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Faith, Sex and TorturePosted by Victoria Bresee, 2/10/05 at 7:12:31 PM.
Female interrogators at Guantanamo have developed a spiritual anguish torture technique to break off Muslim detainees’ connection to God. Initially, even defense attorneys were hesitant to believe their clients’ accounts, since they “seemed crazy, like something out of a horror movie,” or a “rock music video.”
Using the knowledge that it is taboo for Muslim men to have physical contact with women other than their wives, the interrogators used mini skirts and thong underwear, or simply disrobed, to taunt detainees and to humiliate them if they showed signs of arousal. The women also smeared or dripped fake menstrual blood on shackled men to make them feel unclean and removed water from the cells to ensure that they could not wash themselves, knowing that they would believe themselves to be too impure to pray.
Some men spat at the women, one tried to head-butt a woman who had sat on his lap, resulting in his beating, one lunged so intensely that he broke an ankle shackle and then “began to cry like a baby” (AP 1/27).
Attorneys for detainees compared the “tactics to Nazis shaving the beards of orthodox Jews or artists dunking a crucifix in urine to shock Christians.” In an Op-Ed in the New York Times, entitled, “Torture Chicks Gone Wild,” Maureen Dowd states that the “missionaries and zealous protectors of values should be worried about the American soul.”
A second military investigation is underway, while accounts keep surfacing. Initially, when detainees complained of physical abuse Defense Secretary Rumsfield insisted that they were treated “humanely,” and “Pentagon officials said terrorists were trained to fabricate torture allegations.” However, recently the Pentagon did confirm that one female interrogator had been reprimanded for smearing red dye. A first person account, Inside the Wire, by former Army translator Erik R. Saar, will be published this year, with Penguin Press.
There are about 545 prisoners from close to 40 countries at Guantanamo, many held more than three years without charge or access to attorneys. |
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