Transcript of Susan Burke CNN Interview
CNN INTERNATIONAL
SHOW: CNN’S AMANPOUR 3:00 PM EST
Benghazi Attack Hearing; Syrian Chemical Weapons Use Hard to Prove; US Military Sexual Abuse Hits Headlines Again
BYLINE: Christiane Amanpour
GUESTS: Thomas Pickering, Gary Samore, Susan Burke
SECTION: NEWS; International
LENGTH: 3902 words
HIGHLIGHT: Congress holds more hearings on the Benghazi attack. Seeking concrete evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I’m Christiane Amanpour.
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And after a break, a crisis inside the American military: female soldiers under attack, and this time the enemy may share the same foxhole. Sexual abuse in uniform — when we come back.
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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program. And now to the ongoing sexual abuse of women serving in all branches of the U.S. military. It has soared to a new level of outrage.
In an alarming confirmation that women are risking sexual assault just to serve their country, a Pentagon survey released this week says that it’s happened to more than 6 percent of women on active duty last year and that is up from previous years.
The military has again been rocked this week after the Air Force officer in charge of a program called sexual assault prevention was himself arrested and charged with sexual abuse. Now both Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and President Barack Obama are weighing in, vowing to really enforce a zero tolerance policy.
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BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: For those who are in uniform, who’ve experienced sexual assault, I want them to hear directly from their commander in chief that I’ve got their backs. I will support them. And we’re not going to tolerate this stuff. And there will be accountability. If people have engaged in this behavior, they should be prosecuted.
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AMANPOUR: But only a fifth of all these cases ever get to trial. My next guest, Susan Burke, represents many of the military women who do and who are trying to take their cases to court.
Thank you so much for joining me.
SUSAN BURKE, ATTORNEY: Thank you for having me on.
AMANPOUR: So we’ve laid out the statistics; you heard what President Obama has said and you’ve also probably heard what the Defense secretary said. Do you think it’s going to make a difference?
BURKE: No. The reality is that neither the president nor Secretary Hagel have stepped forward and supported changing the judicial system, changing the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And until that is done, we’re going to continue this just dreadful cycle, where there are not prosecutions, there’s not convictions. And as a result, there’s rampant underreporting.
AMANPOUR: What precise element of change are you talking about in the military judicial system?
BURKE: Right now, the military operates a judicial system that’s somewhat parallel to the civilian system. But they have a unique structure in which they let the chain of command, the operational day-to-day warfighters to interfere and intervene in those judicial proceedings.
So for example, say you are a major; the colonel or the lieutenant colonel above you can intervene and tell the prosecutors, no, you know, I really like him; I don’t think this should go forward. They can — they can even turn things over, once a jury has found someone guilty.
AMANPOUR: I want to play a little bit of an interview that I did with a military officer who you actually represent — and I talked to her months ago about this issue.
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JENNIFER SMITH, SGT, USAF: The most traumatic thing that has happened to me with when I was in Iraq in Balad, I was assaulted by an Army personnel. And he basically just grabbed me and threw me up against the wall.
But that changed — that was like the pinnacle that changed how I thought about some of the things that I had seen in the military prior. I kind of didn’t tell anyone. I just came back, went to work the next day like nothing happened and buried it.
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AMANPOUR: I mean, Susan, it really does beg a belief that a serving officer in the U.S. Air Force, not to mention all the others, you know, feel that they are not going to get any recourse for these crimes that are committed against them.
What do you think is going to be the fallout from this, you know, the officer who’s just been himself accused of sexual abuse, and who was meant to be preventing it?
BURKE: Well, I would hope that it would persuade members of Congress that, given after two decades of the military trying to fix this, there needs to be a recognition that we cannot just leave the problem in their hands. It is beyond their abilities to solve it.
And remember, the Constitution, thus civilian control, oversight belongs to the Congress. So I very much hope this dismal sequence — I mean, you know, you remember back in ’91, there was Tailhook; we had Naval proving grounds, Aberdeen proving grounds, scandal after scandal after scandal culminating with Lackland recently and then this, you know, the gentleman arrested this weekend.
It’s long enough to have fixed it if they were able to. A change has to come from Congress now.
AMANPOUR: And not only that, it seems that even those offenders who go to court, some have had their convictions overturned.
BURKE: And that’s the — you know, that is the part — this is why the platitudes that you hear the military people speaking are not going to fix it, because it’s — right now, it is not rational to report. You have — if you report, the documents put up by the military demonstrate that you have a 62 percent chance of being retaliated against. So your career is going to take a hit.
And yet you have a less than 1 percent chance that your perpetrator is going to be convicted. So you have got to step up and say the judicial process has got to be fixed. That is the first thing that has to be fixed. Because otherwise you’re going to keep having the underreporting.
AMANPOUR: Now former Defense Secretary Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dempsey, did come out with a whole set of proposals. And I’m waving it around right here. Did they implement any? Has any of that made a difference?
BURKE: It has not, because the reality is that if you have a unfair and corrupted judicial process, nobody trusts it. So all of these other Band-Aids, although they are well-intentioned, they are not going to work. And we know this from history. These are the same type of fixes, the same type of solutions that were proposed back after Tailhook in ’91.
So it’s just more of the same. We have as a nation, we’ve got to look at each other and say, wait a minute, these are our soldiers. These are our troops. We owe them a fair and impartial justice system.
AMANPOUR: At the very least.
Susan Burke, thank you very much indeed and remembering, of course, that there is no draft and 1 percent of this country is in armed — is in uniform and serving, and 99 percent are not.
After a break, as the body count climbs in Bangladesh, the blame game intensifies. But there are more hard questions than easy answers. We’ll have that when we come back.
