“And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W’s, where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there.
Mother rapers.
Father stabbers.
Father rapers!
Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!”
— Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, Arlo Guthrie

The 1969 film of Alice’s Restaurant was funny, touching and pricked a piss-angry mood of a nation bog-downed in Vietnam.
Arlo Guthrie‘s lyrics nowadays, however, is more truth than a funny fable.

Decider George’s military adventures the past near-eight years has destroyed the US military as we once knew it, and the Group W bench was a forerunner to the asshole with the same middle initial.
This week, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings on such goings on in the military and the shit don’t smell good.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, spoke from the heart.

• She said she recently visited a Veterans Affairs hospital in the Los Angeles area, where women told her horror stories of being raped in the military.
  “My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41 percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military,” said Harman, who has long sought better protection of women in the military.
  “Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and downward spirals many of their lives have taken since.
  “We have an epidemic here,” she said. “Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.”
  As of July 24, 100 women had died in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.
  In 2007, Harman said, only 181 out of 2,212 reports of military sexual assaults, or 8 percent, were referred to courts martial. By comparison, she said, 40 percent of those arrested in the civilian world on such charges are prosecuted.
  Defense statistics show that military commanders took unspecified action, which can include anything from punishment to dismissal, in an additional 419 cases.

And what about the military’s response?
Just the same un-Constitutional, illegal shit for all of Decider George’s criminal minions.
From the CNN article above:

• But when it came time for the military to defend itself, the panel was told that the Pentagon’s top official on sexual abuse, Dr. Kaye Whitley, was ordered not to show up despite a subpoena.
  “I don’t know what you’re trying to cover up here, but we’re not going to allow it,” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, said to the Defense official who relayed the news of Whitley’s no-show. “This is unacceptable.”
  Rep. John Tierney, the panel’s chairman and a Democrat from Massachusetts, angrily responded, “these actions by the Defense Department are inexplicable.”
  …
  The Government Accountability Office released preliminary results from an investigation into sexual assaults in the military and the Coast Guard. The GAO found that the “occurrences of sexual assault may be exceeding the rates being reported.”
  “At the 14 installations where GAO administered its survey, 103 service members indicated that they had been sexually assaulted within the preceding 12 months. Of these, 52 service members indicated that they did not report the sexual assault,” the GAO said.
  The office found that the military and Coast Guard have established policies to address sexual assault but that the implementation of the programs is hampered by an array of factors, including that “most, but not all, commanders support the programs.”
  “Left unchecked, these challenges can discourage or prevent some service members from using the programs when needed,” the GAO said.

One wonders at how all this came about, that women have to watch the asshole in the foxhole with her as much as she has to look out for the enemy.
Wars tear at the fabric of national society, especially illegal and immoral wars which go on and on and on and on…

From the New York Times last April:

• Strained by the demands of a long war, the Army and the Marine Corps recruited significantly more felons into their ranks in 2007 than in 2006, including people convicted of armed robbery, arson and burglary, according to data released Monday by a House committee.
  …
  The 2006 and 2007 Pentagon data released Monday show for the first time the number of dispensations issued for specific felonies.
  The number of Army waivers for aggravated assaults with a dangerous weapon rose to 43 from 33. Waivers for burglaries increased to 106 from 36.
  Waivers for possession of narcotics, excluding marijuana, rose to 130 from 71 and for larceny to 56 from 26.
  In the Marine Corps, waivers for burglary convictions rose to 142 from 90, while those for aggravated assault increased to 44 from 35.
  The Army also listed a handful of felony waivers granted for kidnapping, making terroristic threats, rape or sexual abuse, and indecent acts or liberties with a child.
  …
  Military analysts, though, say these are exactly the kinds of recruits who would never have been allowed into the Army before the war in Iraq.
  To reach its recruiting targets, the Army has had to soften many of its requirements.
  It now allows in more recruits who did not graduate from high school and who received lower test scores in their service entry exams.
  Recruits are older and less physically fit.
  And there are more people in the service with medical conditions that would have otherwise disqualified their enlistment.
  “With the Iraq war being as controversial as it is and absent any higher level call to service, it’s a very difficult challenge to all the services, particularly the Army,” said Michele Flournoy, the president and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, a centrist research organization that focuses on national security and military policies.
  “The fact that the use of waivers has increased dramatically is something that should be of concern and should be watched over time.”

And the horror of the military continues — The case of PFC Lavena Johnson, who despite all evidence to the contrary, her death in 2005 was ruled a suicide by US military investigators — they reported Johnson had somehow, someway, had beaten herself to death.
She’d been brutally raped then hideously murdered to cover up the crime.
Read about it here.
And here.

Decider George has created a monster military.
He’s far worse than any of those father rapers on the Group W bench.