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Interrogation tool defiles all involved
By MARIE COCCO
Washington Post Writers Group
02/23/05 - - WASHINGTON -- We know as much about the women as we do about the men. That is, almost nothing.
We do not know who the woman is who approached a Yemeni detainee at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wearing a tight T-shirt and taunting him about sex. “You are a young man and have needs,” she reportedly suggested, bending so her breasts fell toward the table. “What do you like?”
We do not know who has touched detainees suggestively, or strutted around an interrogation room in lacy bras and panties. We do not know who the women are who pretended to be menstruating and smeared something meant to be taken as blood — perhaps red ink? — on the Muslim detainees.
We know this was meant to break the men down by violating a religious taboo against contact with women and with menstruating women in particular. It is considered unclean and makes Muslim men unfit to pray.
We do not know if the women are U.S. military personnel, or contractors working for the military at the Guantanamo holding pen. We know only that the Pentagon has confirmed that this sexual degradation has taken place, and it continues to be investigated.
And we have heard no official voice — not from Congress, not from the White House — that has abhorred the use of American women as sexual teases in the war on terror. Even if you accept, which I do not, the premise that anything goes in this war — that detainees can be held indefinitely without charge, or physically abused, or secretly shipped off to distant countries where torture is routine — does that mean the honor of American women is to be sacrificed, too?
The sexual humiliation of the detainees is sexual humiliation of the women as well.
When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal came to light, with its photos of naked men and leering female jailers, we could not believe our eyes. Official investigations identified as the foundations of the scandal the makeshift nature of the prison, the shortage of trained personnel, the chaos inherent in running such a place in a war zone.
None of this is true about the prison at Guantanamo Bay. It is neither chaotic nor understaffed. What goes on there is systematic, calculated, controlled. There is a clear chain of command.
Military officials will not openly discuss the use of sexual interrogation techniques, because their investigations are unfinished. Privately, some believe the episodes occurred in 2002 and 2003, a time when they say the rules for questioning were in constant flux. There is, as well, a sense — maybe a hope — that use of sexual humiliation was a rare and unauthorized tactic.
But the theory of rogue wrongdoing wears thin. There have been too many reports — from appalled FBI agents, from lawyers who now represent a few detainees, from a former Army translator who hopes to publish a book detailing the abuse. And how do you explain why, or how, an American woman would know that contact with menstrual blood would so defile a Muslim man that he’s rendered religiously unfit?
“That didn’t just pop into their heads,” said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and director of the Women in the Military Project of the Women’s Research and Education Institute. “I’m appalled, one, at the reports and two, at the lack of interest.”
The silence is kept even by women in Congress who serve on the House and Senate Armed Services committees. My efforts to get them to talk about this story failed on a bipartisan basis. They were in hearings, or rushing home for the Presidents Day break, or off to fact-finding missions abroad. Even Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, Armed Services Committee members and feminist icons in the Democratic and Republican parties, kept mum.
The American military has an unseemly history of tolerating harassment and violence against its own women. Now, as they serve in Afghanistan and Iraq in part to liberate those far-off women from abuse, military women are again reporting rape at the hands of their fellow soldiers and official lassitude in pursuing cases.
The demeaning use of our own women for sexual exploitation at Guantanamo should be seen for what it is: a new turn in an old and shameful story.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is:mariecocco@washpost.com
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