Did The Bush White House Commit Sex Crimes Against Detainees?

Scott Horton at The Daily Beast confirms that torture photos from Abu Ghraib do contain explicit sexual images, and are as bad as the London Telegraph said thay are.  Furthermore, the Pentagon is denying the facts here.

The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition, and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.

Naomi Wolf, in her “Sex Crimes in the White House” article last year, documents the Bush White House’s involvement in committing sex crimes against detainees.
 

We now know that the torture of prisoners was the result of a policy set in the White House by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Rice — who actually chaired the torture meetings. The Pentagon has also acknowledged that it had authorized sexualized abuse of detainees as part of interrogation practices to be performed by female operatives. And documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union have Rumsfeld, in his own words, checking in on the sexualized humiliation of prisoners.

The sexualization of torture from the top basically turned Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay into an organized sex-crime ring in which the trafficked sex slaves were US-held prisoners. Looking at the classic S and M nature of some of this torture, it is hard not to speculate that someone setting policy was aroused by all of this. And Phillipe Sands’ impeccably documented Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, now proves that sex crime was authorized and, at least one source reports, eroticized: Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo who signed off on many torture techniques, told Sands about brainstorming sessions that included the use of “sexual tension,” which was “culturally taboo, disrespectful, humiliating and potentially unexpected.”

It’s no wonder our government doesn’t want certain photos released.  It’s not because doing so would be “too dangerous”; it’s because, as Naomi Wolf notes, the bodies depicted are crime scenes.

But what is far scarier about these images Obama refuses to release and that the Pentagon is likely to be lying about now is that it is not the evidence of lower-level soldiers being corrupted by power – it is proof of the fact that the most senior leadership – Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, with Rice’s collusion – were running a global sex crime trafficking ring with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Baghram as the holding sites. The sexual nature of the torture also gives the lie to Cheney’s and others’ defense of torture as somehow functional: the sexual perversity mandated from the top reveals that it was just plain old sick sadism gratified by a very sick form of pleasure. I also pointed out in `Sex Crimes in the White House’ that the escalation of the sexual abuse showed the same classic pattern shown by sex criminals everywhere – you start with stripping the victim, keeping him or her completely in your power, and then you engage in greater and more violent excesses with more and more self-justification.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.