inside the glass house

Torture, a weapon too dangerous to be sexy
NEW YORK – Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former American ambassador to the United Nations and currently a university professor, often made the highly-questionable distinction between "friendly" right-wing "authoritarian" regimes (which the US loved) and "unfriendly" left-wing "totalitarian" regimes (which the US abhorred).

While the strongly pro-US Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran ran authoritarian regimes by US standards, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Iraq's Saddam Hussein were running totalitarian governments crying out for US-inspired "regime change".

During a visit to France last week, the new US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice resurrected the old Kirkpatrick political dogma when she pointedly told a group of French intellectuals that Iran was a totalitarian, not an authoritarian state.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said that Rice was obviously trying to "scare" the French because for most intellectuals the term totalitarian evokes images of violent regimes such as Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Kirkpatrick's distinction between user-friendly and unfriendly dictators prompted a response from her ideological foe at that time, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who said: "It seems to me that if you're on the rack (and being tortured), it doesn't make any difference if your torturer is right handed or left-handed." So much for right-wing and left-wing regimes.

Vance's comment also reinforced one of the cherished principles of the rule of law which have guided successive US administrations – namely, that torture, banned by a UN convention, is abhorrent.

But since two successive US wars in recent years – one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq – American troops and CIA interrogators have been accused of torturing prisoners in violation of both the UN convention against torture and the Geneva conventions which protect the rights of prisoners of war (PoW).

If that right can apply to American PoWs -- as demanded during the Vietnam war – it should apply equally to Iraqi or Afghan POWs as well.

Perhaps the most sadistic and humiliating torture took place in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad where American soldiers were accused, ironically, of using some of the techniques once fine-tuned by the Saddam Hussein regime – including hooding, disorientation, sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme heat and extreme cold in cramped prison cells.

Last week there was a new twist to the old routine – sex as an instrument of torture. A Pentagon inquiry confirmed charges made by Muslim prisoners at the US military compound in Guantanamo Bay that female US interrogators used sexually suggestive tactics to humiliate prisoners and extract confessions from them.

In a book to be released shortly, a former US army sergeant who worked as an Arabic interpreter says that some of the women who were assigned to question Muslim prisoners wore skimpy bikinis, tight tee shirts and paraded in mini skirts to torment and sexually arouse their victims.

In one instance, he says, a female military interrogator rubbed against a prisoner's back even as he was praying with his eyes closed. The tactic, the book says, was to make the prisoner feel he was unclean and unable to go before his God in prayer.

At least two prisoners, the author of the book says, spat on the faces of the female interrogators and called them prostitutes. According to testimony recorded by Pentagon investigators, one of the women asked a detainee: "Why aren't you married? You are a young man and you have needs. What do you like?"

She then bent down with her breasts on the table and her legs almost touching his, the testimony said. This made him very upset. She said: "Are you going to talk, or are we going to do this for six hours?"

Even in the Abu Ghraib scandal, the torture was occasionally sex-oriented. A slew of photographs taken at that prison showed US soldiers, including servicewomen, holding naked prisoners on a leash or posing for pictures in front of a pile of naked Iraqis.

The pattern of torture – whether sexual or otherwise -- seem to be a routine way of interrogation. But surprisingly, no high ranking officials of the Bush administration have taken the blame for the continued atrocities. US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, who has refused to accept any indirect responsibility for the growing scandal, claims he twice submitted his resignation but President Bush rejected it.

Still, Rumsfeld refuses to admit the prevalence of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison. While he concedes that the Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad were "abused" and "humiliated", they were not "tortured".

"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe is technically different from torture", he said last year, splitting hairs over legal definitions. "And therefore I am not going to address the 'torture' word", he told reporters.

And as the acclaimed writer, the late Susan Sontag, once remarked: "Perhaps torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component".

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