for Broadsheet editors. She said she was raped, therefore she was raped. Hmm, where have we heard that before? Better than that, she is now being "prosecuted for her own rape." No, actually she's being prosecuted for indecency and underage consumption of alcohol, but those are just inconvenient facts.

If facts are of any interest to Lloyd, she might consider that, at least as of now, she and we have few. We know that the woman received a medical exam after the alleged event, but we don't know what if anything it revealed. We don't know what the men say happened. We don't know if sexual intercourse occurred. But of course none of this stops Lloyd from concluding that rape occurred even though she throws in a word or two about not rushing to judgment. Naturally that came after Lloyd had already...well, rushed to judgement.

The facts as reported by the AP are entirely consistent with some sort of "indecent behavior" (like her being partially naked in the men's barracks), getting caught, claiming rape and then refusing to testify because her story was so flimsy. I don't know if that's what happened, but I, unlike Lloyd want to know what the evidence actually shows before drawing conclusions.

I had thought Broadsheet might have figured that one out by now, but apparently not.

Yes, I did read the whole thing and, if you'd read my whole post, you'd know that I referred to Lloyd's "rush to judgment" comment. But, by titling her piece "she raped herself" and by claiming that the woman is being prosecuted for "her own rape," Lloyd has concluded that rape occurred. That is somethng she cannot know based on the evidence she has. It's simple concept, and one I'd have thought Lloyd would have learned, but rape apparently is one of those issues about which certain feminists just can't keep from rushing to judgment.

Try a little less bliss and a little more accuracy.

I agree with most of what you say, but what were the men doing that would warrant a charge of indecency? Do we know? Do we know that sex occurred? Do we even know how the Military Code of Justice defines indecency?

Your proof?

That's a good way to not learn anything, but otherwise, what about what I've said so far is so beneath your contempt?

The articles you cite are, as I'm sure you know, far from persuasive. The first simply rehashes the notion that women in the US military in Iraq are afraid to go to the bathroom at night for fear of rape. Some months ago there was a lengthy exchange in these pages on this very subject and several female Iraq War vets wrote in to say it's nonsense. The womenandwar piece says that there were 2374 allegations of sexual assault in the whole US military in 2006 (2005?). Those were allegation, not proven cases and they were of all sexual assault cases, not just rape. And besides, that's a very small number even if they were all true, which of course they're not. A NYT Magazine article about the same time as the Salon piece said frankly, that after interviewing women who claimed to be sexual assault victims, it was impossible to know what really happened in any of the cases.

Now the same womenandwar article cited well-known figures to the effect that the 2374 figure is substantially higher than previous years, but it neglected to mention that that's because the military took steps to make sexual assault claims easier to file.

But all of this is off my original point which is that it's obviously irresponsible for Lloyd to conclude that a rape occurred in this case. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. None of us knows, but why can't Broadsheet learn from its egregious mistakes of the past and just admit that we don't know the facts? And for that matter, why can't some of the posters here?

while you're at it, you might point out that lefty bloggers in 2007 are scarcely the first people to notice that warfare and the military-industrial complex drive foreign policy on the part of the U.S. You and the other bloggers the foreign policy community abhores have a rich tradition to point to that goes back at least to Eisenhower. Fred Cook's book The Warfare State was published in the very early 60s and its title has become such a commonplace that many books and articles use it as a known term of art.

The fact is that much of the U.S. economy depends on the production and sale of armaments and other acoutrements of war. So it is no surprise that we are a very warlike nation. Warfare depletes inventories of armaments requiring their replenishment and tests the efficacy of new weapons systems, both to the benefit of arms makers. Nor is it a surprise that a densely populated stable of foreign policy "experts" is always at hand to defend this system and make light of those who criticize it.

William Timberman's point that, during the Viet Nam war, the people were far ahead of the press and the foreign policy establishment in opposing the war. Polls conducted at the time showed this clearly and Noam Chomsky, among others has noted same in print. That war lasted a long time and required a draft to prosecute making anti-war demonstrations easy to stage. The cumulative effect was to raise consciousness about what was actually happening over there, why we were there and how factually-challenged Johnson and Nixon were on the matter. The inevitable result was broad-based opposition. It was truly remarkable to watch the press dutifully struggling to manufacture consent for the war when all hope of actually doing so had long passed.