Elite trainers at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland have been busted in the past 10 years for DWI, assault, abusing trainees and for using heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy and marijuana.
The offenses, disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information request by the San Antonio Express-News, show a pattern of misconduct since 2002 in a training corps that has been reeling in the wake of a sexual misconduct scandal that has ensnared 25 boot-camp instructors, who are accused of victimizing 49 female recruits.
The Air Force documented 81 cases that were not sexual in nature over the past 10 years, with most of them handled in secret administrative procedures.
They generally resulted in sentences that included reprimands, loss of rank and forfeiture of pay — though commanders sometimes suspended punishment.
Nearly three dozen other cases involved sexual relationships, most of them consensual, underscoring a pattern in which military training instructors have become involved with their students, despite a code forbidding such contact.
Lawyers who defend soldiers point to broader problems with military discipline.
"Talk about more core values, who should have more core values than Gen. (David) Petraeus (who resigned as CIA director under a cloud of sexual scandal)?" said Frank Spinner, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who represented a soldier convicted of rape in the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground scandal in 1997. "So if he cannot ... discipline himself, then how can we expect (a military training instructor) to be (self) disciplined?"
Yet victims' advocates say failure to hold offenders and their superiors accountable perpetuates misconduct.
"A pattern of superior officers abusing their power, victim-blaming, intimidation and cover-up of criminal behavior has been well documented," said Nancy Parrish, founder and president of Protect Our Defenders. "Unfortunately, this type of behavior is nothing new in our armed forces."
Instructors are touted as top-flight noncommissioned officers, carefully selected because they mold civilians into airmen, a task that requires them to serve as role models.
But the sex scandal that has ensnared the instructors, two of whom were involved with 10 women each, has triggered a dramatic reassessment.
An investigation unveiled last week prompted Gen. Edward Rice Jr., head of the Air Force training command, to say the sex scandal was "attributable to weaknesses" in institutional safeguards.
He also said Lackland was beset by "insufficient leadership oversight" of instructors.
Rice said a team led by Maj. Gen. Margaret Woodward found "a breakdown of good order and discipline among ... instructors."
The corps, stressed by chronic personnel shortages, had little backup from higher-level officers. Recruits usually stayed silent, fearing reprisal.
The new records show those problems have existed for years.
Trainers at Lackland were accused of obstructing justice, going AWOL, lying to superiors, assault and battery, and in one case larceny.
Maltraining and maltreatment are the most common violations. Maltraining is any practice not designed to meet goals of the course, while maltreatment includes threats of violence, hitting, intimidation, and belittling, demeaning or using profane language. Most cases involved physical and verbal abuse.
The vast majority of offenders — 88 in all — were staff sergeants, an entry-level NCO rank that today is the backbone of basic training. Most of them, however, no longer will serve as instructors.
Under changes announced a few days ago, Rice has ordered new rules that will allow only a relatively few staff sergeants into the corps. But he rejected the idea that staff sergeants weren't up to the job.
"I can go to basic military training today and I can show you some senior airmen who are fabulous trainers," Rice told the Express-News.
Harsh punishment rare
The FOI request filed by the newspaper in May found that of 120 cases handled by courts or commanders, 34 involved sex and other prohibited relationships between instructors and trainees.
Since 2002, 384 courts-martial were held at Lackland, along with 2,967 Article 15 nonjudicial-punishment proceedings, said Col. Stephen Clutter, chief spokesman for the Air Education and Training Command.
There have been 30 courts-martial of training instructors over the decade, including five from the current misconduct cases. Since 2003, the earliest year available, 4,545 trainers have served on the base, Lackland spokeswoman Collen McGee said
In many of those cases, the relationships were consensual and not all involved sexual contact. However, one previously unreported incident saw a staff sergeant who was sentenced to more than 21 years in prison in 2003 for sexually assaulting a child and possessing child pornography.
He and other instructors accused of misconduct are not fully identified in the records. Last names were provided for only a few of the soldiers. Accusers are not identified.
Harsh punishment is rare. Most cases never went to trial and were handled administratively. Most of the accused were busted in rank and forfeited pay, but 17 trainers were sent to jail, mostly for limited sentences ranging from 45 days to 12 months.
One staff sergeant who was addicted to heroin also took oxycontin, a drug for pain relief, and was handed 18 months in jail last year — one of the longer sentences given in any trial.
Another staff sergeant was found guilty of using Ecstasy after an Article 15 evidentiary proceeding in May. He lost one stripe and was fined $1,000 a month for two months. One of those months was suspended.
Yet another staff sergeant got a reprimand and suspended reduction in rank in his Article 15 after being accused of stealing money that was earmarked for buying trainees T-shirts. He lied "multiple times" to his superiors about it.
Clutter said that while a single case is one too many, most of the training corps had done its work without incident and helped make cases against errant instructors.
Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who led the service's judiciary from 2007-08, said the numbers over the decade weren't "shockingly high or shockingly low."
"It's certainly too many," said Davis, professor at Howard University School of Law, "but it's not a number that in and of itself just jumps out as being an aberration."
But Parrish said sex crimes in the military are underreported.
"According to DOD's own reports, less than 14 percent of victims of rape or assault come forward due to fear of retaliation. And of the few who do come forward, more than 80 percent would not do so again if given the chance," she said. "In addition, we know the military is loath to bring sexual assault cases to trial. Many cases are left uninvestigated, dismissed or the charges are reduced."
At the Pentagon last week, Rice said there was nothing specific in the Air Force's culture that led to the sexual misconduct scandal, instead calling it "a challenge and a problem throughout society," and a complex issue "because we're talking about human behavior and human feelings."
"I do strongly believe that accountability and the perception of accountability is absolutely critical to this element of deterrence that must be part of the set of institutional safeguards that we have in place," he said.
Davis pointed to Petraeus' affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell — who went to West Point and is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve — as a perfect example of a "good-old boys club" that is a legacy of military culture from another era.
"The people that you're talking about are pretty much near the bottom of the pyramid, but you have a top-down issue as well where you can have a guy like Petraeus," he said, "It can't just be from the bottom up, it's got to be from the top down."
Spinner thinks the Air Force is acting properly in dealing with the issue. But human nature being what it is, he said, means it's likely that Rice and the Air Force won't change much of anything.
"I've known women who talk about recreational sex outside of marriage, and to me, if you have women coming from the very culture where sexual activities are part of normal life, why do we think the minute they pass the main gate at Lackland ... they're no longer going to be human beings from that culture?" he said.
But Parrish noted the Veterans Affairs Department estimates women in the military are two to three times as likely to be victims of sexual assault than woman in the general population.
"This is a crisis, not a cultural phenomenon," she said. "Mr. Spinner's statements fly in the face of what the military is reporting about the 'silent epidemic' in our armed forces. Instead of looking at facts, he does what is common practice in the military — blames the victims."
Rice, talking to reporters last week, said the Air Force had to challenge that offenses are part of the culture.
"We hold ourselves to a very high standard in the military and the Air Force, as we should," he said, "and so because this is a challenge everywhere is no excuse at all for us not to get our arms around this and do better than we have in the past."
sigc@express-news.net
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario