Sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib stemmed from Pentagon policy: photos were part of plan to blackmail prisoners

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 15, 2004 by Rosemary Ruether

Racism is a subtext of every war. Whenever a group of humans goes to war against another group of humans, it seems they have to construct the "enemy" as subhuman. In order to be able to kill others, we have to imagine them as demonic and bestial, lacking fellow humanity and unworthy of life. We are told that these "others" have "no respect for life," that "they only understand force," even as we prepare to treat them only with force and to have no respect for their lives. Moreover, violence and sexuality are deeply mixed in militarist cultures. Rape and sexual torture are all too typical of the treatment of captured enemies the world over. All these patterns have returned with a vengeance in the U.S. adventure in Iraq, even as we piously claim to have gone there only to "liberate them," to give them the benefits of our democracy--in other words, for their own good.

Western culture abounds with stereotypes of the Arab as sensual and violent, as was demonstrated decades ago in Edward Said's classic work, Orientalism (1978). What is startling, however, is to discover how high up in the echelons of the American government and military such anti-Arab racism prevailed. In an article by journalist Seymour Hersh, "The Annals of National Security: The Grey Zone," published in the May 24 issue of The New Yorker, Hersh traces the policies that appeared in Abu Ghraib prison back to a decision by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 to extend the secret operation to hunt for leaders of al-Qaeda to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. This Pentagon operation, dubbed Copper Green, encouraged sexual humiliation as part of the torture of Iraqi prisoners on the assumption that this could generate more information about al-Qaeda's presence in Iraq.

Hersh claims that the idea that Iraqis are especially vulnerable to sexual humiliation was a key "talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives" in the months before the invasion of Iraq. Hersh reveals that the key source for this idea was the 1973 book The Arab Mind by Israeli Jewish cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai. Significantly, this book was republished in 2002 (Hatherleigh Press) with a new forward by U.S. Army Col. Norvell De Atkine, director of Middle East Studies at the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, who describes Patai's work as his own mainstay in his 12 years of briefing military teams deployed in the Middle East on how to deal with the Arabs.

Patai himself was a scholar who was conversant with the classical Arabic language and literature and saw himself as deeply sympathetic to the Arab world. Yet his book can easily be read as confirming all the Orientalist stereotypes of Arabs as irrational, violent and dominated by repressed sexuality. A paternalistic view of Arabs pervades the book as well as a tendency to see all Arabs in all countries and across the centuries as static exemplars of the same stereotypic cultural patterns. Hersh claims that the Washington neocons especially focused on Patai's eighth chapter on the Arabs and sex. Here repressed sexuality rooted in the segregation of women and fear of homosexuality is seen as governing the "Arab mind." According to Hersh's informant, two themes dominated the neocon discussion, "one, that Arabs only understand force, end two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

From such thinking was crafted a policy not only of sexually humiliating the Iraqi prisoners but also of photographing them in these humiliating postures. The idea behind these photos was not only that sexual humiliation would break the prisoners and cause them to tell what they knew, but also would be a tool for ongoing blackmail. Fear of exposure of their humiliating treatment would cause the released prisoners to inform on their neighbors. According Hersh's informant, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people who you could insert back into the population."

The crudity of such views of the psychology of others and the ease with which they might be manipulated is stunning. What was not imagined is that these photographs might be revealed to the world, causing exactly the opposite reaction. Iraqis and the Arab world were confirmed in their suspicions that the Americans themselves are possessed of a violent pornographic culture totally lacking in respect for Arab people. Every anti-Occidental prejudice generally harbored by Arabs and Muslims about the corrupt West was reinforced. Resistance to the American presence stiffened.

However important the use--or misuse--of Patai's book might have been for Washington neocons, one suspects that such stereotypes of Arabs and the tendency to mix violent abuse with sexuality hardly needed the help of an Israeli cultural anthropologist. Such patterns are already deeply embedded in Western culture, needing only the license to abuse others to bring them out. Moreover, such patterns are not confined to the particular circumstances of Abu Ghraib. Whether in prisons or battlefields in Vietnam, Central America or Africa, or in the United States, whenever violent abuse to death is licensed, one sees the same behavior. The torturer who cuts off the breasts or stuffs an explosive up the vagina of a prisoner in El Salvador or Guatemala operates from the same mentality. When will we get off the facile excuse of the "few bad apples" and look more deeply into the rot that pervades the subtext of our own culture?