| tesla69 |
05.13.2008 03:44 PM |
Obviously missing from the CIA’s list of interrogation techniques is sexual humiliation, degradation and terrorization. [ABC News, November 18, 2005] Reconstructing U.S. military and intelligence officials use of sexual interrogation techniques begins in 2004 with Abu Ghraib and Seymour Hersh’s invaluable “New Yorker” article and the CBS “60 Minutes II” broadcast of soldiers’ photos. Their combined impact not only exposed the horrendous treatment of Iraqi prisoners, but made “celebrities” out of three of the perpetrators, Army reservists Charles Graner, Sabrina Harmon and Lynndie England. [see New Yorker, April 30, 2004 and March 24, 2008]
The best single source for details on abuses at Abu Ghraib is the study conducted by Major General Antonio Taguba. In the report’s executive summary, the following "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” are identified as having been used at the prison:- videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
- forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
- forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
- forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
- forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
- arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
- positioning a naked detainee on a MRE [meals ready to eat] Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
- placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture;
- sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
In a description of a meeting about the report with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other high-ranking Defense Department officials, Taguba told Hersh: “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”Images of these practices, like similar images of cruelty from the Vietnam and other wars, have become enshrined in the nation’s memory.
Making matters even more sadistic, the festive, if not chaotic, conditions at the prison led male soldiers to engage in “consensual” sexual liaisons with female prisoners and even record their trysts for posterity. According to the Taguba report, “a male MP guard [was] having sex with a female detainee.” [Taguba report, “Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade”; New Yorker, June 25, 2007]
Subsequent to the Hersh and CBS exposés, additional photos, videotapes and personal accounts by military personnel and former detainees have come out. More than one hundred photographs and four videos taken at Abu Ghraib were initially suppressed by the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. In September 2005, and only after ACLU litigation and a ruling by District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, was all the “evidence” finally released to the public. (Dozens of photos can be accessed through google and other sources.) They provide further examples of the sexual abuse systematically employed by U.S. personnel on alleged or suspected terrorists.
Drawing from a host of media reports, a jig-saw-puzzle picture of sexual torture employed in the War on Terror begins to emerge. Two examples are illustrative: - Scotland’s “Sunday Herald” reports that a former Iraqi prisoner claimed that there is a photo of a civilian translator raping a male juvenile prisoner; he stated, “They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming, … and the female soldier was taking pictures.”
- The Associated Press reports that a former inmate, Dhia al-Shweiri, was ordered by American soldiers to strip naked, bend over and place his hands on a wall; while not sodomized, he says he was humiliated: “We are men. It’s OK if they beat me,” al Shweiri said. “Beatings don’t hurt us; it’s just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman.”
Accepting the patriarchal sexism, the humiliation was deeply upsetting.
The experience of another former inmate, Hayder Sabbar Abd, is similarly revealing. Abd is memorialized as the man in the hood in Lynndie England’s infamous photo. In that photograph, the smiling England gives a thumbs-up gesture and points at Abd's exposed genitals.
As reported by the “Independent”:Mr. Abd said he recalled having his hood removed and being told by the soldiers' Arabic translator to masturbate as he looked at Ms England. "She was laughing and she put her hands on her breasts," he told the newspaper. "Of course I couldn't do it, so they beat me in the stomach and I fell to the ground. The translator said, 'Do it, do it. It's better than being beaten.' I said 'How can I do it?' So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending."
At this point, one of the other prisoners, ­a friend of Mr Abd's identified as Hussein, ­was pushed towards his genitals while the hood was put back over his own head.
"They made him sit next to me. My penis was very close to his mouth. I did not know it was my friend because of the hood. It was humiliating. We didn't think that we would survive. All of us believed we would be killed and we would not get out alive," said Mr Abd.
One can only wonder what England now thinks about Abu Ghraib as she sits in her jail cell at San Diego’s Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar. And how she appreciates the “bad apples” theory in the face of the recent revelation of Bush administration “Principals” approving “harsh” interrogation techniques.
Surprising to many, nearly a year before Abu Ghraib was exposed, in May 2003, British private Gary Bartlam, previously stationed in Basra and the port of Umm Qasr, was arrested in his hometown of Tamworth, Staffordshire. He had brought in a roll of pictures he shot in Iraq to his local photo-developer for processing. A shocked clerk, after reviewing the shots, called the police. Among his photos were:* a picture showing an Iraqi man being forced to perform oral sex on a (white) man;
* a picture showing two Iraqis apparently being forced to perform anal sex;
* a picture showing two naked Iraqis cowering on the ground.
A flabbergasted Bartlam told the police that he took the shots to show his mom what was going on in Iraq. |
