Military Misconduct

Given the history of sexual misconduct by members of the military, maybe we should ban heterosexuals from the service. RICHARD HALLABRIN San Diego

Even as Israel defended its handling of last year's military offensive in the Gaza Strip, officials said Friday that the government was considering heeding international calls to open a new inquiry of its army's actions. Officials cautioned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had made no final decision and that his Cabinet remained divided. Israel had flatly rejected calls for an independent inquiry and insisted that its internal military investigation of the Gaza operation was sufficient.

The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's central coast. They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.

A Marine from Camp Pendleton, convicted of murdering an unarmed Iraqi civilian, has a job waiting with the sheriff's department in his hometown in Massachusetts once he is released, a Navy parole board was told Wednesday. The Plymouth County sheriff submitted a letter to the Naval Clemency and Parole Board that he plans to hire Lawrence Hutchins III as an emergency medical technician. Hutchins grew up in Plymouth and his brother, Kurt, is a deputy sheriff. "I am confident that based on Private Hutchins' demonstrated record of accomplishment prior to his offense, and his strong network of support, that if he is released on parole, he will be an asset to this office and to the community," wrote Sheriff Joseph McDonald Jr. Hutchins is serving an 11-year sentence at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., for the 2006 killing in Hamandiya, west of Baghdad.

One night in April 2007, as Mike Partain hugged his wife before going to bed, she felt a small lump above his right nipple. A mammogram -- a "man-o-gram," he called it -- led to a diagnosis of male breast cancer. Six days later, the 41-year-old insurance adjuster had a mastectomy. Partain had no idea men could get breast cancer. But he thinks he knows what caused his: contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where he was born. Over the last two years, Partain has compiled a list of 19 others diagnosed with male breast cancer who once lived on the base.

A Marine Corps second lieutenant at the base in Twentynine Palms has been charged with involvement in a gay pornographic Web site, officials said Monday. Douglas W. Shirer, 26, a supply officer, has been charged in connection with a San Francisco-based Web site that purports to show naked Marines. Participation in pornography is forbidden under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Three young men sit confined in an Okinawa jail, an ocean away from their hometowns in Texas and Georgia, possibly unaware that the brutal rape they are charged with committing against a Japanese girl has ignited a political firestorm between Japan and the United States. To the folks back home, the two Marines, Pfc. Rodrico Harp, 21, and Pfc. Kendrick M. Ledet, 20, and Navy Seaman Marcus D. Gill, 22, are well-mannered young men.

Much of the current debate over gays and lesbians in the U.S. armed forces has been entirely irrelevant to the genuine problems posed by excluding them. Opponents of lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military talk incessantly of the problems posed by gays' announcing their sexuality. This betrays an appalling ignorance of how the ban actually functions. Ever since the anti-gay regulations were first enacted in 1943, they created a dilemma for military investigators. How do you find gays?

A scandal about the sexual abuse of Congolese women and children by U.N. officials and peacekeepers intensified Friday with the broadcast of explicit pictures of a French U.N. worker and Congolese girls and his claim that there was a network of pedophiles at the U.N. mission in Congo. ABC News' "20/20" program showed pictures taken from the computer of a French U.N. transport worker. The hard drive reportedly contained thousands of photos of him with hundreds of girls.

U.S. troops in Afghanistan use excessive force during arrests, mistreat prisoners and commit other human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today. "In doing so, the United States is endangering the lives of Afghan civilians, undermining efforts to restore the rule of law in Afghanistan, and calling into question its commitment to upholding basic rights," the New York-based human rights group said in its report.

An Afghan soldier opened fire on foreign troops Tuesday at a military base in western Afghanistan, killing an American soldier and wounding two Italians, a senior Afghan commander said. The incident -- unusual but not unprecedented -- could heighten an already considerable sense of mistrust between Western troops and Afghan security forces. That in turn could undermine the Obama administration's plan for Afghan forces to eventually shoulder the responsibility for safeguarding the nation and take the place of the more than 110,000 Western troops now serving in Afghanistan.

The Mexican army, deployed across the nation as part of the government's campaign against drug cartels, has killed prisoners, tortured civilians and captured suspects illegally, Amnesty International said Tuesday. In a scathing report, the human rights organization was especially critical of Mexico's civilian authorities, saying they had failed or refused to investigate or prosecute military abuses. Complaints against the military are almost entirely handled by military courts, and only a handful of cases, among thousands of denouncements, has been prosecuted.

Embarrassed by what it called "a disgraceful disciplinary aberration," the Israeli military announced Friday that it would punish soldiers who staged a pro-settler demonstration during their swearing-in ceremony at Jerusalem's Western Wall. Thursday's protest reflected fears by right-wing nationalists that the conservative-led government would eventually yield to U.S. pressure to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and evict Jewish settlers from the West Bank. The young soldiers, who were being sworn in to an elite infantry unit, the Kfir Brigade, held up banners declaring their refusal to obey orders to enforce any such decision.

An American soldier accused of killing five fellow troops at a counseling center in Iraq had been unraveling for nearly two weeks but the U.S. military lacked clear procedures to monitor him or deal with the deadly shooting spree once it began to unfold, a military report found. The shooting at a U.S. base in Baghdad in May was the deadliest case of U.S. soldier-on-soldier violence in the six-year Iraq war. Sgt. John M. Russell, 44, was arrested and is the only person charged in the incident.

Congress is set to allow the Pentagon to keep new pictures of foreign detainees abused by their U.S. captors from the public, a move intended to end a legal fight over the photographs' release that has reached the Supreme Court. Federal courts have rejected the government's arguments against the release of 21 color photographs showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by Americans. The Obama administration believes that giving the Defense secretary the imminent grant of authority over the release of such pictures would short-circuit a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act. The White House is asking the justices to put off consideration of the case until after a vote on the measure in the House and Senate, as early as this week.

The U.S. military announced Tuesday that a soldier has been formally charged with murder in the slaying of a civilian contractor who was shot this month on a base in northern Iraq. Army Spc. Beyshee Velez, who was already in custody, was charged Monday in the killing of an employee of Houston-based KBR Sept. 13 at the U.S. base Camp Speicher near Tikrit. The 31-year-old soldier, who is being held in Hawaii, faces two counts of murder, three counts of assault and one count of fleeing apprehension in the death of contractor Lucas Vinson, 27, the military said in a statement.

The young girl stood at the podium in a cavernous federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, 8,000 miles and a world away from her native Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A prosecutor offered her a wooden footstool to stand on so she could better see the judge, but the girl declined. She eyed the defendant, who had done unspeakable things to her and six other girls. He was seated just a few feet away with a smirk on his face.

In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service's chief of criminal investigations. An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer's widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam. But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert's public accounts of his war experiences. "This package ...

One night in April 2007, as Mike Partain hugged his wife before going to bed, she felt a small lump above his right nipple. A mammogram -- a "man-o-gram," he called it -- led to a diagnosis of male breast cancer. Six days later, the 41-year-old insurance adjuster had a mastectomy. Partain had no idea men could get breast cancer. But he thinks he knows what caused his: contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where he was born. Over the last two years, Partain has compiled a list of 19 others diagnosed with male breast cancer who once lived on the base.

Speaking in a soft, sometimes labored voice, the only U.S. Army officer convicted in the 1968 slayings of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai made an extraordinary public apology while speaking to a small group near the military base where he was court-martialed. "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," William L. Calley told members of a local Kiwanis Club, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported Friday. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families.