Private: Women Soldiers Die of Dehydration, Fear of Rape

Over at Truthout, Marjorie Cohn reports on a cover-up of women soldiers' deaths in Iraq. She writes:

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that "women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep."

"It was out of control," Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

Female soldiers' fear of being raped is not a new phenomenon; indeed, the problem has become so severe that the Army has established its own sexual assault website.
Also not new is the U.S. military's attempts to cover up such assaults and rapes. These female deaths, for example, are no longer being recorded with a cause of death. While the official explanation is to "protect women's privacy rights," others suspect a more sinister motive to cover-up the conditions.
Explained Col. Karpinski:

"And rather than make everybody aware of [the cause of death due to dehydration caused by fear of rape] - because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore."