Air Force charges victim in her own rape

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Yes, that seems to be what happened. From KVUE's website:

In the early hours of May 13, 2006, Cassandra said she was raped by three men at a party at Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, N.C.

[...]

Six months after the alleged assault, the Air Force charged Cassandra and the three men with indecent acts.

And it gave the men accused of the sexual assault immunity to testify against Cassandra, which they accepted.

“When you have a change of command, when you have your first leaders, and over time they switch out. So the people that know her are not there now. So they see a different person than other people might have seen, and when you have that change you might have a different attitude,” Jesse Hernandez said.

(Emphasis added.) If this is true, the culture of our military is really fucked up. I found this via Feministing. The Houston Chronicle has a story on this as well. Let's hope someone comes to their senses. But then, the Air Force doesn't have a very good record on this sort of thing. Neither do the other branches of the military, as far as I know. Of course, we only hear about the cases where things seem to go horribly wrong. But it seems to me that we need to shine the light of scrutiny into what goes on when sexual assault is reported in the military.

UPDATE: Doonesbury has been doing a series on this. Man, I know its a cliche by now, but why is it that Doonesbury, The Daily Show, and This Modern World seem to be the ones bringing up painful realities about the war and generally calling bullshit on this administration and the media?

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