Air Force Officials Blamed in Sexual Assault Scandal

A decade-long failure by top officials to recognize the severity of sexual abuse problems at the Air Force Academy created a culture that allowed sexual assaults to go unreported and unpunished, an internal Pentagon review has concluded.

The report also blamed eight Air Force officials for “creating, contributing to, or abiding” a faulty assault reporting system.

The eight individuals were not identified in a summary of the report released Tuesday, and Pentagon officials would not say whether any had since retired from the military. The report by Pentagon Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz was given to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Overall, the report concluded that Air Force leaders “could have been better role models, could have been more vigilant in inspecting those placed under their command, failed to guard against and suppress sexual misconduct between and among cadets ... and failed to hold cadets accountable for such misconduct,” Schmitz wrote.

Based on dozens of interviews and thousands of documents, Schmitz reported that the root cause of the scandal was the “failure of successive chains of command over the past 10 years to acknowledge the severity of the problem.”

Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday that sexual abuse problems extended beyond the Air Force Academy. To address them, David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel, said the Pentagon would adopt a policy protecting the identities of alleged victims of sexual assault.

“First and foremost, we want victims to come forward for help,” Chu said.

The inspector general’s report is the latest in a series of investigations into a scandal that tarnished the Air Force Academy’s reputation and led to the firing of the school’s senior leadership. In the aftermath of the scandal, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche lost his bid to become secretary of the Army.

The problems at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., surfaced in January 2003, when an anonymous tipster sent an e-mail to senior government officials and members of Congress alleging widespread sexual abuse and rape at the school. Since then, approximately 150 cases of alleged sexual abuse over more than a decade have been investigated.

In June 2003, a team of Air Force investigators found that a male-dominated, rigidly hierarchical culture at the Air Force Academy helped create a “less-than-optimal environment to deter and respond to sexual assaults and to bring the assailants to justice.”

Three months later, an independent panel chaired by former Republican Rep. Tillie Fowler of Florida concluded that the “highest levels of Air Force leadership” had been aware of sexual misconduct at the academy since 1993 but failed to take action. Fowler’s commission suggested that some Air Force officials might have obstructed the investigations into misconduct.

In a second report released Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Steven R. Polk, the Air Force inspector general, concluded that the school’s senior leadership impeded none of the investigations into misconduct at the academy, and said that there was “no evidence of intentional mishandling or willful neglect on the part of any academy official in their actions to address the issues of sexual assault in these cases.”