reports of sexual assault in the militaryhave jumped 46% in 2013. one other big number that came in, general odierno released a studythat showed that to set up a separate prosecution for sexual assault cases, you're looking ata whapping $113 million a year. which includes salaries for up to 600 attorneys and supportstaff, that is if the military takes sexual assault prosecutions out of the chain of command.this is michael waddington with the military law news network and today i'm joined withtimothy bilecki. tim, what are your thoughts on this 46% increase in reports in 2013 alone?mike it's wild, 46% increase? seriously 46% increase, are you telling me that in the militarywe have added nearly 50% of individuals who now are sexually assaulting and raping women?it's ludicrous, it's ridiculous mike. what
it shows is that we over prosecuting the hellout of sexual assaults and individuals are getting the message. that if you want to getout of the military, you want an honorable discharge, you want to be coddled, make anallegation of sexual assault. because we'll believe you, no matter how ridiculous it is.i find it absurd and obscene to think that in the military we have 50%, nearly 50% morerapists in the military in 2003 than 2012. these numbers speak for themselves. they'reridiculous mike. i don't buy it, i don't believe the hype, it shows that we're over prosecutingservice members and that there are false allegations of sexual assault being made right and left.these numbers should be screaming out to commanders and congress people, that's saying somethingis wrong here. no other society in history
that i am aware of and i know you are alsoa scholar of history mike; has shown an increase in a crime. let it be a sexual assault orany crime of violence, saying increasing it 50% in 12 months. think about that just fora second and how ridiculous that is. that's my [inaudible 00:02:49] comment mike.tim, i completely agree with you. that is a shocking increase in sexual assault reportsand you kind have to wonder what's behind that? well, possibly what's behind that is,is this army of victim advocates that are throughout the world now, teaching peoplethat if you have one beer, we've been talking about this before. if you have one beer andone drink and you do something you regret. or the new thing is this; if you have onebeer or one drink, or two beers or two drinks
and you make a 'bad decision' that you wouldn'tpossibly have made if you were sober, then you are a victim of sexual assault.you know what, i had that in a case that i did this week at norfolk navy base, whereone of the government star witnesses kept talking about how the girl, the alleged victimhad a couple of drinks. after she had a couple of drinks she was making what he consideredto be not good decisions, decisions that she wouldn't have made if she was sober and thereforeshe could not consent. that was his analysis that he was telling the investigating officer,which is ludicrous. it turns out this person doesn't drink at all and has never reallybeen around drunk people. so my point is that you take normal behaviorbetween consenting adults and you educate
people and tell them that behavior if youregret what you did or you feel bad about it, or you wish you didn't do it; it's notyour fault. you're a victim, it's not your fault if you did something you regretted because,you really wouldn't have done that if the circumstances would have been different. you'rea victim and by the way, if you're a victim you can get an honorable discharge, you'regoing to get full disability because you've got ptsd now and because of this traumaticevent. you're can change duty stations, you can get out of deployment, you can be setfor the rest of your life, right now if you make an allegation, it could be the biggestlie false allegation. or you could just say, i think i've been assaulted,that's enough to start an investigation at
court marshall and that's enough to get youptsd diagnosis and benefits for life. we see it happening all the time.i want to bring something up you said. i just did a trial two weeks ago out in korea. itwas sexual assault trial and we were doing our jury selection and notice voir dire andi believe two or three members of 12 that sat on that jury, that said they had specifictraining. that if you have one drink, female has one drink they cannot consent. these weresenior officers; senior enlisted who're buying into it. who said they agreed with it andthis was in the army, what the army was teaching. so if you have one drink, one drop of alcoholyou can't consent. now as i'm picking the jury i'm using examplessaying, what if i go out to morton's with
my wife and i have glass of wine and afterwardswe have sex. she just has a glass of wine, but i guess i've successfully then raped myspouse because we had a glass of wine together. but they're buying it and they believe thisand i don't know; i'm asking where's the common sense coming in? so senior officers and seniorenlisters are believing this, what's happening at the lower level with the junior enlisted,who are getting told week after week after week, one drink equals no consent. it's crazy mike. so the question becomes ifa female drinks and a male soldier drinks why isn't it that female is charged with sexualassault because the male soldier can't consent as well. that just kind of goes to logic ifwe go down this approach, but it doesn't happen
that way.so going back to these ridiculous numbers, the ridiculous numbers are hey, perhaps ifyou consider a sexual assault two people having sex after having a glass of wine together,yes then maybe 46% more people have had sex after having a glass of wine or having a drink.but that's not sexual assault mike, you know that and i know that. anyone who's been throughthe system knows that. if you haven't been through system, you haven'tgone and seen a court marshall and seen the ridiculous facts that are getting taking totrial, then you don't know what you're talking about it. this notion of 46% more sexual assaultshave occurred in the military is ludicrous. tim, we're looking at a complete double standard.the law is applied differently in the military
right now, by very chauvinistic leaders whofeel that they have to protect every single ... if you're a female then you're not equalto a male. this is how a lot of these people think. we need to protect you, you're youngladies, you can't make decisions for yourself. you can't have a drink of alcohol; you can'tchoose to have sex. we all know that women consent to have sex all the time; there arebillions of people on this planet. if this idea that just because you're femaleyou can't drink, you can't choose to have sex, you can't enjoy sex. you can't have multiplesexual partners like many people in the military ... many females in the military have multipleconsensual partners, sexual partners. but that's not the way that the leadershipsees it. because they see, a lot of these
leaders see women as people that need to beprotected. which is not true, you know everybody deserves the right to not be assaulted obviously.but this idea that you have to go around protecting people because they're inferior or they'renot as strong. i think is an insult to women in general.i couldn't agree with you mike, it's insulting. not only is it insulting to women in general,it should be insulting to the general public to say, we are spending the limited moneyand resources on sexual assault and they're growing and growing all the time in military.but would they take these cases to trial, that should never go to trial and there aresexual assault victims out there. i said that from the beginning, the military does havepeople who sexual assault people. it's not
at the numbers that they claim, but the militaryneeds to focus its time, its effort and its resources on prosecuting those who actuallyhave committed sexual assault. or there's good evidence, there's facts thatshould go to trial and not take every single case, where you had one glass of wine, onebeer in the villa in korea, made a decision to have sex and now it's going to trial. itis a travesty, it's an injustice, it's a waste of resources and the quota rates get higherand higher and higher and we don't understand why.mike i want to go back to something you said earlier about the money. you've been sayingthis for months mike, but this is driven by money. it's driven by job security, a lotof it is. these victim advocates, these individuals
who talk and they teach on sexual assault.the ones who ... the hypocrites who on a friday afternoon will give a sharp training classsaying one drink of alcohol equals no consent. probably go home, have a drink and have sexwith their husbands or their wives, they need jobs. without sexual assaults, without prosecutionsthey don't have job. a lot of this is self perpetrated, becauseof the need for job security that they get paid. they need to go preach that sexual assaultsoccur, that one drink equals no consent and it's financial motivated for themselves. you'vebeen saying this for a long time, they have a lot of critics of yourself for saying that,but i completely agree with you mike. so dam the critics because this is what's happeningday in and day out in the trenches.
tim, this is interesting that ... you knowi have come under a lot of attacks. when i travel round the world and go to these militarybases, it's not uncommon for me to go in to the court room and the sj ... and not everytime because some of them are professional. but many times i go in the court room andall of the victim advocates, the sj staff, some of the prosecutors and all their littlepaparazzi, are literally staring me down, talking trash on me. they've seen a lot ofthese videos, they've watched a lot of the videos we've done and they hate us. okay,because we speak what we believe to be truth and what i think is the truth.now going back to what i was saying about money; as the military draws down our governmentis on the verge of ... well it shut down a
month ago and couldn't pay their employees.they're going broke, what they're doing is they're scaling down the military, there arepeople losing jobs. now general odierno came out with this, released this study and commentedon it. where this new program that all these victim advocates are pushing for, is goingto create 600 positions, 600 lawyer jobs around the world. that also includes paralegal andother staff and what are those 600 lawyers, in this new independent program going to run?their original estimate is $113 additional million a year. that's $113 million in legalsalaries and support salaries. that's a lot of money for creating a new system when wealready have this system in place. that's one of the reasons that the general ... asidefrom eroding good order and discipline and
the power they command. that's one of thereasons that the general odierno is against taking and creating this new system.tim let me tell you something, i was at mountain home air force base two months ago, two andhalf months ago doing a court marshall. there were no jets in the sky except for the jets;i believe it was the singapore government's fighter jets. all of the american jets weregrounded, now is this a ford air base that's up in the north west united states, this isthe tip of the spear end of a soviet invasion or it's north korean air invasion. we didn'thave gas for our planes, because we had no money.that's scary to me as a us citizen and most people wouldn't know that unless they werethere. all jets grounded, that's going on
around the world, not just with jets beinggrounded, tanks being kept in the tank yard, no gas for humvee's, no bullets for our weapons.now they want to take $113 additional million to create 600 new lawyer jobs. you cannottell me that this isn't about creating jobs. it's creating jobs for lawyers tim; it's notcreating jobs for other people. they're actually firing a ton of people out of the militaryright now, using all sorts of shady tactics. but the lawyers are the ones behind that aswell, so we have the lawyers creating jobs for lawyers and then getting rid of the restof the military. what we're going to have in the next ten years? an army of nothingbut lawyers it seems to me and victims. mike, you raise a great point. i saw thisa couple of weeks ago when i was out in korea
again. i was talking to soldiers out there,who were saying because of the budget restrictions they're not training. that they don't havemoney to do anything, that there's not training, they can't do the majority of their missionbecause there's no money. i'm hearing that from soldiers on the ground there and at thesame time the government flew in over two dozen; i believe it was nearly two dozen witnessesthey flew in from around the world to take on this garbage sexual assault case. a casethat probably should never have gone to trial, but they're spending nearly $100,000 of moneywhen they don't have enough money for the troops to train.there was one instance we caught a cid agent perjuring herself on the witness stand. sheperjured herself, there's no question about
it. we had witnesses who would basically saythat she perjured herself. in order to overcome that, the government flew out one of her friendswho was also cid agent from the mainland at probably a cost of nearly $10,000, i'm estimatinghere. probably $10,000, got her on plane the next day, put her up on tdy to testify for5 minutes to say that her friend, another cid agent had a reputation for truthfulness.i'm watching my tax payer dollars, your tax payer dollars, america's tax payer dollarsget pissed away in these trials. but the troop's right down the street, also on base don'thave the money they need to train. this is about money, it's a waste of resources, weneed to get back to taking the cases that actually merit trial on sexual assault. takethose cases to trial, zealously advocate for
them and have some discretion, because it'sjust there in the military anymore. people are blindly prosecuting these cases, blindlythrowing the money the government doesn't have and yet they wonder why they can't wintrials. tim, i'm going to one up you there buddy.i was at travis air force base in california just last week. i was doing a special courtmarshall jury trial and the key evidence in that case was some photographs okay. wellguess what, the government could not afford, according to the people in the jag office,could not afford a color printer. what's a color printer going to cost, $200 to $300,they couldn't afford a color printer because of budget cuts.however, they flew two civilian expert witnesses,
who probably charged about $20,000 a piece,plus travel including one for us. neither one of the witnesses testified, so that's$40,000 plus probably another $5,000 in travel. that's $45,000 for two civilian psychologiststo sit and court. then they also flew out two additional expert witnesses that had todo with emergency room techniques and things like that and child abuse, not even one ofthem testified, they just sat there. in the end it was a full acquittal, a fullnot guilty verdict. the problem was, because they couldn't afford a color printer theyhad to take some other money and go to kinko's and do it that way and it ended up costingthem $70 to make these photographs at kinko's and it turned out that the photographs wereall jacked up. the shadows were all mixed
up and they were basically useless to thepanel. anyway, i would say in that case alone i saw;aside from the whole court martial being a waste. but in that case alone we're lookingat about $50,000 in expert witness fees when not a single one of those witnesses, feesand expenses ... not a single one of those witnesses testified.mike, money's easy to spend when it's not yours and there really should be some oversightin these jag offices and these trial councils and these svp's and sj's and how they're spendingtheir money. like i said money's really easy to spend when it's not yours. the fact thatwe are spending money on these garbage sexual assault cases, when troops don't have moneyto train it's beyond me. it just shows how
ridiculous system has gotten.tim, i want to say something. if this bill passes and they do set up a new prosecutor'soffice i think that, i predict that court marshalls are going to go through the roof.you're going to see two to three times as many court marshalls. the reason is, if youset up in office with 600 lawyers and professional legal staff, allocate $113 million and youknow they're going to spend much more $113 million if they set this up. it's going toalways go over budget, you need business. they're going to need business to justifythose 600 jobs and who's going to suffer? the tax payers, but most importantly the peoplethat are being falsely accused of sexual assault and being railroaded are going to really suffer.as well as people weren't really victims,
that are being told, no you're victim youhave to go through this. that's a very traumatic process, when someone really wasn't a victim,to force them into a court marshall. to be publicly humiliated and then they get a notguilty verdict. so there's more than one victim here and if this thing goes forward they waythat they have it planned. i just hope that general odierno has his wayand this doesn't go forward. because like i said, if you fund it you've got to havethe cases to justify it. so we're just going to see an explosion in the court marshallbusiness and sexual assault, more than we're even seeing now. i really hope that commonsense does prevail and this doesn't go forward. i'm just hoping right now, i have simple needs,simple hopes that garbage cases don't go forward.
the innocent services members aren't chargedand eventually convicted. i'm asking for that i haven't seen that yet,but i'm hoping that this ridiculous bill does not pass, because if they do it mike, they'regoing to have to justify it. the only way they can justify it is with more court marshallcases and more sexual assault charges. to be determined, we'll see. but i certainlyhope this doesn't go forward because once again it's all about the money, not aboutthe victims. but that's all the time we have for this particularepisode of the military law news network. keep your comments coming in; we love to hearfrom you. we love to hear what topics that you want to hear about and we certainly likeyour comments, criticisms and however you
feel on them and your view certainly is important.so from mike waddington and tim bilecki on the military law news network, take care.
