Flirtatious emails. Jealous threats. Consensual sex. Scandalous? Hardly. Try... Foolish. Ubiquitous. All too human adult behavior. And frankly none of our business.
The real scandal is that this type of behavior -- stumbled upon via highly questionable investigative practices -- is what garners nonstop media coverage and glaring headlines while a real military sexual scandal, our U.S. military's horrific rape epidemic, affecting tens of thousands of our service members (annually!!), goes unreported and ignored.
And thanks to widespread institutional coverup and lack of responsible media attention, allowed to continue unabated, inflicting debilitating damage on victims, imperiling troop cohesion, and posing a much more grave threat to our national security than a highly forgettable personal drama of soap opera import.
A recent film out of Sundance, The Invisible War, exposes the truth about the real sex scandal in our U.S. military. It's a wrenching, damning, searing indictment of flagrant criminal practices that have gone on without respite for far too long.
We watch as countless young service members (both male and female), who have pledged their lives to protect our country, undergo vicious assault and then are, all too often, themselves blamed and exiled in a kafkaesque miscarriage of justice, their lives shattered and worlds transformed into a never ending echo chamber of horrors.
Watch this movie. It's your civic duty. The stories will leave you stunned, shaken and compelled to act -- a much more productive way of channeling our energies than chasing idle gossip. Talk about it with others. And make noise. This is the type of scandal we must all be talking about and working on eradicating.
The fact that we haven't been doing so until now... now that's another real scandal.
Petraeus has stepped down, taking these actions out of "duty and honor".
Where is the duty and honor to protect our service members from vicious unsolicited sexual assault?
This week Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, ordered a military ethics review. The first act of the review board should be to watch this documentary.
Failure to do so would be simply scandalous.