Schofield Barracks man charged for allegedly trying to push wife out of a moving car

According the the Honolulu Star Advertiser, a 27-year old Schofield Barracks man was arrested and charged with terroristic threatening for allegedly attempting to push his wife out of a moving vehicle:

Darren R. Barnhill, of a Schofield Barracks address, remained at the main police cellblock Wednesday afternoon unable to post $11,000 bail.

Police said the incident began when Barnhill was arguing with his wife, 24, in a vehicle about 10:30 a.m. Monday. When she tried to get out, Barnhill stopped her and sped off onto the westbound lanes of H-1 near Kunia, police said.

He tried to open the vehicle’s door on the freeway and push her out, police said.

Darren Barnhill

 

Man finds naked sailor in home

A McCully man had an unusual and uninvited house guest last night.  The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports: “Deyoung Chipen had left the door to his one-bedroom apartment unlocked as he moved his car in the parking lot. On his way back he saw the man, wearing only shorts and shoes, run into his second-floor unit.”

The article continues:

“I open the door, I see his shoes inside,” Chipen said.

He went back out and called police. Chipen and an officer went into his unit and found the man in his bedroom.

“I saw him lying on my bed and no more clothes,” he said. “I never know him, too.”

Police said the man came from the USS Carl Vinson, which stopped in Hawaii after carrying Osama bin Laden’s body and burying it at sea.

[…]

“I really feel bad because he’s on my bed already,” said Chipen, whose wife was at church at the time. “I don’t like him or anybody go inside my house. He never get permission.”

As a police cruiser rolled away with the man in the back seat, the sailor yelled out to Chipen, “I really am sorry, sir. I’m not a bad person. I got drugged.”

Ah, the joys of being a military colony…It could be entertaining if it weren’t so oppressive.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

 

Breaking the conspiracy of silence

Betsy Kawamura is originally from Hawaiʻi.  She writes about being sexually assaulted in Okinawa by a man she believes was an American stationed at Kadena.  She campaigns internationally for human rights for women.  Her organization is Women4Nonviolence.

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Breaking the conspiracy of silence

Betsy Kawamura, 20 May 2011
“I was 12 years old…..my anguish ended when my family left Okinawa after this man had paid me $5 during our last encounter for my ‘services’,” Betsy Kawamura

In the 1970’s in Okinawa, an island south of mainland Japan, a middle aged Caucasian man in civilian attire stopped me outside a bookstore in the city of Koza, now called Okinawa City near the U.S. Kadena Air Base.  I was 12 years old.  Though I could not identify the man explicitly as being part of the U.S. armed forces, it would have been likely as most of the Americans living in Okinawa were directly or indirectly part of the U.S. military in those years during the Vietnam War.  The tiny island of Okinawa was often a training ground for U.S. military personnel who were sent to Vietnam then, and still serves as a main base for U.S. armed forces for Asia Pacific regions. Lured by his smooth talk and fearful of disobeying an older man as an ‘authority figure’, I tragically agreed to go for a ride in this man’s car. Without going through traumatizing details, the perpetrator sexually assaulted me, found out where I lived, and took  me out of my house to repeatedly assault me for several days in remote areas in Okinawa. He also told me openly about his sexual abuse of other young girls, including his own daughter and told me he found ‘nothing wrong’ with what he was doing to me at all. My anguish ended when my family left Okinawa after this man had paid me $5 during our last encounter for my ‘services’.

I had felt disgustingly dirty and traumatized but I received no care or attention from those closest to me.  Nearly two decades later, after prolonged neglect of this early traumatic situation, I ended up institutionalised, temporarily clinically disabled, and was forced to survive on the streets homeless.

Twenty years later, when I was able to return to my professional work in Japan, I met some journalists and activists working with trafficked and tortured defectors from North Korea. I attended the second annual conference on North Korea human rights violations in Tokyo, complete with raw drawings of children depicting their lives in the gulags.  The depiction of torture in the drawings and testimonies of the trafficked women triggered in me such a powerful and overwhelming response that I was never able to return completely to the corporate world. As I researched further the plight of trafficked women out of North Korea, the tortuous consequences reminded me of my own encounter of sexual assault in Okinawa. Women of Okinawa then did not have an adequate ‘voice’ or power to prosecute perpetrators and I realized then that survivors of sexual violence globally need strong political advocacy and socio-economic support to empower them. This realization ignited my will to come out as a visible survivor and a ‘voice’ to support severely stigmatised groups, as well as NGOs and journalists who try to assist in such efforts.

Like many oppressed groups in the world, I feel that many Asian women and those of minority ethnic backgrounds are still conditioned to be ‘less empowered’ than the opposite sex.  I want to prevent gender based violence through grass-roots level engagement, and create awareness of the problem by approaching government, civil society and military representatives; and to support survivors toward highest-level peace negotiations globally.

I have been deeply disappointed with many of the military decision-making bodies globally because of their lack of accountability in dealing with violence against women, and lack of foresight in focusing on preventing armed conflicts. For example, although things in Okinawa have improved since 1995, there is still room for improvement in the cases of the thousands of woman and children in Asia Pacific who have survived violence since the second World War under US military presence. The 1995 Okinawa rape incident refers to a rape that took place on September 4, 1995, when U.S. Navy Seaman Marcus Gill and two U.S. Marines Rodrico Harp and Kendrick Ledet, all from Camp Hansen rented a van and kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old Japanese girl. Okinawan activist Suzuyo Takazato, and other women who were present at the Beijing Platform then investigated the incident and later generated a list of several hundred cases of sexual crimes committed by the U.S. military in Japan over the years. The 1995 rape case caused a huge public outcry in Okinawa and resulted in some changes in the handling of U.S. military crimes.

More provisions still need to be made for rape victims, such as changing the nature of Status of Force Agreements between the USA and host countries globally that leave loopholes that prevent the effective prosecution of rapists. The fact that the USA, along with other global super-powers like China and Russia, are not part of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, though they are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, leaves room for concern for survivors/victims of sexual violence like myself, who question the provision of ‘security’ by U.N. Security Council members.

Other territories such as East and West Africa and Balkans have also suffered from the gendered impact of armed conflicts, including militarised prostitution and human trafficking. In observing the current unrest in the Middle East and Far East Asia (North Korea in particular), it would be unfathomable not to look at how implementing UNSCR 1325 could help  prevent further armed violence.

UN Security Council Resolution 1960 passed on December 17, 2010 to name and shame parties to armed conflict “credibly suspected” of committing rape or other forms of sexual violence, is a very welcome move.  It is also critical to look at longer range legal consequences of accountability for super powers such as China, USA, and Russia, who are not part of the Rome Statute.

One of the greatest challenges in empowering survivors of gender based violence lie sincreating a paradigm shift in the minds and hearts of people universally who wrongly believe that survivors are disempowered and can not both give and receive love. I was asked recently whether I still belived in ‘love’. I remain committed to my belief int he transcendent powers of agape, including its ability to heal society from violence against women.

When I attend the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on ending sexual violence against women in conflict, I hope I will be able to catalyse efforts with like-minded individuals and survivors to create a global network of survivor empowerment programs that will be survivor-steered and driven, designed to support efforts at The Hague and to evaluate National Action Plans on UNSCR 1325. As a survivor from the small island of Okinawa during the Vietnam War, I hope that I can inspire others to engage in empowering programs to lessen the burden and stigmatisation of the violence that is still disproportionately borne by female survivors.  I thank the powerful and critical engagement of men in assisting us such as partners of women who were sexually abused, who stand tall and proud by them, instead of marginalizing or stigmatising them.

Gender-based violence is a weapon of mass destruction fuelled by generations of grief and ‘conspiracy of silence’ abetted by perpetrators.  Such violence will continue to fuel and perpetuate wars unless there is a paradigm shift for change in the hearts and minds of the survivors, witnesses, and everyone globally. This is the message I will  be taking to the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on ending sexual violence in conflict

Betsy Kawamura is the founder and director of Women4NonViolence

APEC will cause surge in prostitution

The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports “Prostitution expected to surge for APEC”:

“When big events come to town, the number of prostitutes increases on the street, and APEC is a big event,” said Ben Rafter, president and chief executive of Aqua Hotels & Resorts, operator of Aqua Waikiki Wave.

APEC Leaders’ Week — Nov. 7 to 13 — will bring about 20,000 attendees, including President Barack Obama, other heads of state from APEC’s 21 countries, ministers, political staff, business leaders and media.

The Pro Bowl, military exercises and the Asian Development Bank meeting in 2001 all drew more prostitutes to Waikiki, said Bob Finley, who has been a Waikiki resident since the 1970s and is chairman of the Waikiki Neighborhood Board.

As usual, the government and business response is to beef up security and police to target the women, most of whom are trafficked to Hawai’i to meet the demand from the large influx of transient male populations such as tourists, conventioneers and the military.  Why do they not identify the ‘johns’ as the problem?  Kaleo Keolanui, president of the Hawaii Hotel & Visitor Industry Security Association even framed it as if the women were the predators:

“We have travelers from all over the world mixed with our military population, which makes for an ideal prey for the prostitutes,” Keolanui said. “Why? Because they have money, and they’re here for a very short period of time. It’s a huge concern.”

The link between military populations and prostitution is plain knowledge. However, whenever the military proposes to expand in Hawai’i and are asked to study the impact on prostitution and sex crimes, the environmental impact statements are always silent.

It’s ironic that the corporate and government elites are worrying about prostitution with APEC.  When whole industries have been developed in ways to pimp Hawai’i to the outsider such as corporate tourism and the military, prostitution will be part of the mix.   APEC is itself a grotesque example of Hawai’i being prostituted to cater to the desires of the international conference industry.   Maybe it’s time to rethink the ways that Hawai’i is always forced to ‘turn tricks’ for others.

A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man – Who pays?

Today’s Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that a planned Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment center has been delayed due to difficulty in the consultation process regarding the preservation of historic properties:

The reason for the long delay lies with the VA’s difficulty in navigating the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, and Section 106 of that act, which requires federal agencies to take into account effects on historic properties, and consult with state and other preservation agencies over their proposed actions.

[…]

Pua Aiu, administrator for the State Historic Preservation Division, said it’s taken a long time to gain consensus on the project because it’s going in on the “relatively pristine” Tripler grounds, an area that’s eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

“And when that happens, (consultation) normally takes a long time,” Aiu said.

Aiu said it’s not unusual for an agency to come in and “they believe their project is really good, and we believe their project is really good, but they have to accommodate the historic preservation rules. It’s a federal law.”

The VA came in initially with a project “that was simply unacceptable to be put on a property that’s eligible for the (National Register),” she said.

Veterans’ advocates say that the facility is desperately needed and criticize the “bureaucratic impasse” that has delayed the project.

There is no doubt that the epidemic of PTSD America’s wars have unleashed on our communities desperately needs attention. But as the New York Times article “A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man” makes painfully clear, PTSD is merely a symptom of the profound moral, spiritual and social “disease” of war and militarism.  Treating symptoms will not cure the disease.

And why should Hawai’i’s cultural resources, environment and communities have to pay the terrible costs of war, whether they are in Makiki, Moanalua, Lihu’e (Schofield), Makua, or Pohakuloa?

Here is a sample of an excellent article in the New York Times about the Stryker Brigade murders of civilians in Afghanistan:

April 27, 2011

A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man

By LUKE MOGELSON

Last May, in the small village of Qualaday in western Kandahar Province, a young Army lieutenant and his sergeants met with several elders to discuss the recent killing of a local mullah. The desert heat was fierce, and the elders led the soldiers across their village to sit under the shade of nearby trees. Three days had passed since they were last there; during that interval the place appeared to have been abandoned. When they sat down, some of the soldiers removed their helmets, and a few elders their sandals and turbans. A freelance photographer was permitted to make an audio recording of the discussion. The lieutenant wanted to know where everyone had gone. One elder explained: People left because they were afraid.

“Ask them, ‘Do they understand why we shot this dude?’ ” the lieutenant told his interpreter. During their last patrol to Qualaday, soldiers in the platoon had attacked Mullah Allah Dad with rifles and a fragmentation grenade that blew off the lower halves of his legs and badly disfigured his face. The soldiers claimed that Allah Dad was trying to throw a grenade at them. Two days after the killing, however, a company commander attended a council during which the district leader announced that people believed the incident had been staged and that the Americans had planted the grenade in order to justify a murder.

“Tell them it’s important that not only the people in this village know, but the people in surrounding villages know, that this guy was shot because he took an aggressive action against coalition forces,” the lieutenant told his interpreter. “We didn’t just [expletive] come over and just shoot him randomly. We don’t do that.”

Last month, in a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., 22-year-old Jeremy Morlock confessed to participating in the premeditated murder of Mullah Allah Dad, as well as the murders of two other Afghan civilians. In exchange for his agreement to testify against four other soldiers charged in the crimes, including the supposed ringleader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the government reduced Morlock’s mandatory life sentence to 24 years, with the possibility of parole after approximately 8. The rest of the accused, who are still awaiting trial, contest the allegations against them.

The story that has been told so far — by Morlock in his confession and by various publications that relied heavily on the more sensational accusations from interviews hastily conducted by Army special agents in Afghanistan — is a fairly straightforward one: a sociopath joined the platoon and persuaded a handful of impressionable subordinates to join him in sport killing as opportunities arose. There may indeed be truth to this, though several soldiers in the platoon give a more complicated account. Certainly it’s a useful narrative, strategically and psychologically, for various parties trying to make sense of the murders — parents at a loss to explain their sons’ involvement and lawyers advocating their clients’ innocence and a military invested in a version of events that contains and cauterizes the problem.

On the day of Jeremy Morlock’s confession, I watched as several of his friends and relatives took the stand to vouch movingly for his character and struggle to fathom how the young man they knew could have committed the crimes to which he confessed. I watched, too, as Morlock himself recounted his failed ambition to follow in the footsteps of his father, a former master sergeant who died in a boating accident not long before Morlock deployed. “If he had been alive when I went to Afghanistan,” Morlock told the judge, “I know that would have made a difference. . . . I realize now that I wasn’t fully prepared for the reality of war as it was being fought in Afghanistan.”

Among the witnesses who testified that day was Stjepan Mestrovic, a sociologist who specializes in war crimes. Mestrovic was allowed to study an internal 500-page inquiry into the Fifth Stryker Brigade’s “command climate,” the purpose of which was to assess whether shortcomings in leadership might be partly to blame for the murders, and to identify any officers who should be held to account. In court, Mestrovic said he was shocked by how dysfunctional the brigade appeared to have been, and he added, “In a dysfunctional unit, we cannot predict who will be the deviant — but we can predict deviance.”

I met with Mestrovic later that evening and asked him to elaborate. Before becoming involved in Morlock’s case, he served as an expert witness at trials related to Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad canal killings and Operation Iron Triangle, a case with some similarities to this one, in which American soldiers in Iraq murdered three unarmed noncombatants. He excoriated the tendency of the Army — and the news media — to blame such crimes on “a few bad apples” or a “rogue platoon.” Close examination of these events, Mestrovic argued, invariably reveals that the simplistic bad-actor explanation “doesn’t fit the picture.”

Of course, while the murders in southern Afghanistan reflect most glaringly upon the men who committed them, the need to revisit these crimes goes beyond questions of culpability and motive in one platoon. As with Abu Ghraib and Haditha and My Lai, it’s hard not to consider how such acts also open a window onto the corroding conflicts themselves. This isn’t to suggest that military personnel are behaving similarly throughout Afghanistan as a result of the conditions there; it is only to say that 10 years into an unconventional war whose end does not appear imminent, the murder of civilians by troops that are supposed to be defending them might reveal more than the deviance of a few young soldiers in a combat zone.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Military personnel drive demand for synthetic drugs

The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that there military is contending with an epidemic of drug use involving “Spice” and “Bath Salts”, synthetic cannabinoids.

The military, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Congress and state lawmakers are scrambling to get a handle on drug compounds that are easily obtained, can easily be modified to keep them legal and are readily available in stores and on the Internet.

“The number of incidents of designer drug usage is rising at an alarming rate in our Navy,” Adm. John C. Harvey, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, said in January.

In the four months before his statement, 72 Pacific Fleet sailors had been accused of using or possessing the drugs. The Navy said in February that it was discharging 16 sailors on the Norfolk, Va.-based amphibious assault ship Bataan for using or dealing in Spice.

[…]

The Air Force said there have been six Spice cases at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam resulting in nonjudicial punishment and/or administrative discharge since January, compared with two Spice cases in 2010. Hickam did not have any Spice cases before 2010, officials said.

The military is a big customer for Spice and Bath Salts.

Hawaii’s Natural High shop owner Greg Azus said he doesn’t sell synthetic drugs, but he gets one or two military members a day stopping by his Waikiki store asking for them.

“It’s consistent,” Azus said. “It’s like I know what they are going to ask.” He added that “you can pretty much tell” the individuals are in the military because of their short hair and appearance.

He said that he probably gets as many requests these days for Bath Salts as for Spice.

These drugs have been linked to a number of bizarre crimes and violent acts:

Schofield Barracks soldier Spc. Bryan Roudebush smoked the designer drug “Spice” and then beat his girlfriend and tried to throw her off an 11th-floor balcony in Waikiki.

He said in court he didn’t remember what happened that night in April 2010.

[…]

The high that individuals are seeking from the drugs also can bring a raft of serious side effects, including anxiety attacks, rapid heart rate, vomiting, disorientation, hallucinations, paranoia and suicidal thoughts, and some alarming behavior has followed.

In one case a man in Mississippi got high on Bath Salts, hallucinated and repeatedly sliced his face and stomach with a skinning knife.

David Rozga, 18, of Iowa killed himself after using K2 purchased at a mall.

 

Former Marine admits to beating man and raping his daughter

From the Honolulu Star Advertiser: http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/118821734.html

Former Marine admits to beating man and raping his daughter

By Nelson Daranciang

POSTED: 07:07 p.m. HST, Mar 28, 2011

A 29-year-old former Marine accused of beating up a Washington man he met on the pool deck of a Waikiki condominium-hotel then raping the man’s 10-year-old daughter has agreed to a 30-year prison term.

Christopher Cantrell pleaded guilty in state court today to five counts of first-degree sexual assault, one count of third-degree sexual assault, promoting child abuse, kidnapping, burglary and assault in a plea deal with the state. The child abuse charge is for recording pornographic images of the girl.

[…]

Police said Cantrell met the girl and her father Sept. 17, 2008 on the pool deck of the Waikiki Banyan and accompanied them to their 12th-floor hotel room. They said Cantrell asked the man if he could take nude pictures of the girl then punched him repeatedly until the man was unconscious.

He then took the girl to the 10th-floor laundry room where he raped her, police said.

Cantrell is originally from South Carolina.

He was court martialed while in the Marine Corps and sentenced to three years of confinement for missing duty, being drunk on duty, stealing a big screen television from the barracks’ common area and setting fire to one of the rooms, according to his military record. Cantrell recently completed his confinement when he met the man and girl visiting from Washington.

The ‘Kill Team’ images

SPIEGEL magazine has published photos of U.S. troops posing with the corpse of an innocent Afghan civilian allegedly killed for sport by this so-called Stryker brigade “Kill Team”.  The release of the photos has the U.S. and NATO concerned about a backlash.  The U.S. Army issued an apology for the suffering the photos may cause.

SPIEGEL wrote:

The victim in the image is Gul Mudin, an Afghan man killed on Jan. 15, 2010 in the village of La Mohammed Kalay. In total, SPIEGEL and SPIEGEL TV has obtained a significant number of photos and videos.

The suspects are accused of having killed civilians for no reason and then of trying to make it look as though the killings had been acts of self-defense. Some of the accused have said the acts had been tightly scripted.

In one incident, which has been reconstructed based on documents from the investigation, the soldiers themselves detonate a hand grenade in order to make it look like they were the subjects of an attack before killing a man. One of those who allegedly participated, Adam Winfield, 21, described the incident to his father in a chat on the social networking site Facebook. “They made it look like the guy threw a grenade at them and mowed him down,” SPIEGEL quotes Winfield as having written in the chat.

In a second incident on Feb. 22, 2010, one of the members of the “kill team” who had been carrying an old Russian Kalashnikov, fired it before pulling out another gun and shooting 22-year-old Afghan Marach Agha. In a third incident on May 2, 2010, it appears that a hand grenade attack was again staged before the shooting and killing of Mullah Allah Dad.

1 in 5 Air Force Women and 1 in 20 Men Victims of Sexual Assault

From Service Womenʻs Action Network: www.servicewomen.org

Service Women’s Action Network Statement on Air Force Survey

Christian Science Monitor Previews Survey’s Release:  1 in 5 Air Force Women and 1 in 20 Men Victims of Sexual Assault

NEW YORK – According to an exclusive piece published today online in the Christian Science Monitor, the Air Force is set to release a comprehensive survey later this week that finds almost 1 in 5 women and 1 in 20 men in the Air Force say they have been sexually assaulted or raped since joining the service.  According to the story, among the women surveyed, 58% revealed they had been raped and 20% had been sodomized.  Additionally, almost half of the victims didn’t report the crime because they “did not want to cause trouble in their unit.”  To read the entire exclusive Christian Science Monitor story online, click here.

In reaction to the findings outlined in the story earlier today, Anu Bhagwati, executive director of Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), released the following statement:

“It should be no surprise that rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment are an every day fact of life for women in the Air Force, and every any other branch of the military,” said Anu Bhagwati, former Marine Corps Captain and Executive Director of Service Women’s Action Network.

“Despite having more women than any other branch of service, it’s clear that the Air Force, like the rest of the military, is in over its head when it comes to reducing this threat to our servicemembers,” Bhagwati continued. “Survivors don’t feel safe enough to report their attacks, and frankly, there’s little reason for them to feel safe in today’s military climate. Senior military leadership has failed to protect survivors, punish perpetrators or hold commanders accountable for failing to enforce sexual assault policy. Immediate legislative action by our elected officials is the best tool we have to stop this crisis now.”

In addition to today’s leak of the Air Force survey scheduled for release later this week, the Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO) released its FY 2010 “Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military”.  The SAPRO FY 2010 “Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military” can be viewed here

The 622 page report was released moments ago, revealing 3158 reports of sexual assault military-wide in FY10, and is being further analyzed by SWAN’s experts. A forthcoming analysis of the report and fact sheet will be made available to the public as soon as it is completed.  Media outlets interested in interviewing or booking Anu Bhagwati, SWAN’s executive director, should contact:  Robb Friedlander, Luna Media Group, at 913.636.0099 or robb@lunamediagroup.com.

SWAN is spearheading a national advocacy campaign to end military rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. More information can be found at www.servicewomen.org/endit.

SWAN is a national human rights organization founded and led by women veterans. SWAN’s vision is to transform military culture by securing equal opportunity and the freedom to serve in uniform without threat of harassment, discrimination, intimidation or assault. SWAN also seeks to reform veterans’ services on a national scale to guarantee equal access to quality health care, benefits and resources for women veterans and their families. You can follow Service Women’s Action Network on Twitter at http://cts.vresp.com/c/?ServiceWomensActionN/ceb87fc8c5/7536332849/2893dad97c, or on Facebook at http://cts.vresp.com/c/?ServiceWomensActionN/ceb87fc8c5/7536332849/3678379387.