Fort Bragg Protest Calls Attention To Crimes Against Female Soldiers

Bragg protest blames military culture in deaths

The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Oct 9, 2008 9:06:24 EDT

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — Protesters gathered outside a gate at the Army’s Fort Bragg to draw attention to the deaths of female soldiers this year because of domestic violence.

The protesters were critical of the military culture they said makes it difficult for a female soldier to tell a commander that she is being threatened, The Fayetteville Observer reported Thursday.

Retired Col. Ann Wright said during the Wednesday event that the military must address the issue. Protesters also criticized the military bureaucracy that they said minimizes sexual assault complaints.

Military spokesmen have said officials don’t see a pattern in recent deaths and that the safety of female soldiers is an important issue.

In addition to three female soldiers from Fort Bragg killed since June, the burned body of a pregnant female Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune was found in January.

“I am here to say that our military must address this,” said Wright, who served 29 years in the Army and was stationed at Bragg for three years.
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http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/10/ap_braggprotest_100908/

U.S. Military Keeping Secrets About Female Soldiers’ ‘Suicides’?

U.S. Military Keeping Secrets About Female Soldiers’ ‘Suicides’?
Ann Wright


TruthDig

Sep 10, 2008

August 26, 2008 - Since I posted on April 28 the article “Is There an Army Cover Up of the Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers,” the deaths of two more U.S. Army women in Iraq and Afghanistan have been listed as suicides—the Sept. 28, 2007, death of 30-year-old Spc. Ciara Durkin and the Feb. 22, 2008, death of 25-year-old Spc. Keisha Morgan. Both “suicides” are disputed by the families of the women.

Since April 2008, five more U.S. military women have died in Iraq—three in noncombat-related incidents. Ninety-nine U.S., six British and one Ukrainian military women and 13 U.S. female civilians have been killed in Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women and girls. Of the 99 U.S. military women, 64 were in the Army active component, nine in the Army National Guard, seven in the Army Reserve, seven in the Marine Corps, nine in the Navy and three in the Air Force. According to the Department of Defense, 41 of the 99 U.S. military women who have been killed in Iraq died in “noncombat-related incidents.” Of the 99 U.S. military women killed in the Iraq theater, 41 were women of color (21 African-Americans, 16 Latinas, three of Asian-Pacific descent and one Native American—data compiled from the Web site www.nooniefortin.com).

Fourteen U.S. military women, including five in the Army, one in the Army National Guard, two in the Army Reserves, three in the Air Force, two in the Navy (on ships supporting U.S. forces in Afghanistan) and one in the Marine Corps, one British military woman and six U.S. civilian women have been killed in Afghanistan. According to the Department of Defense, four U.S. military women in Afghanistan died in noncombat-related incidents, including one now classified as a suicide. Four military women of color (three African-Americans and one Latina) have been killed in Afghanistan. (Data compiled from www.nooniefortin.com.)
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http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/ArticleID/11132

Ireland wants answers on death of Spc. Ciara Durkin

Call for new probe into Irish-American's death
Friday, 9 May 2008 16:20
A retired US Army Reserve Colonel has called on the US congress to compel the US army to re-investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Connemara native Ciara Durkin in Afghanistan last September.

Colonel Ann Wright has researched the suspicious noncombat deaths of military women in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

She has concluded that specific US Army units and certain US military bases in those countries have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of noncombat related injuries, with several identified as suicides.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/world/main3328739.shtml?source=mostpop_story

According to her research, 94 US military women have died in Iraq or during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Twelve US civilian women have been killed during the operation.

Thirteen US military women have been killed in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Twelve US Civilian women have been killed in Afghanistan. Colonel Wright says that at least 15 of these deaths occurred under extremely suspicious circumstances.

One such case was the death of Massachusetts Army National Guard Specialist Ciara Durkin.

The 30-year-old finance specialist was found lying near a church on the very secure Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, with a single gunshot wound to her head on 28 September 2007.

She had recently told her relatives to press for answers if anything happened to her while she was deployed in Afghanistan.
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http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0509/durkinc.html

Just a reminder of how odd her death was

How Did Specialist Ciara Durkin Die?
Soldier In Finance Unit At Bagram Air Base Said To Have "Discovered Things" Is Found Dead
BOSTON, Oct. 4, 2007



(CBS/AP) Exactly how Ciara Durkin died remains a mystery. The Army National Guard soldier from Massachusetts was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head in Afghanistan last week, and now her family is demanding answers from the military.

Initially the Pentagon reported that Durkin, part of a finance unit deployed to Afghanistan in November 2006, had been killed in action, but then revised its statement to read she had died of injuries "suffered from a non-combat related incident" at Bagram Airfield. The statement had no specifics and said the circumstances are under investigation.

Durkin had a desk job doing payroll in an office about three miles inside the secure Bagram Air Base. About 90 minutes after she left work last Friday, her family says she was found dead near a chapel on the base with a single gunshot wound to the head.

The 30-year-old soldier, who was born in Ireland and came to the U.S. as a little girl, felt safer deployed in Afghanistan over Iraq, her family told CBS News correspondent Kelly Wallace. Yet she was found dead within a highly secure base, with few answers.

"The family has been informed that she was in the compound, and she was shot in the head," Durkin's sister, Fiona Canavan, told the Boston Globe. "She was in a secure area of the compound, which, even though the investigation is not complete, leads the family to believe it was what is called friendly fire," she said.

Adding to the mystery is something the Army Specialist told her family: if something happened to her in Afghanistan, they should look into it. She was concerned about things she was seeing over there, one of her eight brothers and sisters said in an interview.

Pat Tillman's family still wants answers on his death. Family after family still want answers on the deaths of their family members place into the care of the military. To be killed in combat, well that's a lot easier to accept because the risk was known from the beginning. The problem with these deaths is that they were not caused by the enemy.

Sometimes non-combat deaths are because of the enemy in the minds of the soldiers. Those deaths are very hard to cope with because there is always the unanswered questions of what more could have been done. Yet when it comes to deaths like this under very suspicious circumstances, the answers need to be found. Someone is responsible for the life taken. It is not so out of the grasp of reality that someone was murdered. After all the men and women in the military are just as human as the rest of us are and there are some people who are not interested in membership of the military family but have ulterior motives being in the military. Thankfully they are few and far between but we need to face this fact. If you need more evidence of some criminals in the military, look at the rapes that have occurred and remember that it is a crime, yet the military treats it much differently than the rest of us do.

The headline from CBS shouts for an investigation

"Soldier In Finance Unit At Bagram Air Base Said To Have "Discovered Things"

Is Found Dead" yet there are still unanswered questions surrounding her death. This is not a cut and dry case of suicide. Often the family members have a very hard time dealing with suicides and they will try to find other causes instead of accepting the suicide verdict. Most of the time, they are wrong but there are sometimes when they are right and their gut instinct vindicated their suspicion.

Colonel Ann Wright found 15 suspicious deaths for women in the military so how have these stories died? Is truth now a commodity too expensive to seek? What about honor? What about justice? We do still have investigators in the military, trained to find the answers. So where are they? What are they doing? How long does it take to do this right? In civilian life, law enforcement investigators seem to find the answers a lot faster. Why doesn't the military?

When I was researching the non-combat deaths for the video Death Because They Served, I found investigation after investigation still not closed. Years after the death, no one knows how it happened. The family member left behind are left with the haunting questions. Instead of finding closure and grieve for the loss, they are consumed with the lack of accountability from the military. There are many occasions when the military proves the theory they take care of their own but in these cases, it appears they are taking care of the perpetrator instead of the life gone from "friendly hands."

Was there a cover up in the death of Spc. Durkin? Will Ireland cause the investigation to become serious enough to get the family the answers they need to find the closure they need? Are women of lesser value? Too often we have examples this very well may be the case to far too many.
Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington