A state secret revealed

‘For 54 years the fate of a young Bedouin girl who disappeared in the Negev desert was relegated to rumour and a single entry in the diary of David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of the fledgling Israeli state. “It was decided and carried out: they washed her, cut her hair, raped her and killed her,” he wrote. After that the case became one of the state’s earliest secrets, and no more than hearsay passed between soldiers. Now the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has used previously classified army documents to reveal the full story of what Mr Ben-Gurion called a “horrific atrocity”.’

Crux of the deed:  ‘In August 1949, an army unit stationed at Nirim in the Negev shot an Arab man and captured a Bedouin girl with him. Her name and age remain unknown, but she was probably in her mid-teens. In the following hours she was taken from the hut and forced to shower naked in full view of the soldiers. Three of the men then raped her. After the Sabbath meal the platoon commander, identified by Ha’aretz as a man called Moshe who had served in the British army during the second world war, proposed a vote on what should be done with her. One option was to put her to work in the outpost’s kitchen. Most of the 20 or so soldiers present voted for the alternative by chanting: “We want to fuck”. The commander organised a rota for groups of his men to gang rape the girl over the next three days. Moshe and one of his sergeants went first, leaving the girl unconscious. Next morning, she complicated matters by protesting about her treatment. Moshe told one of his sergeants to kill her. She was forced into a patrol vehicle with several soldiers, two carrying shovels, and they drove off into the dunes. When the girl realised what was about to happen she tried to run, but only made it a few paces before she was shot by a Sergeant Michael.’

Above is from here.

Female soldiers on patrol

The following article excerpt is from a PBS TV documentary about female soldiers in combat, called Lioness. “After Shannon Morgan returned from serving in Iraq, the memories of killing and carnage continued to haunt her, memories that some told her were unexpected for a female soldier. Department of Defense policy bars female soldiers from direct ground combat, but for Ms. Morgan, like the four other female soldiers profiled in the documentary “Lioness,” that regulation meant little in the heat of battle. Attached to all-male combat units in the Army and the Marines as part of the Lioness program, the female troops were used to search Muslim women as needed and to defuse the cultural tensions caused by strange men interacting with Iraqi women. But when fighting broke out, the female soldiers fought back…” Read story here in the NY Times.

The near Big One and the other near big one and the other…

Now we all know about the Cuban Missile Crisis and how close we came to an atomic exchange but did you know about the one from back in 1956 when “the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) received warnings that seemed to indicate that a large-scale Soviet attack was under way” or the one from 1979 when “four command centers for the U.S. nuclear arsenal received data on their radar screens indicating that the Soviet Union had launched a full-scale nuclear first strike on the United States” ? Don’t worry there were others too and probably a lot more we don’t know about yet. Read rundown here.