Friday, March 10, 2006

Fisking MIDN Burnett: the MIDN Owens saga

More news.
"Any girl at our school who turns in a guy is gonna be crucified," Midshipman Elizabeth Burnett said..
Read that comment again. "Girl...Guy..." The academy that is supposed to be making warfighters an leaders for the Navy of the world’s only superpower. Are they focused on their core competency (a little B-school lingo for you 6-sigma types)?
Burnett's testimony highlighted a nagging problem at the academy, ... it has been hit by recurring sexual assault and harassment scandals in recent years.
Would that be partially because you have them watching training that tells them that just because she doesn’t say no or stop doesn’t mean you can move from one base to another (I guess they are building a checklist or something – “BOLD FACED ITEMS COMPLETE”)?
Burnett said the pressure not to report sexual assaults comes not only from male midshipmen but also from women, who make up about 17 percent of the 4,200-member student body.

"They'll say this is why the guys here won't date us," Burnett said,
Read that again and ask yourself the question; is Annapolis focused on producing leaders and warfighters – or are they being made once the get to the Fleet? Are you happy that a MIDN who is 18 months away from being a commissioned officer finds it a problem that she might have a problem finding someone to be her boyfriend in Bancroft Hall. What WILL she do for prom?
"People are starting to find out it's her," Burnett said. "And some people are not really standing by her."
Is this a requirement? Where did she get this idea? What if it is Sober Buyer’s Remorse? Just because someone thinks something, does not require everyone to blindly agree with them; especially if they have information that leads them to think otherwise. If one day I tell everyone that the Lady of the Lake handed me a sword and declared me King – that does not require everyone to call me Your Majesty; though I recommend it.
Burnett testified yesterday that she and another midshipman, Megan Boyd, met with Owens at his invitation Jan. 29. She said Owens seemed remorseful and told them that he had been drinking in Baltimore that night with other members of the football team. They asked him what happened, Burnett said.

"I don't really remember all of it because I was drunk and so was she, and we just started talking and things escalated," Burnett recalled him saying. Burnett said she told him that the woman didn't see it that way.

"What? Is she calling it rape?" Burnett recalled him saying. Burnett and Boyd each testified that Owens told them, "If someone did this to my sister, I'd want to kill them."

Under cross-examination, Wrobel asked whether Owens might have been remorseful at the thought of having consensual sex in a dorm room, a violation of the honor code punishable by expulsion.

"That's fair," Burnett responded.
So, we have more “I wish I was JAG….” personal investigations going on? Also, in spite of MIDN Burnett’s pre-Art. 32 bias towards thinking MIDN Owens was resourceful might be about rape, that you now admit it might be because of the “….”

Her testimony, more than anything else, leads me to the thought that if MIDN Owens is a rapist, then most of the men I went to school with were rapists, and most of the women I know has been raped. If everything is rape; rape doesn’t exist. That is the tragedy of this.

I will now take a deep breath with hope that my Navy will in the end do the right thing and clear MIDN Owens’s name of the rape charge. As for the new problems he has as mentioned in the article; let me define pr0n and then give me full access to the computers and server records of every USNA officer and those in D.C. There aren’t enough JAGs in the Navy to handle the case load. Click the wrong google link or reference from a MSM source....and you're there You don't think so, go to this link from the WaPo article quoted in this article. Don't believe me - check the Technoroti page. A little N6 and NMCI knowledge is a dangerous thing….

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