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when a 20-year-old Sunni woman from Baghdad appeared on the satellite television station Al Jazeera on Monday night with a horrific account of kidnapping and sexual assault at the hands of three officers in the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Police, people across the country were stunned, some disbelieving, others horrified, but all riveted.

Almost immediately, Shiite leaders lined up to condemn the woman, calling her charges propaganda aimed at undermining the new security campaign

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Here's what President Maliki had to say:

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His office released a second statement after midnight, that one calling the woman a liar and a wanted criminal and going on to praise the officers involved.

“It has been shown after medical examinations that the woman had not been subjected to any sexual attack whatsoever, and that there are three outstanding arrest warrants against her issued by security agencies,” said the second statement. “After the allegations have been proven to be false, the prime minister has ordered that the officers accused be rewarded.”

The government did not elaborate on the statement or say why the prime minister had so quickly reversed himself. His office only said that “known parties” had been responsible for the allegations.

But in siding with the security forces, Mr. Maliki threatened to only heighten the tensions surrounding the already highly charged case. His government also released the woman’s name, which is not being published by The New York Times.

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I hate the media and I hate the Iraqi government for turning this atrocity into another Sunni-Shia debacle- like it matters whether Sabrine is Sunni or Shia or Arab or Kurd (the Al Janabi tribe is composed of both Sunnis and Shia). Maliki did not only turn the woman into a liar, he is rewarding the officers she accused. It's outrageous and maddening.

No Iraqi woman under the circumstances- under any circumstances- would publicly, falsely claim she was raped. There are just too many risks. There is the risk of being shunned socially. There is the risk of beginning an endless chain of retaliations and revenge killings between tribes. There is the shame of coming out publicly and talking about a subject so taboo, she and her husband are not only risking their reputations by telling this story, they are risking their lives.

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Theoretically, if it could be proven that her charges were untrue and that she was lying, then:

It would make sense to punish her.
It would make sense to compensate the accused for the damage to their reputation.

However, it is obviously very unlikely that:

a) the woman is lying, given the climate in Iran.
b) it could be proven she was lying.

Jane Doe was on The Current just this morning talking about this very issue.

Women who are sexually assaulted do not go to police, anywhere in the world that I know of. Look at the stats right here in Canada.

If they report that they have, then they are asked whether they reported it to police.

Those statistics do exist, and show that a huge number of sexual assaults/rapes go unreported.

Still, it isn't really the same situation as in Iraq: there, the woman reported being raped by three policemen. Within a DAY, the PRIME MINISTER announced that the men should be REWARDED.

Education Wife Assault FAQ

Women Against Violence Against Women: BC

It certainly does not speak well of Maliki's sense of judicial propriety at all, and only further reveals the deeply biased nature of the puppet regieme he represents, as there is no way he could know the facts, and for him to judge on them and make pronouncements to that effect, rather than calling for a judicial investigation to reveal the facts, speaks volumes about the manner his governement conducts the adminstration of the law.

What we saw in the Saddam trial, is being repeated here -- a politicized legal process, free of even handed caution, not free of bias as it should be.

Its quite astonishing that he has not even served up the usual platitudes in this case.

[ 22 February 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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The international news media is flooded with images of a woman in a pink headscarf recounting a shattering experience of rape by members of the Iraqi National Police. Most of the coverage has focused on her taboo-breaking decision to speak publicly about the assault, but has ignored the context for understanding — and combating — sexual violence by Iraqi security forces.

As Iraqi women’s organizations have documented, sexualized torture is a routine horror in Iraqi jails. While this woman may be the first Iraqi rape survivor to appear on television, she is hardly the first to accuse the Iraqi National Police of sexual assault. At least nine Iraqi organizations (including Women’s Will, Occupation Watch, the Women’s Rights Association, the Iraqi League, the Iraqi National Association of Human Rights, the Human Rights’ Voice of Freedom, the Association of Muslim Scholars, the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Media and Culture Organization) as well as Amnesty International, the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq, and the Brussels Tribunal have documented the sexualized torture of Iraqi women while in police custody. And as this case attests, sexual violence is woven into the fabric of the civil war now raging across Iraq. According to Iraqi human rights advocate and writer Haifa Zangana, the first question asked of female detainees in Iraq is, “Are you Sunni or Shia?” The second is, “Are you a virgin?”

Next week, MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization, will release a report that documents the widespread use of rape and other forms of torture against women detainees in Iraq by US and Iraqi forces. The report includes testimonies of numerous rape survivors, collected by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). Since November 2005, OWFI has conducted a Women’s Prison Watch project and has found that, “Torture and rape are common procedure of investigation in police stations run by the militias affiliated with the government, mostly the Mahdi and Badr militias,” according to their summer 2006 report.

These are the same sectarian Shiite militias that are prosecuting Iraq’s civil war, the same militias that stepped into the power vacuum created by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the same militias that have been systematically attacking women in their bid to establish an Islamist theocracy. Since 2003, the political leadership of these militias has been handed control of the Iraqi state by the US, while the militants themselves have waged a campaign of assassinations, rapes, abductions, beheadings, acid attacks, and public beatings targeting women — particularly women who pose a challenge to the project of turning Iraq into a theocracy. As the occupying power in Iraq, the US was obligated under the Hague and Geneva Conventions to provide security to Iraqi civilians, including protection from gender-based violence. But the US military, preoccupied with battling the Iraqi insurgency, simply ignored the reign of terror that Islamist militias have imposed on women.

By early 2005, as the “cakewalk” envisioned by US war planners devolved into the quagmire that has become the Iraq War, the US began to cultivate Shiite militias to help battle the Sunni-led insurgency. According to Newsweek, the plan was dubbed the “Salvador Option,” recalling the Reagan Administration’s use of militias to bolster right-wing regimes in 1980s Central America. But by late 2005, once the Iraqi militias had become notorious as thugs and sectarian death squads, we stopped hearing so much about the military training that these groups had received under the command of Colonel James Steele during John Negroponte’s stint as US Ambassador to Iraq.

Neither have we heard about how the US allowed the government it installed in Baghdad to hand control of the country’s security forces to the militias. Today, the Mahdi Army controls the police forces of Baghdad and Basra, Iraq’s two largest cities. The Badr Brigade is headquartered in Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, which directs the country’s national police, intelligence, and paramilitary units. And the United Nations special investigator on torture is reporting that torture in Iraq is worse now than under Saddam Hussein.

It’s no surprise that we’re hearing allegations of rape against the Iraqi National Police, considering who trained them. DynCorp, the private contractor that the Bush Administration hired to prepare Iraq’s new police force for duty, has an ugly record of violence against women. The company was contracted by the federal government in the 1990s to train police in the Balkans. DynCorp employees were found to have systematically committed sex crimes against women, including “owning” young women as slaves. One DynCorp site supervisor videotaped himself raping two women. Despite strong evidence against them, the contractors never faced criminal charges and are back on the federal payroll.

Contrary to its rhetoric and its international legal obligations, the Bush Administration has refused to protect women’s rights in Iraq. In fact, it has decisively traded women’s rights for cooperation from the Islamists it has helped boost to power. Torture of women by police recruits armed, trained, and funded with US tax dollars is one symptom of this broader crisis.

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The single sheet, apparently part of a multi-page report, said that there were "no vaginal lacerations or obvious injury." An accompanying statement asserted that the medical report "confirmed" there had been no rape, but several rape experts in the United States said the report did no such thing.

The report didn't disprove the woman's allegations, the experts said, and it indicated that the woman suffered extensive injuries, including at least eight bruises on the front of her thighs consistent with a sexual assault.

"Generally it occurs when the suspect is holding the victim's legs open and the victim is attempting to close her legs," said Tara Henry, a former head of the sexual assault unit at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage, who reviewed the report at the request of McClatchy Newspapers.

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