Sex Crimes in the White House
NEW YORK - Sex crime has a telltale signature, even when those directing the outrages are some of the most powerful men and women in the United States. How extraordinary, then, to learn that one of the perpetrators of these crimes, Condoleezza Rice, has just led the debate in a special session of the United Nations Security Council on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
I had a sense of déjà vu when I saw the photos that emerged in 2004 from Abu Ghraib prison. Even as the Bush administration was spinning the notion that the torture of prisoners was the work of "a few bad apples" low in the military hierarchy, I knew that we were seeing evidence of a systemic policy set at the top. It's not that I am a genius. It's simply that, having worked at a rape crisis center and been trained in the basics of sex crime, I have learned that all sex predators go about things in certain recognizable ways.
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."
"These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion," writes Sands. "'Who has the glassy eyes?" Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, thirty or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" [reported Beaver]. A wan smile crossed Beaver's face: "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard, I can stay detached."' [Sands, p 63]
The nonsexual torture that was committed ranged from beatings and suffocation, electrodes attached to sensitive areas, and forced sleep deprivation, to prisoners being hung by the wrists from the ceiling and placed in solitary confinement until psychosis was induced. These abuses violate both US and international law. Three former military attorneys, recognizing this blunt truth, refused to participate in the "military tribunals" -- rather, "show trials" -- aimed at condemning men whose confessions were elicited through torture.
Though we can now debate what the penalty for waterboarding should be, America as a nation, maintaining an odd silence, still cannot seem to discuss the sex crimes involved.
Why? It's not as if the sex crimes that US leaders either authorized or tolerated are not staring Americans in the face: the images of male prisoners with their heads hooded with women's underwear; the documented reports of female US soldiers deployed to smear menstrual blood on the faces of male prisoners, and of military interrogators or contractors forcing prisoners to simulate sex with each other, to penetrate themselves with objects, or to submit to being penetrated by objects. Indeed, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was written deliberately with loopholes that gave immunity to perpetrators of many kinds of sexual humiliation and abuse.
There is also the testimony by female soldiers such as Lynndie England about compelling male prisoners to masturbate, as well as an FBI memo objecting to a policy of "highly aggressive interrogation techniques." The memo cites a female interrogator rubbing lotion on a shackled detainee and whispering in his ear -- during Ramadan when sexual contact with a strange woman would be most offensive -- then suddenly bending back his thumbs until he grimaced in pain, and violently grabbing his genitals. Sexual abuse in US-operated prisons got worse and worse over time, ultimately including, according to doctors who examined detainees, anal sodomy.
All this may sound bizarre if you are a normal person, but it is standard operating procedure for sex offenders. Those who work in the field know that once sex abusers control a powerless victim, they will invariably push the boundaries with ever more extreme behavior. Abusers start by undressing their victims, but once that line has been breached, you are likely to hear from the victim about oral and anal penetration, greater and greater pain and fear being inflicted, and more and more carelessness about exposing the crimes as the perpetrator's inhibitions fall away.
The perpetrator is also likely to engage in ever-escalating rationalizations, often arguing that the offenses serve a greater good. Finally, the victim is blamed for the abuse: in the case of the detainees, if they would only "behave," and confess, they wouldn't bring all this on themselves.
Silence, and even collusion, is also typical of sex crimes within a family. Americans are behaving like a dysfunctional family by shielding sex criminals in their midst through silence.
Just as sex criminals -- and the leaders who directed the use of rape and sexual abuse as a military strategy -- were tried and sentenced after the wars in Bosnia and Sierra Leone, so Americans must hold accountable those who committed, or authorized, sex crimes in US-operated prisons. Throughout the world, this perverse and graphic criminality has added fuel to anxiety about US cultural and military power. These acts need to be called by their true names -- war crimes and sex crimes -- and people in America need to demand justice for the perpetrators and their victims. As in a family, only when people start to speak out and tell the truth about rape and sexual assault can the healing begin.
© Project Syndicate
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War crimes and torture of prisoners must all be investigated when Obama is elected. America is losing its legacy day by day as the Bush admin. breaks laws and withholds the truth from the American people.
I have written several times about the sexual pleasures the administration is getting from filming
Gitmo interrogations several times.When they used our women soldiers to supposedly smear menstrual blood on the detaineses it was not only sexual abuse of the detainees but a way to humiliate the women as well. You can be sure the films of torture have been saved and are in a private collection. The American people have never seen the worst of them.
we were talking about this crap in alt.politcs long before huffingtonpost came along.
great article - tyvm!
Good golly gosh, I wonder who has these torture films? Oh gee wilikers, what former White House leader is creepy enough to instigate such a thing? Oh my, such henny-penny poppycock!
"...but a way to humiliate the women as well." I agree, where's the outrage among women's groups about it?
what if tens of millions of americans approve of all this? what if this came from the bottom instead of the top? what if this is a sick adolescent pathology defining the fast majority of the troops actively or passively? what if this is a kind of monstrosity practiced by the same american troops who are being so nice to the kids whose families they have slaughtered and destroyed? what if america is a big sick beast burning up the world's substance and bullying people until the world is totally destroyed?
what do humanist intellectuals do then? i think denial is a very important psychological tool here. denial is the only state in which spiritual value retains coherence. this is something that has been unleashed- not created. i am ok with the neccessary myth that bush, cheney, rumsfeld have created all this- instead of the truth that americans are cruel acquisitive beasts.
that's an awful lot of what-ifs.
what we know is enough without asking 'what if'.
smacks of known-knowns, known-unknowns, etc...
Two words...Jeff Gannon.
Connect the dots back to this former gay male prostitute (aka James Guckert) play acting as a reporter in the White House, and tell me that this President doesn't have some skeletons in his closet. Gannon/Guckert in the WH may not be, in and of itself, significant, but then again, maybe it is?
Using the FOIA, it was determined that Gannon/Guckert had at least a dozen "sleep-overs" at the White House, that remain unexplained. None of those dozen (or so) "visits" happened in relation to anything "official". Take a giant leap to the subject of Naomi Wolf's article, namely a President who likely has "enjoyed" inflicting sexual punishment/depravity on helpless victims, and the implications of what Gannon/Guckert was doing having unexplained sleep-overs (pajama parties?) becomes a bit more piquant, if not downright salacious.
Just a thought.
oh my god. hear hear! i was just about to launch into a long post about this. thank you guntoting.
I was also about to mention the Jeff Gannon/Guckert scandel. You know they're a lot of people who think Gannon is Johnny Gosch. Look up the interviews with Gannon on YouTube. There is a lot of weird shit going on in Washington and else where. Bohemian Grove anyone? Yeah, I know, maybe it's just a meeting among those that the great, late George Carlin would refer to as the "Owner's of America", but did anyone see that video footage of a 9/11 Truther interupting Bill Clinton months ago while he was giving a speech at a Hillary ralley in Minnesota? The 9/11 Truther asked Clinton about Bohemian Grove and Clinton responded: "Isn't that where all those rich republicans stand naked against red wood trees?" Keeping in mind all the publicity political sex scandels get(Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Elliot Spitzer, ect), why haven't we heard anything about the Bohemian Club in the mainstream media? So tell me Naomi-if you're so interested in White House related sex crimes/scandels-what's up with Jeff Gannon and Bohemian Grove?
Thank you so much for bringing this all together, Naomi.
A nation that proclaimed governmental adherence to law to be a noble end in itself has dissipated itself into emulating the most corrupt, repugnant regimes of all time.
And in so doing becomes one of them.
Our collective silence as citizens to these outrages will define our generation as surely as we now view the examples of history.
It is important to speak in public and name these crimes. At home and in civil society.
kay griggs, married to a military intelligence top ranking officer said this all and more about Rumsefeld and Wolfowitz and Kissenger in 1990's to head of CIA -COLBY who helped here. He died in a mysterous accident after that, but here tapes are on internet. Read and listen to kay griggs. For America's sake and for your sons and daughters' sakes. Closing your eyes now is just like a mother ignoring her child's pleas against the incest in her midst.
People who truly know me, know that when I get quiet...I am really, really pissed. So I am saying this in almost a whisper........when and how can we get these bastards. When and how can we give them some of their own.
Now for all the good Americans who screamed out about Michelle Obama's statement about not being proud of being an American, how do you feel? I am not very proud right now and want to get the ones that did this. I will not be proud until these criminals stand before world justice and are taken down just like the Nazi war criminals. They are the same. Damn them all.
Sexual abuse in US-operated prisons got worse and worse over time, ultimately including, according to doctors who examined detainees, anal sodomy.
All this may sound bizarre if you are a normal person, but it is standard operating procedure for sex offenders. Those who work in the field know that once sex abusers control a powerless victim, they will invariably push the boundaries with ever more extreme behavior. Abusers start by undressing their victims, but once that line has been breached, you are likely to hear from the victim about oral and anal penetration, greater and greater pain and fear being inflicted, and more and more carelessness about exposing the crimes as the perpetrator's inhibitions fall away.
The perpetrator is also likely to engage in ever-escalating rationalizations, often arguing that the offenses serve a greater good. Finally, the victim is blamed for the abuse: in the case of the detainees, if they would only "behave," and confess, they wouldn't bring all this on themselves.
Silence, and even collusion, is also typical of sex crimes within a family. Americans are behaving like a dysfunctional family by shielding sex criminals in their midst through silence,,,"
THIS ARTICLE NEEDS FRONT PAGE PRESS IN EVERY NEWSPAPER AND RADIO TV NETWORK. IT WON'T BECAUSE THE CONSPIRACY IS HUGE!
actually it started at anal sodomy and now includes routine gangrape around the clock for certain inmates- usually low level drug offenders.
i have a friend who has a permanent colostomy bag after being raped for three days straight and then stuffed with crushed razors. the leaders of this country have a lot to answer for, that's for sure.
conspiracy of silence, a movie available on the internet, one hour long, see it yourself, done for public television, never shown. red ice, conspiracy of silence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jShle0W6HH0
Webster Tarpley on the Pedophile cabal in Omaha, Nebraska
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=BushCh21
kay griggs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKcm9QI1eo8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FGTqNRpOJY&feature=related
Child Prostitution, Satanism, & The CIA - 1of7 -
ex head of FBI in Southern CA, TED GUNDERSON...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU-k-tfiPfs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrl5Ti35Clk&feature=related
When you threw in "satanism" you lost all credibility; the vast majority of Satanists are teenagers who will usually drop it after they figure out that it has no real substance as an alternative religion.
The easiest way to spot an over-the-top, tinfoil conspiracy is the inclusion of the evil Satanists and/or Satanism--THERE IS NO SUCH LARGE SCALE MOVEMENT IN THIS COUNTRY. Anyone who believes there are multiple large scale Satanist cults holding black masses all over the place is simply a FOOL who is easily duped.
I suppose they're sacrificing newborn babies too....
It is about the shadow government, sex slaves, and MK ULTRA, monarch programs as mentioned before by another poster. The satanazation of American politics, for blackmail, and the trafficing of sex slaves for profit and power. Chip'ping humans is next. It is right there, hidden by MSM and the programing and psyops of the military industrial congressional complex.
how about it. ghosts. i remember similar "shock" about the priest scandal. it was right there in front of us the entire time.
The unmitigated mess of the past 7+ years is not the fault of the Bush administration alone, but rather the result of years of both negligence and outright malevolence on the part of nearly every entity involved in setting the course of US policy.
I didn't see this coming, but in a sick, ironic way, the George W Bush presidency HAS caused me to question my longstanding atheism: I always dismissed evangelicals' "evil for evil's sake" conception of Satan as a kind of histrionic, childish hyperbole... the stuff of bad melodrama (is there any other kind?) yet here it is, staring us in the face and holding high office. It's nearly enough to make me reassess what else I may or may not believe in... don't I feel like the naive one for a change...
Thank you for your continuous efforts to raise public awareness, Naomi. I am shocked by this country's silence regarding the human abuse committed by our government.
Not only must we hold the Bush administration accountable, we also need to question the Democrats ability to effectively govern this country. The Democrats could have stopped these abuses had they chosen to use the inherent authority granted them by the Constitution to impeach Bush and Cheney.
The People must demand not only hearings and criminal investigations but that anyone, no matter what office they hold, be held accountable for these atrocious acts. This is a shameful legacy for this country - the People need to speak out loudly and clearly.
Obama MUST appoint a truth commission once he is president to get to the bottom of all of this and bring everyone responsible to justice. Only then can this nation have healing. We have people in high positions today who are just as guilty as the Nurenburg criminals and we must make this right.
Won't happen, since that would involve exposing all of the members of the democratic congress persons and leadership that knew what was going on and did not take a stand to stop it.
thats what they said about foley. if enough people bug out about it, they will have to do something.
and how many of us enen think there is a price to pay.
It won't come from the Dems. Even if we sweep EVERYTHING, the 'leadership' will have the *next* election in 2 years on their radar. And we don't need to interupt their sleep, thank you.
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