Female U.S. service members in Iraq were afraid of being raped on their way to the latrine at night, so they stopped drinking water in the afternoon, and died of dehydration in their sleep. What the coverup says about U.S. jails and prisons.
The point in my Fri. 1-27-06 diary about insurgents' wives as hostages was to draw a connection between official conduct during foreign war fighting and domestic criminal justice operations.
Most of the comments focused on the unprincipled nature of the tactic, or the desire for revenge that it is likely to stimulate.
The point is that the official use of women (as hostages, or as "bait" for or snitches against their male partners) is not peculiar to the war in Iraq, but is also a feature of the war on drugs at home.
Here is another opportunity (unfortunately) to make a similar point:
At
http://www.truthout.org/... Marjorie Cohn blogs about one effect of pervasive sexual assault within the U.S. military in Iraq. Female service members stop drinking fluids in the afternoon, to avoid the hazardous walk at night to the female latrines. There were deaths from dehydration.
The obvious point is about the prevalence of male violence, but there is another, more elusive lesson. Again, it is about corrections and criminal justice on the home front.
Read Cohn's blog on truthout (and the other blogs on this emerging scandal). A command decision was made to suppress information about the phenomenon. The covering explanation for why causes of death (dehydration) would no longer be disclosed was "privacy."
Anyone who's ever tried to advocate for the physical or mental health care of an inmate in the U.S. has encountered this official excuse. Blood relatives and attorneys who possess signed releases alike routinely hear jail and prison authorities blithely protect inmates' privacy in a way that obstructs advocacy and care, and is, in fact, contrary to the inmates' wishes and interests.
Further, the compelling similarity is that both in the foreign war zone (with service members) and at home (with prisoners), the misuse of privacy concerns begins at the top of the command staff. In both cases, the most senior persons in authority pursue a goal of limiting families' ability to care for and act in behalf of their loved ones.
