Perhaps a mi of army personnel and forensic experts can explain to me how the details below point to suicide…
Do suicidal people normally burn their genitals with acid before offing themselves?
(link to a Salon outline of the case with additonial links therein)
Frankly, I don’t know the details one way or the other - I’d have to read a lot more. But there are a lot of examples over many years of the military screwing up various investigations for all sorts of reasons, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised by whatever turns up here.
Yeah, I just don’t get it. Maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye, but it doesn’t sound like it.
I never understood the Pentagon’s way of handling things like this. Just tell the truth, as bad as it may be!
The lies will be uncovered or go unbelieved anyway, and it just makes you look worse and worse!
I went to high school with her, but didn’t know her (big school).
No one I know that knew her believes she offed herself. And from stuff I’ve read about it, I don’t believe it either.
Too bad the military has the power to get away with hiding this if it was in fact murder…
Perhaps if the Pentagon/millitary were not used as a public relations tool by whichever administration?
Well that clears that right up, then. 
I served on a ship that had a sailor commit suicide. He was in one of the divisions I worked with closely (M-Div, compared to RL-Div) and so while I can’t say I was close to him, I knew him fairly well. He was found hanged by the phone cord for one of the onboard phones. More than a few people I know were not convinced that he would have committed suicide, nor that it was possible to commit suicide in that manner. The whole scene was cleaned up within hours of the body being found, and any trace evidence that could have been found by a proper crime scene investigation was lost.
The family never forgave the Navy for that, and I can’t say that I blame them.
I don’t know that what happened on my ship was a suicide or a murder. I do believe that the military is far too quick to label questionable deaths as suicides, for a number of reasons.
So, no, I’m not going to defend this decision.
Oh get off of it - this problem (and it is one) has been around so long you can’t pin it on any single administration. And generally when these things get investigated in any detail, any coverup or whitewashing that is discovered is usually found to have been done to keep the command looking good. And this can be grasped immediately with only a second’s thought when you think of a commanding officer’s priorities - administrations may change, but promotions boards don’t, and marks against you like this will sink your career.
Did you note the word “whichever” in “whichever administration”?
There’s a column that I think no longer appears in The Atlantic Monthly called “Word Watch.” It covered new slang terms. One that I remember was “Trustafarian”—rich kids would turn their backs on their parents and live on the street. “Trust” for trust fund and since their hair would go dredlocky, “-afarian” from “Rastafarian.”
They had a term for the military practice of manipulating dead bodies to disguise the circumstances under which they died, but I can’t remember the term. E.g. suppose a soldier was behind enemy lines in violation of an agreement with another country, then got killed. When the army retrieved the body, they’d fabricate a story like “He got hit by a jeep while on training here in the U.S.” Then they’d prop up the cadaver and actually hit it with a jeep, hoping to cover their tracks and corroborate their story. Then they’d ship the body back to the family and hope nobody questioned it or examined the body with any scientific skepticism.
Remember back in 1989 when an accidental explosion caused by among other things, bad powder, resulted in 47 deaths aboard the USS Iowa? The Navy first tried to blame it on a gay sailor in an unhappy relationship committing suicide. Here’s an article reviewing a book about the incident.
Navy statements immediately after the event were homophobic, even to me, and I’m not the most sensitive of men. I paraphrased the Navy statements as claiming two gay sailors got in a snit over who used the last of the coral pink nail polish. It wasn’t quite that bad, but it wasn’t much better.
I guess my point is that any bureaucracy, military or otherwise, is a living organism and will do whatever it takes to perpetuate itself. If a bureaucracy was an individual, you’d have to call it a sociopath.
My god.
I did. But I don’t think it usually goes quite that high up - generally this is a command-level mess.
Can anybody say Pat Tillman?
Nope; no doubt it was an attempt to cover up yet another rape of a female soldier by her comrades. Rape and other sexual abuse of female soldiers by the men is pretty much endemic, from what I’ve read over the years, and one reason I hold the American military in such contempt. And one reason I wasn’t surprised by Abu Ghraib or other reports of abuse; a barbarian army acts barbarically.
Isolated instances such as these do not define the character of the military as a whole. If you’d served you would know that.
What is depressing about this is that it appears as yet another fuckup coverup by higher ups in the Pentagon. I still fail to understand why they just don’t come clean and admit that there was a rape and a murder.
But it’s par for the course when you’re dealing with a huge government. Lots of shit gets covered up from Exec branch, CIA, military, et al. Some covering up may be necessary for security reasons, but I fail to see why it would be remotely necessary in this instance.
(After reading this thread about the Canadian military’s Pride Parade presence, let me narrow my OP to the US military – and obviously just those involved in this and other similar incidents and those who’ve helped cover them up. Also, I see now that part of my OP got disappeared.)
Yeah, this sucks, and I wish I could say I’m surprised, but I can’t. During AIT, I remember a couple of guys from my company getting into a fistfight with some townies who were trying to beat up a female soldier. The soldiers were outnumbered and outsized, but they still managed to both defend the woman and hold their own against these fucking mutants. Well, it turns out one of those fucking mutants was the son of a full bird colonel so our shit CO did his damndest to get the soldiers Article 15’s. Rumor had it that he also considered an Article 15 for the female soldier. Fortunately, one call to IG straightened the whole mess out, but damn, what a fucker.
I don’t blame the army. Not every unit is like that. I blame cowardly officers more concerned with their careers than their soldiers or seeing justice done. As far as CID’s reaction, or lack thereof, well I don’t have enough experience with CID to say (and I’m very happy about that fact). I think the bloggers are doing the right thing, and hopefully, the congresscritters will get enough emails to be convinced to make sure this case gets revisited.
A few things puzzle me, although based on what I’ve read, I don’t doubt for a second the whole thing’s suspicious. The acid. I’ve never served in a combat zone, but is acid that easy to come by on a base in Iraq? If what I’m reading is accurate, this wasn’t even staged to look like a suicide. Who declared it a suicide? Every source just says “the Army”, but that’s like citing an online article by claiming you found it on the Internet. Was it CID? Is this a claim by her CO or someone else in the chain of command? An army pathologist? I really agree that CID needs to get on this and find out who’s saying what.
Perhaps you shouldn’t do so - the Somali affair in the mid-1990s badly damaged morale in the Canadian Forces, and illustrated pretty well that incidents like this can happen in nearly any military force.
Not that those incidents are illustrative of those forces, but it provides context both ways.
Word! I’d forgotten about that. Der Spiegel published the pictures of the soldiers posing with that Somali kid, and they weren’t pretty. I’m not saying that justifies what’s happened on our side of the border, but one of the sad facts of militaries of the free world is that psychos quite often pass basic training right along with the normal kids.