records reviewed by the AP show that the U.S. Army and the state of Arizona missed or ignored multiple red flags over more than a decade, which allowed Frodsham to allegedly abuse his adopted son and other children for years, all the while putting national security at risk.
The state permitted Frodsham and his wife, Barbara, to foster, adopt and retain custody of their many children despite nearly 20 complaints, and attempted complaints, of abuse, neglect, maltreatment and licensing violations. Meanwhile, the Army gave Frodsham security clearances and sensitive jobs at a time when his illicit sexual practices made him vulnerable to blackmail.
Yeah, we certainly can’t abide high-ranking officials who knowingly open themselves up to blackmail. This isn’t the Trump White House, after all.
“He would have been an obvious target of foreign intelligence services because of his role and his location,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of counterintelligence for the FBI, told the AP. “Fort Huachuca is one of the more sensitive installations in the continental United States. People with security issues should not be there.”
The AP investigation was published amid civil action brought by two of Frodsham’s adopted sons against the state of Arizona, which licensed Frodsham and his wife, Barbara, as foster parents.
In his lawsuit, Ryan Frodsham said the state was informed that David and Barbara Frodsham were physically abusing their children “by slapping them in the face, pinching them, hitting them with a wooden spoon, putting hot sauce in their mouths, pulling them by the hair, bending their fingers back to inflict pain, forcing them to hold cans with their arms extended for long periods time,” and refusing to let them use the bathroom unless the door remained open. In his AP interview, Ryan said Barbara never sexually abused him but walked into the room where David was abusing him at least twice.
David Frodsham in 2016
Ryan Frodsham also alleges that his adoptive father began sexually abusing him when Ryan was just nine or 10 years old.
The AP investigation also raises further questions about Arizona’s child welfare system, which the outlet describes as having been “embroiled in scandal.” In 2013, for example, the Department of Protective Services had a backlog of more than 6,500 abuse and neglect cases that had never been investigated. This led to reforms that involved eliminating the department in favor of a cabinet-level state office.
Of course, one of the problems that had led to the sorry state of Arizona’s child protective system was—you guessed it—financial cutbacks, including “deep budget cuts to family support services, leading to soaring abuse and neglect complaints and what an auditor general’s report would later refer to as ‘unmanageable workloads, staff turnover and the limited experience of some CPS supervisors and newly hired investigators.’”
Hmm, maybe some of our vast military budget would be better spent elsewhere. Just a thought.
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