The Washington Blade has one of the better roundups on Iraqi prisoner abuse. A recent letter chides us for not doing more about the scandal, and I hope our IGF writers will give it the sort of thoughtful analysis this story calls for. In the meantime, I'll just say that the events at Abu Ghraib prison -- where Iraqi prisoners were photographed naked, forced to simulate gay sex, and otherwise humiliated and abused -- exposes many levels of sexual twistedness all round: The U.S. military, whose guards (and possibly prison administrators) consider gay sex the ultimate in humiliation/emasculation, and the Iraqi insurgents/terrorists, who consider gay sex the ultimate in humiliation/emasculation. As one prisoner who was stripped told the Associated Press (this from the Blade account), "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."
At this point, we have pictures (and admissions by the U.S. military) of such things as prisoners being striped, posed as if having gay sex, forced to form a naked pyramid, being tied up and pulled on a leash, and being forced to crawl naked along the floor. This is abuse and mistreatment, to be sure, but is it "torture," as some in the media and the anti-war camp have labeled it (e.g., Seymour Hersh's "Torture at Abu Ghraib" in The New Yorker)?
Well, if some of the accusations, to date unsubstantiated, about
actual sodomy/rape or even murder prove true, then yes, it's
torture. But if it's being stripped and posed and forced to crawl,
then I think the use of the word "torture" also signifies on the
part of the media (and some war critics) the view that being forced
to simulate gay sex is the very worst than can be done to a man --
apparently equivalent to the actual physical torture that Saddam
inflicted year after blood-curdling year on innocent dissidents in
the same prison. (Again, I say this about the events we have proof
of -- not the as of now unproved allegations).
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