Iraq deaths by dehydration: Women soldiers die avoiding rape by other soldiers?

Did US Lieutenant Gen. Ricardo Sanchez really bury cause of death info for some soldiers who've died in Iraq? Are women soldiers getting voicemail when they try to report sexual assault to their superiors? Lawyer Marjorie Cohn's t r u t h o u t.org article, "Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers' Deaths" describes Colonel Janis Karpinski (Abu Ghraib prison ex-commander who took the weight for torture and abuse conducted there) testifying to a judges' panel at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration that some women soldiers "died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark." It gets worse. Cohn says in a public presentation in 2005 Karpinski charged women soldiers were given an '800' phone number to report sexual assaults but that none of the soldiers had phones. Even worse - no one even answered the 800 number, based thousands of miles and several time zones away from Iraq in the U.S. Cohn adds: "Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message." The article notes latrine facilities were far from the women's barracks, and were not even lit - hello?! "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night" according to Karpinski in a 2004 interview with retired US Army Col. David Hackworth. The women went without liquids after 3 or 4pm in the afternoon in fierce desert heat to protect themselves from sexual assault while going to the bathroom. Karpinski also claims women  soldiers basically have no voice. "Even as a general I didn't have a voice with [Lt. Gen.] Sanchez, so I know what the soldiers were facing. Sanchez did not want to hear about female soldier requirements and/or issues." US military sexual assault is so bad that the Army has set up a "sexual assault web site." In April 2004 the government issued a 99-page report that said, among many other things, "... low sociocultural power (i.e., age, education, race/ethnicity, marital status) and low organizational power (i.e., pay grade and years of active duty service) were associated with an increased likelihood of both sexual assault and sexual harassment." An expert interviewed in this piece adds, "People who report assaults still face command disbelief, illegal efforts to protect the assaulters, informal harassment from assaulters, their friends or the command itself." Read all of it @ t r u t h o u t.org.