Army Accused of Coercion in Sex Probe

Five women soldiers from Aberdeen Proving Ground accused the Army on Tuesday of pressuring them to make unfounded rape allegations against drill instructors caught up in the Army’s six-month-old sex scandal.

Investigators at the northeastern Maryland ordnance center “tried to make me say ‘rape’ and I would not do it,” Pvt. Kathryn Leming, 22, of Harrisburg, Pa., said at a news conference organized by the NAACP.

Several of the women said the Army had promised them immunity from prosecution and beneficial transfers if they cooperated--promises that they claimed have not been honored.

“Something really wrong is happening,” said Pvt. Darla Hornberger, 30, a mother of three. “I told the truth in my statement. That’s not the truth they wanted to hear.”

Four of the five said they told the truth in their sworn allegations: that the sex they had with the instructors was consensual.

Consensual sex between instructors and subordinates is a court-martial offense in the military, although subordinates frequently are viewed as victims of coercion and, therefore, not punished.

A fifth soldier, Pvt. Toni Moreland, 21, of St. Louis, announced last week that she was recanting an earlier accusation of rape. She said she now faces court martial for making false statements.

NAACP officials called for an independent investigation of the conduct of Army investigators, saying that their tactics may have violated the civil rights of both “the accusers and the accused.”

“We think it borders on illegality,” said Kweisi Mfume, president of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Local NAACP officials previously have charged that race is an element in the Aberdeen investigation, which so far has led to formal charges against 13 soldiers, all of whom are black. On Tuesday, NAACP officials seemed to tone down their allegations of racism, saying that they have no proof of a racial motive, though they see strong circumstantial evidence because none of the accused is white.

“There’s no way we could know,” said Janice E. Grant, president of the Harford County NAACP. “But we see lots of reason for suspicion.”

Ken Bacon, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that Togo West Jr., the secretary of the Army, “will look very closely at this. But it is not his belief that the Army investigators . . . coerced these people into making statements.”

According to Bacon, West said he wanted to be “very clear that the issue at Aberdeen is not race. It’s sexual harassment.”

One Army official speculated that what the women saw as high-pressure tactics may have been the investigators’ routine efforts to ensure that the misconduct was not more serious than the women were alleging. “Investigators are supposed to do that; they challenge the system” to try to get at the truth, said one official.

Also appearing at the news conference were Pvt. Kelly Wagner, 20, of Bakersfield, Calif., and Pvt. Brandi Krewson of Dallas.

Three of the women alleged that they had consensual sex with one instructor and the other two alleged they had relations with a second instructor. Officials said that none of the women is likely to be punished. The soldiers’ reassignments have been held up pending completion of fact-gathering in the case, they said.

Separately, an attorney for Sgt. Maj. of the Army Gene C. McKinney said that his client will argue that the former aide who has charged McKinney with sexual harassment was angry that he planned to dismiss her.

Attorney Charles W. Gittins said that McKinney, the Army’s highest-ranking enlisted man, had told former Sgt. Maj. Brenda L. Hoster that he was dissatisfied with her habitual tardiness and the quality of her work.

Hoster was angry because “he had told her that it was time for her to move on,” said Gittins. “The bottom line is, the charges here are garbage.”

Hoster has alleged that McKinney was guilty of sexual harassment on several occasions, including last April, when he allegedly kissed her and pressured her for sex.

Gittins also accused the Army of pressuring potential witnesses to come up with charges against his client. “If people don’t say what they want, they’ve been beating them up [pressuring them] in a big way,” Gittins said.