William K. Wolfrum Chronicles

Read this account of the murder of two women in the Navy by a male serviceman in Bahrain, and see if you can guess how the Wall Street Journal decides to play it:

“Mother blasts wall of silence”

THE mother of a sailor shot dead at the US naval base in Bahrain yesterday blasted the wall of silence surrounding her daughter’s death.

Jovie Paulino revealed her heartache at being forced to bury her child without a proper explanation of how she died.

Anamarie Sannicolas Camacho, 20, and her colleague Genesia Mattril Gresham, 19, were shot dead at the Naval Support Activity Base, Juffair, at around 5am on October 22.

Their alleged killer, fellow serviceman Clarence Jackson, 20, is still clinging to life after apparently shooting himself in the head immediately after the murders.

He is now at the National Naval Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland, US, after being transferred to the US from a specialist hospital in Germany.

There has been no change in his condition and he has not regained consciousness.

“I have asked questions, but the only response (from navy officials) is ‘we do not know’,” Ms Paulino told the GDN from her home in Tinian, in the Northern Marinas islands, US.

“How much longer will it be before that changes?”

Ms Paulino said her daughter’s body is due to return home next week and as soon as she is laid to rest on November 5, she plans to pursue the navy more vigorously for answers.

She says her daughter had no part in any relationship between Ms Gresham and Mr Jackson and on the day of her death she was merely caught in the wrong place.

“She did not have anything to do with their relationship and she was just in the wrong place,” she said.

“I was assured that she had no involvement, except that she was her (Genesia’s) roommate.”

Ms Paulino, who served in the US Air Force for six years, is also angry at the way the navy have handled the shooting.

“I had entrusted my daughter to the navy when she joined and this is what has happened, I just don’t understand,” she said. “I was in the military and right now I feel so angry and disappointed. She put her life on the line for our freedom and the only thing they should do (in return) is protect her.”

Her comments echo that of Ms Gresham’s mother Anita, who earlier blamed officials for leaving her daughter exposed to danger from a man she said turned nasty when she tried to cool their “casual” relationship.

Ms Gresham revealed Jackson had a restraining order against him and had been on suicide watch, after he allegedly attacked Miss Gresham less than four months ago.

She was also angry that Jackson was allowed to carry a gun after his alleged attack on her daughter and that officials were not telling her what happened in the run-up to the killings.

According to Wall Street Journal Columnist James Taranto, this incident shows that:

1) The mainstream media is corrupt and anti-war by calling this “war-related death.”
2) Gays don’t belong in the military, and women only to a certain degree.
3) Relationships during war time will get you killed.

The San Francisco Chronicle published news of Camacho’s and Gresham’s deaths under the headline “U.S. Toll in Iraq,” and the text said they had died “in Iraq.”

This is false, as the Chronicle’s own Web site confirms. The paper has a database with details of all the deaths “in Iraq,” and both Camacho’s and Gresham’s entries show that they “died Oct. 22 in Bahrain during a non-combat related incident.

The incident does illustrate an uncomfortable truth: that romantic entanglements can be harmful to military discipline. This is why servicemen can be prosecuted for adultery, and it is one reason that the military excludes open homosexuals and restricts the roles in which women may serve. This was a horrific and senseless crime. Imagine how disruptive it would have been in a combat unit.

Ordinary humans would look at this as another example of unchecked violence against women in the U.S. military, the U.S. military’s inability to protect its own troops from those who attacked them in the past, and the overall hell that is war.

Not the Wall Street Journal. And not Glenn Reynolds. Two women are murdered by someone they should have been protected from, and it shows that the U.S. media is anti-war. And that gays shouldn’t be allowed to serve.

This is political discourse amongst the extremist right of the U.S. And it just gets consistently more horrific and inhumane.

–WKW

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 4:10 am and is filed under Politics, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.