Alternet had a great article about something that was also covered in the Denver Post last week: the brutal decisions facing many female US soldiers currently serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

When I read this, I was stunned. Surely there was some exaggeration, or this wasn't that widespread.
In a 2004 report released by the Department of Defense, the rates of reported alleged sexual assault were 69.1 and 70.0 per 100,000 uniformed service members in 2002 and 2003.
The army's response to this increasingly common problem was to provide an 800 number that victims could call to report this heinous crime, but that solution was certainly not without its share of problems:

There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

While Congressional hearings were called for, none have been scheduled - despite acknowledgements of the problem going all the way back to February of 2004 when Secretary Rumsfeld directed a 90 day review of military sexual assault policies, no ground has been gained.
How can America truly claim to support our troops when we allow them to be victims of heinous human rights abuses and leave them without recourse?