Sodomized to Protect Our Freedoms

[Peter Presland]

The thread title says it all in the matter of the moral degeneracy of the US military.

Stark, hard-hitting polemical stuff from Alternet, but fully justified by the facts contained in this PHR report and well enough known anecdotally from myriad sources.

If the USA - 'Home of the Brave and Land of the Free' - EVER had any justified claim to the moral high ground in its geo-political dealings - and that is a debatable point at best - then it has definitively lost it. Not only because of the facts of what its military, with the approval of its political leadership, has done; but because of its steadfast refusal to hold those responsible to account, together with its incessant attempts at minimization, obfuscation and justification.

Much of it's Military/State Apparatus and Institutions belong in the sewer.

"Yasser tearfully described that when he reached the top of the steps 'the party began. … They started to put the [muzzle] of the rifle [and] the wood from the broom into [my anus]. They entered my privates from behind.' ... Yasser estimated that he was penetrated five or six times during this initial sodomy incident and saw blood 'all over my feet' through a small hole in the hood covering his eyes." – by Physicians for Human Rights' "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," a report containing firsthand accounts of men who endured torture by U.S. personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

Waterboarding. It's all we seem to discuss when comes to American torture. Whenever you see people discussing "enhanced interrogation" on your TV, chances are they'll be throwing around the same tired arguments, all revolving around waterboarding.

Why, of all the things we've done to our suspected (and not-so-suspected) terrorist detainees, is waterboarding the issue? Why confine the rapidly dwindling debate to that single technique? We've engaged in a lot of other practices that qualify universally as torture. Are sleep deprivation or "Palestinian hanging" not controversial enough? Is solitary confinement too mundane?

How about sodomy? Is that something we consider unremarkable?

"This is highly consistent with the events Amir described, including a traumatic injury and subsequent scarring process. Examination of the perianal area showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick." -- "Broken Laws, Broken Lives"

That's right; sodomy. Forcible anal penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet and John "History will not judge this kindly" Ashcroft.

I don't want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It's just that there's something about anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus.

Just once, I'd like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the neocons' freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy's ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn't be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.

The next time I hear some idiot refer to Jack Bauer in defense of torture, I want to ask him what he thinks of Jack Bauer rogering terrorists with a broomstick. You've never seen that in the hours of not-so-subtle pro-torture TV drama we've seen since 2001, have you? Never saw Andy Sipowicz cornhole a skell on NYPD Blue? Or Michael Chiklis on The Shield making a suspect drink his pee? Me neither. Something tells me that might have hurt their ratings.

More from "Broken Laws, Broken Lives": "He also recalled having been forced to wear soiled underwear, often for weeks or months at a time. 'I had diarrhea and I was in handcuffs. I was making my toilet in my underwear, and I was very dirty. That was very painful.' ... When he asked to see the doctor, he was told 'we brought a medicine to you.'

Laith explains that, in fact, 'They brought to me bottles [of] urine and [they] told me if you do not drink these now, we will bring your mother and sisters. Because I was hearing the voices of women and children, I [believed him and] drank it. I was in handcuffs, and they poured the urine [into my mouth], and sometimes I vomited from that, but when I vomited they kept on pouring [the urine] on my head … I died at that time.' He said that he was forced to drink urine from the soldiers on 11 different occasions."

The key to winning the debate on torture is to eradicate any illusions about just what this was, which is sick, twisted and freakish beyond any usefulness in gathering information. And it becomes very clear in the light of a rectally inserted lightstick.

Raise the specter of White House-authorized sexual abuse, and anyone who doesn't shrink away from defending it will be doomed to be remembered as the guy who defended ass-rape and forced urine-drinking, which is the very least an American should suffer for trying to justify brutally raping prisoners.

But no one will pull the trigger. Even as more proof is revealed, nobody seems to mention the sodomy. The torture debate is limited to waterboarding alone. Why?

Forget the 48 photos President Barack Obama has flipped on releasing (like the putz he's turned out to be). There are known photos -- you can see them at Salon.com -- of a female prisoner being raped, and a male. Not to mention the kinky, naked slave-stacking and forced masturbation -- and the prisoner with a banana up his ass.

We blared Metallica at them 24 hours a day while they shat themselves, chained to the floor. We kept them in coffin-sized boxes for hours on end. We hung them from the ceiling. We made them jack each other off. We beat some of them to death. Many have lost their minds. Some of these people were guilty of nothing but being in Afghanistan or Iraq and being swept up as part of an intelligence "mosaic."

"Broken Laws, Broken Lives": "Perhaps most important are the anal scars that were observed. Not only are these scars highly consistent with anal trauma (i.e., as would result from forced sodomy or penetration with an object), these scars are in a location where accidental injuries would not occur."

The inevitable dunderhead response, "they beheaded our people," is a sickness unto itself. From Abu Ghraib to Gitmo, we've suffered countless such humiliating comparisons, judging ourselves by the lowest standards current events can offer.

Sorry, but it is not enough to say we aren't as bad as Saddam Hussein or the scumbags that killed Daniel Pearl. The very idea that we should measure our own conduct by theirs is a total failure of self-respect. Only the worst kind of scumbag can excuse himself by saying, "I'm incrementally better than the Taliban."

"These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion. 'Who has the glassy eyes?' [Guantanamo Judge Advocate Diane] Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, 30 or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: 'You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas.' " -- Phillipe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

What's so sick about it is that the sexual nature of the torture seems so unnecessary. I mean, even if we were going to torture them, we could have stuck to waterboarding, pulling some fingernails or just beating the shit out of them. But menstrual blood smeared on their faces? Rape? What kind of people do that? What possible purpose does that serve that outweighs becoming known as the country that ass-rapes people? We couldn't get enough answers, or false confessions, or whatever we were looking for, from regular brutality? We had to go all BDSM on these people?

The upshot is this: America is the country that rapes its prisoners. We're sex criminals. That's our thing now. And Obama's refusal to "look back," i.e. prosecute these incredibly serious crimes, ensures that it's our permanent legacy. No national reputation can survive this simply by shrugging it off.

We used to be seen as a bastion of freedom and decency around the world. That shit is over, folks. Now we're like the Soviet Union, with better movies. When we talk about human rights, we are an international joke.

And when we talk about torture, we stick to waterboarding, because nobody, not even the "liberals," are willing to face what we've done.

Allan Uthman is executive editor for the Buffalo Beast.

There is a petition at "Broken Laws, Broken Lives" which deserves support but which I fear will, as usual, prove to be an exercise in futility.

[Ed Jewett]

When I saw the title, I thought it was about American citizens ...

Meanwhile, Ray McGovern (former CIA analyst) has some nasty words for the Christians who stand by and ignore, applaud or support this kind of behavior in our military, government, and cultural mindset.

Four excerpts:

“Everyone in the world knows that Jesus and his teachings were non-violent except Christians.” (Gandhi)

“... one of the first things Hitler did on assuming power was to ensure there was a pastor in every Lutheran and Catholic parish in Germany. Why? Because he calculated, correctly, that this would be a force for stability for his regime.”

“The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions — whose texts are unequivocal about murder — to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.”

“As St. Augustine pointed out 1,600 years ago:
“Hope has two children. The first is anger at the way things are. The second is courage to do something about it.”

in Ray McGovern's “Christians” Wink at Torture” (“All the more strange, it would seem, since Jesus of Nazareth, after all, was tortured to death.”)

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/44892

[Dawn Meredith]

This left me angry and in tears. I posted it on fb, let's see if it gets a response there. I also posted Ray's excellent article there a few days ago and it got zilch response. But I emailed it to some people and it got a lively discussion going: with ONE exception: the pastor at my church (which I have not attended in some time, despite my husband being the president of the cong.) That article totally summed up my problem with "church".

People are so asleep that even when we are dragged off to FEMA camps and given the flu vaccine to kill us the sheeple will still do their little email jokes and other foolishness. This is what it MUST have been like in Nazi Germany. No wait, they had a lot of underground resistance and the like...

Dawn
I do know that in many cases people are ignorant of what is truly going on because they so choose. Truth is too distasteful. And that's what has always given the PTB such utter power.

[Peter Lemkin]

It will be interesting to see if these soldiers who did this kind of thing ever realize they are the SS and Gestapo now. A few have - if you go the wintersoldier website and they should be honored for being whistleblowers - but the fact that most do this - watch this happen - or know it is going on and condider themselves better than anyone, is the sad joke. Strange how one doesn't see this on Fox or in the MSM - so called. I don't think they told the Germans what was going on in the 'camps' and torture rooms either....too upsetting.