The Women of Gitmo

[dogday]

There are countless reasons to be outraged about the abuses of detainees at American military prisons. But there is one abuse about which there can surely be no debate, even among the die-hard supporters of President Bush: the exploitation and debasement of women serving in the United States military. This practice must come to an immediate end, and the Pentagon must make it clear that such things will never be tolerated again.

Surely no one can approve turning an American soldier into a pseudo-lap-dancer or having another smear fake menstrual blood on an Arab man. These practices are as degrading to the women as they are to the prisoners. They violate American moral values - and they seem pointless.

Does anyone in the military believe that a coldblooded terrorist who has withstood months of physical and psychological abuse will crack because a woman runs her fingers through his hair suggestively or watches him disrobe? If devout Muslims become terrorists because they believe Western civilization is depraved, does it make sense to try to unnerve them by having Western women behave like trollops?

Yet those appear to be the operative theories at Guantánamo Bay, where military jailers developed the "aggressive" interrogations that were later exported to the Abu Ghraib prison. A Pentagon report released Wednesday contained page after page of appalling descriptions of the use of women soldiers as sexual foils in interrogations. One officer ordered a soldier to buy some perfume at the PX and rub it on the arm of a detainee "to distract" him. The report said that in response, the prisoner tried to bite her, "fell out of his chair and chipped his tooth." It doesn't say that he was moved to divulge any secrets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15fri1.html?ex=1279080000&en=45ac8182e04448f8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[lvx35]

1. Yet another great angle!

sign up for the army! Be ordered to give lap dances to suspected terrorists!

[atreides1]

2. But the writer assumes

That these female soldiers were not willing participants. If some women in the private sector are willing to do something questionable to get ahead, why not women in the military?

As for myself, I'll wait until any of the female soldiers in question come forward and make a statement.

[lvx35]

3. Its still ugly.

Even if female troops were coming forward to do it, its still a dark thing to have associated with military service...I mean flip the genders, and assume it was official policy for the US military to sexually rub against female captives. That would reflect poorly on the military as well!