This article is VERY long so I copy & pasted the parts I felt were most important to read.
Brockton lawmaker slams Fort Hood's investigation of Sgt. Elder Fernandes' sexual assault case
Fort Hood soldiers told members of a congressional delegation that suicides are treated as an inconvenience, they aren’t provided resources to live safely and in healthy conditions and victims who report sexual assaults are harassed by superior officers.
US Rep Stephen Lynch said when he arrived at Fort Hood, he “anticipated they had a plan and they had none.”
Fernandes reported in May that he was sexually assaulted by a male superior. The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command said it found Fernandes’ report “unsubstantiated” following a “thorough legal review.”
But during their recent trip to Fort Hood, the members of Congress said they learned it was largely a polygraph test that was used to determine Fernandes’ sexual assault report was “unsubstantiated.” Lynch said he “doubted the veracity and the process that they had used.”
“They used a polygraph and it turns out, at least according to CID officials there, that they use this on hundreds of cases,” Lynch said. “They gave the accused a polygraph, he passed it and then they dismissed the case, based largely on that, although they did say that they thought there were other witnesses as well, but we didn’t get to speak to those witnesses and they never went back to Elder Fernandes, Sgt. Fernandes, to ask him further details about this. They just exonerated the accused.”
U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, a Massachusetts Democrat who was also part of the delegation that visited Fort Hood, said
she found the use of polygraphs to be a “very strange process” since they aren’t admissible as evidence in any military tribunal or state or federal court.
“We have no idea what the training is for these polygraphs,” she said. “What we do know is that the complaint that Elder Fernandes filed was against a superior and we do know that there is a culture at Fort Hood, and I believe throughout the military, there’s great unease, trepidation and outright fear about reporting superiors and what that will mean.”
They say 30 soldiers have died at Fort Hood this year alone. And Lynch said his staff found there have been about 150 cases of suicides, homicides and disappearances of soldiers at the Killeen, Texas, base in the last five years, which he called “deeply troubling.”
“We cannot ignore the depressed and demoralized experience that service men and women and their families are having there,” US Rep Ayanna Pressley said. “One of the military spouses said everyone knows that Fort Hood is the place where Army careers go to die. This is about endless wars and multiple deployments — the impact on the family unit, on mental health, this is about a base that has a footprint so large that it’s ostensibly a city within a city, and so it brings with it city challenges, including housing stock that is deplorable. I was ashamed — ashamed.”
A young mother told the congressional delegation that black mold was so bad within her family’s home on the base that the mold got into her baby’s mattress and caused respiratory ailments, Clark said.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and a veteran, told his fellow members of Congress that one of the barracks he toured at Fort Hood was one of the “worst he has ever seen,” Clark said.
And
several female soldiers told the members of Congress that they wouldn’t feel comfortable reporting a sexual assault at the base, Clark said.
“Most significantly, I think what we saw is that we need to address the toxic culture of fear, intimidation, harassment and indifference,” Clark said. ”...
We also know that a majority of victims are harassed by someone in their own chain of command. There’s a culture that promotes silence, not safety, a culture that rewards retaliation instead of trust.”
“I see the beginnings of a plan, the beginnings of sort of the Army process that I have recognized in that past where they take an issue seriously and begin to respond, begin to put a plan together,” Lynch said.
The members of Congress are urging for the swift passage of the
I Am Vanessa Guillen Act, which would require the U.S. military to direct independent investigations to determine whether to prosecute service members for sexual assault or sexual harassment.
“It’s not unique to Fort Hood,” Pressley said. “
It is systemic and that’s why we need to pass the I Am Vanessa Guillen Act.”