Perfect masculinity…
Investigators on Saturday recovered the badly burned remains of a woman and her unborn baby, its tiny hand clasped in death, from a backyard grave and formally charged a Marine with killing them.
Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown said the recovery answered the “bizarre” mystery of what happened to Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, 20, who was about eight months pregnant when she was reported missing in December. Although the identity of the body has not been confirmed, authorities charged fellow Marine Cesar Armando Laurean, 21, with killing Lauterbach in mid-December.
Meanwhile, questions grew Saturday about authorities’ handling of Lauterbach’s rape allegation.
The Associated Press reported that the sheriff’s department was slow to act and that Lauterbach continued to work alongside Laurean and endured harassment at Camp Lejeune. But Naval investigators said the pair had been separated on the job, and the rape case was progressing.
Brown and Onslow District Attorney Dewey Hudson said the rape…
…is sociopathic.
Kevin:
“Military investigators have said they did not take action against Laurean before he disappeared Friday because he and Lauterbach appeared to have a friendly relationship.”
We (the military) took no actions against the suspected rapist because he appeared to be on good terms with his victim? You gotta be kidding me.
I have occasion to substitute teach in schools susceptible to military recruitment and I will tell this story to every female student in my class. I figure to tell them if you join the military the chances are about 100% that you will be sexually harassed and the likelihood of sexual assault is much greater as well. If anyone has the numbers on that I would love to have them. Thanks.
13 January 2008, 11:03 amstacia:
you couldn’t read this whole article without registering.
13 January 2008, 4:04 pmthe new york times has a front page story today about the number of Iraq vets convicted or accused of murder in the past year. it’s a staggering article and heartbreaking, much more courageous than the standard nyt fare, but much more staggering is what they don’t say, which is 1) that the best cure for veteran PTSD has to be prevention of criminal wars, 2)if neighborhoods in urban centers of the US are described as being ‘like Fallujah’, just what is it we are trying to export to Iraq, and 3) we went to Iraq so we didn’t have to fight terrorism here; well, here it is.
Indiana John:
All warfare is an armed robbery. How else would you expect these robber boys to behave.
14 January 2008, 10:29 amMichael Anderson:
I have to quote you, Stan, for others who didn’t read “Wolves and Sheep” on FTW in 2003:
“Corpses have now become a familiar phenomenon for a new generation of US soldiers. Many will return now with their heads filled with corpses and their bodies filled with depleted uranium. They will have their moment of intoxicating adulation in public and the corpses will sneak up on them in private. Then the DU will sneak up on them.
Some people learn to live with corpses. Some learn to relish the freedom of killing and develop a taste for it. Perfect masculinity is sociopathic. A young Marine who had just killed a woman at a checkpoint said, matter of factly, “The chick was in the way.” Gangster. Badass.
Others, as the transitory adulation fades, will sense the barrenness of their wounded psyches backlit by the barrenness of a decaying consumer culture, and their alienation will flower into addiction, psychosis, and suicide. And then will we see THEM as pathological.”
It’s all come true…
STAN: No prescience there. This is not new to those of us over 55.
15 January 2008, 12:44 amStan:
3 Buddies Home From Iraq Are Charged With Murdering a 4th
15 January 2008, 6:03 amA Veteran:
Kevin, it appears that you have not served in the military. Let me begin by agreeing that sexual harassment is a problem in the Armed Forces and the more macho services - Army and Marine Corps - do seem to ignore the problem. While harrassment is rampant, there aren’t so many cases of sexual assault.
The military justice system, as defined by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, is quite different from what you are used to in civilian life. It clearly dictates how investgations are to be conducted and provides rights for the accused. Laurean was accused by Lauterbach for raping her. She offered no physical evidence, but only an accusation and well after the supposed rape occured. Her military service record was not stellar. She was known to exaggerate and blow things out of proportion. Her own mother called her a “compusive liar.” The Corps were considering discharging her for being unfit before she made this accusation.
Laurean, on the other hand, seems to have been a good Marine and had an exemplary service record. Moreover, Lauterbach first accuses Laurean of rape and then forms a personal relationship with him. What woman in her right mind would become friends with her rapist, while he is still under investigation for that crime? Was the Marine Corps to jail this man until they could determine if the charges against him had any merit? Where’s the fairness in that? If they had had a motive, the accused had opportunity to have committed the crime, and they had physical evidence that he probably committed the crime, things would be different. If the police were to throw a man in jail without evidence simply because a woman claims that he raped her, our jails would be full. Rape is, after all, the most often used false claims.
Laurean is on the lamb, so obviously, he at least knows something. Whether or not he killed this girl is a matter of speculation. Perhaps the police have good evidence against him. We don’t know. What I’m seeing so far is that the USMC followed their proceedures and a Sheriff who is grandstanding. Eventually we’ll know the truth, but until then, let’s not blame the military for something it, as an institution, did not do.
STAN: Veteran, I am a veteran, too. And yourt claim that sexual assault is infrequent in the military is spectacularly wrong. Your attack on the victim’s character is typically malicious as well… demonstrating again what we are saying about masculinity. We have a series on sexual aggression in the military at this site. The FBI, by the way, says that false rape claims constitute less than one in twenty… so you are wrong on that count, too. Good luck with that “I only burned the body” defense. Semper Fi, yada yada yada.
15 January 2008, 1:26 pmMichael Anderson:
May all of us males with a shred of sense, dignity and perhaps something divine in our souls keep our masculinity imperfect. We may perish for it, given the intellectually squalid and barbaric state of the country, but I can think of worse things to die for.
15 January 2008, 2:30 pmBill Hamilton:
This case has a lot of questions to be cleared up by both civilian and military authorities. The media should not be nor should the Sheriff Brown be convicting Laurean before his trial. As a man who spent 20 years in the military and 21 years as a police officer/investigator I see several things wrong with the assumtions of this case and several things that need to be looked at. First, if the two marines had a sexual relationship it was wrong but it is also something that happens all the time in the military as in civilian life between men and women. The suspect was married and under military code it is an offense if he has sex out of marriage. If he did commit rape that is also a crime. However, as long as the investigation was going forth in the military to prove the rape there appears it may have been actually a consentual relationship. Question if the victim was not initially aware of the suspect being married. Also, did the suspects wife become aware of his adulterous act and did she and the victim get involved in a jealous altercation. This woman as a victim did not stay away from the alleged suspect after the restraining order expired. Military investigators may have been looking at the female victim for making a false report and that may have been why she went AWOL from her duty station. The suspect had not been determined to have to face a court martial for his alleged rape because the Article 32 hearing had not taken place. That is similar to a civilian grand jury which determines if there is sufficient evidence to file actual charges on a suspect. Considering this was a long investigation and after the lady went AWOL she may have gone to the suspects house and had an altercation with Lareans wife who may also have killed the victim in a woman to woman fight. Maybe Larean then disposed of the body to cover for his wife. Is the note that Ms Larean gave to the police actually one that was written by her husband. Noone appears to be looking at these possibilities. Everyone is just calling the guy the murderer because he supposedly wrote a note that he disposed of the body. Yes if she was killed in his house there would be blood evidence. How come his wife also allegedly helped him paint part of the interior of the house. How was she involved in the alleged murder.
15 January 2008, 2:47 pmHeiderose Kober:
Watch this turn into revolting immigrant bashing when it’s no longer possible to defend Larean’s actions and get away with holding the dead woman responsible for her own murder. You know the script a la Dobbecredo: our good, upstanding American boys would never commit such horrible crimes against women and unborn babies–it’s clearly a case of aliens subverting our heroic military! Let’s get a posse together, round them up, and do manly things to those {insert racial epithet). Another crime that keeps on giving… So sad. So very sad.
17 January 2008, 5:17 pmThe Buffalo In The Midst:
Cultivating Sociopathy…
HR3256 Psychological Kevlar Act of 2007
Pentagon’s new lethal weapon
Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:55:17
The US Department of Defense’s wide-ranging ‘warfighter enhancement
program’ is preparing grounds for the most lethal weapon ever.
Pentagon’s ‘the Psychological Kevlar Act of 2007′ puts forward the
idea of using different drugs to insulate combat soldiers from the
stressful psychological element of killing.
The move not only desensitizes them to the horrendous aspect of war,
but also maximizes soldiers’ lethality by bypassing their moral
autonomy.
Analyst Penny Coleman criticizes Pentagon’s attempt to peddle magic
pills to chase away the horrors of war, saying: “The neurological and
genetic re-engineering of soldiers’ minds and bodies is aimed at
creating what the Pentagon calls ‘iron bodied and iron willed
personnel… tireless, relentless, remorseless, and unstoppable.”
Barry Romo a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the
War, also denounces the plan: “That’s the devil pill, that’s the
monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That’s the pill that can make
men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if
it doesn’t work, what’s scary is that a young soldier could believe it
will.”
SBB/RA
Press-TV (Iran)
More @ Google
20 January 2008, 7:45 pmLegume Sam:
The Penny Coleman piece is here…
21 January 2008, 10:26 amJen:
I don’t think there is one woman who has been in the military who hasn’t been sexually harassed.
When ever someone makes that statement I always seem to hear someone try to put it off as some normal thing that happens in the civilian world, except that its not illegal in the civilian world and it IS in the military.
Males in the military like to wax poetic about the honor they serve with but it fly’s out the door when they have question their own actions and beliefs when it has to do with women.
I have heard this story so many times that it is getting old. I just want to know when men are going to realize they need to start questioning each other and calling each other out on their shit.
The military deals with these issues in a way that seems to scream “this is what you wanted ladies, now deal with it”.
Thanks for bringing this up Stan.
30 January 2008, 11:32 pm