AND YOU THOUGHT THE REVELATIONS ABOUT MONICA LEWINSKY WERE SHOCKING!

Now this... no Cuban cigars involved, apparently, although there is the strange coincidence that in both the Clinton and Bush sex scandals, women’s underwear are prominently involved. Very conspicuous by its absence this time, though, is consent. While one president got impeached for admiring a voluptuous butt in a thong, the other treads water fast as he tries to play himself as far above the Abu Ghraib scandal as he can get.

Now we see yet another implication of Bush’s sketchy war service. Here’s a fella who wanted to be commander in chief of a military he never really joined, and now, as one revelation of sexual abuse and torture follows the last, he can do nothing but huddle with his gang of fellow warriors who never went to war and declare the conduct of his Abu Ghraib underlings “un-American.”

Excuse me, Mr. Bush, but you haven’t gone outside often enough in your life to know what “American” means. You may be the president the average Joe Sixpack thinks he’d like to share a beer with, but you come from a level of patrician privilege that most Americans can no more truly grasp than you can understand how it feels to be without resources and desperate. Hate and abusive behavior are as American as apple pie, just one thread in a woven strand that also includes great humanitarianism and courage. News flash, Mr. Bush: You didn’t learn enough about America owning a baseball team to pretend to be an expert now.

Let’s review what we know about the scandal. At least since last fall, and probably longer, US troops (and mercenaries, and maybe some shadowy CIA types) guarding Iraqi prisoners have been under pressure to produce meaningful intelligence from a bunch of often hostile characters stuffed into the same prison Saddam used. Most of these people probably had no real useful information for us. They were mad because we’d invaded their country on false pretenses. (I find it almost too painfully ironic that after all the US government’s insistence that we’d find chemical weapons in Iraq, the first one to apparently be detonated – this week’s sarin release – seems to have been exploded by people with no idea what they had. Sure, they made sarin – according to the formula Saddam got from the US! -- back in Gulf War One, and now it’s being looted by the Iraqi and foreign resistance, but they don’t even know what it is.)

So we have a bunch of folks in the notorious prison who don’t want to be there and who see no real reason to help us out, since we just overran their country blowing stuff up, and even though Saddam was a tyrant, he was at least an Iraqi tyrant, which counts for something. Furthermore, a fair number of these guys don’t have any real useful info for us anyway. The US soldiers (and mercenaries) charged with extracting information have a frustrating situation on their hands, with pressure from above (how far above we don’t yet clearly know) to produce actionable intelligence.

Have we mentioned that a bunch of these folks are National Guard personnel? Um, hardened interrogators these good citizen-soldiers are not trained to be.

And then somebody, somewhere, had a brainstorm.

“I KNOW! LET’S PUT PANTIES ON HIS HEAD!”

It remains unclear how thoroughly it was understood, and part of strategy, to exploit Islamic sensitivities about nudity and sex. Maybe it would have seemed like a good idea in a stressful environment to make any prisoner wear panties on his head – or on any other part of his anatomy. But it seems likely that someone, at least, in the chain of command understood that specifically sexual humiliations and abuses would have a particular effect on this population. If no one did understand this, they should have: It’s as egregious a mistake (and one which will have equally appalling and long-lasting cultural collateral damage) as George Bush talking about a “crusade” after September 11.

So our boys and girls in uniform extracted military intelligence, or tried to, by documenting forced nudity and masturbation, probably threatening to blackmail the humiliated prisoners with the videos and photos; by piling people up and making them simulate sex; by perhaps actually making them perform sexual acts on one another. At least one report has emerged that a prisoner was forced to sodomize himself with a banana. A banana! Did they at least give him lube? Probably not.

I won’t even address the beatings, the non-sexualized forms of torture, the images of cowering Iraqis threatened by dogs: these aren’t something I can professionally speak to.

Well, I can speak to what the use of dogs makes me think of, as an American: our racist history. I’ll get back to that when I resume explaining America to Mr. Bush.

For just a moment, imagine what it would be like if the tables here were turned: if we learned American troops were being held and sexually abused and humiliated. Learning this would likely outrage Americans. One of the reasons the opening volleys of Iraq War Two experienced such citizen support here in the US was the early-in-the-invasion experience of Private Jessica Lynch, reportedly raped while in captivity. They can’t do that to our women! And we’d be completely freaked out, wouldn’t we, to find they’d been doing it to our men?

But as Susan Brownmiller documented over twenty years ago in her book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, rape and sexual abuse are commonly part of war. Such behavior, she documented, is especially likely to be part of hostilities when racial and ethnic tension underlies the war itself.

Racial and ethnic tension in this war? That may not be how most Americans look at it; the media doesn’t exactly provide us with this view, and a great many Americans hope we have put strong racial tensions in our past. But think back two and a half years, just past September 11th. While Bush made problematic use of the word “crusade,” good, outraged Americans went out and took potshots at people they thought were Muslims. If we couldn’t get Bin Laden, we’d get ourselves one o’ his people! More than one person of Middle Eastern origin was attacked, as were a handful of Sikhs, who are not Arab, not Muslim, and not involved in terrorist activities. Of course, you can’t expect your average American yahoo to know any of that. Hence, perhaps, the easy acceptance by so many American of the Bush team’s reasoning about the Iraq invasion. There was pretty much no connection between Iraq and al Quaeda – until now, when Iraq is the go-to turf for all mujahadeen looking to fight for Islam. But many Americans didn’t even know enough to wonder why Saddam had come to stand in for Bin Laden. (The reason? It may not be any more complex, really, than that the US knew where Saddam lived.)
After September 11 Bush took his shoes off and went to a mosque; fair enough. But there has been a racist undertone to an enormous amount of what has happened since. And one element of this is the sexual misbehavior happening systematically in Abu Ghraib prison.

Bush thinks all this is un-American. But when you get down to it, up until a year ago most of us thought it was un-American to invade other countries. So much for that misconception, eh?

SEX AND VIOLENCE: AMERICAN SPORTS

I hardly know where to begin when faced with the notion that Bush found the Abu Ghraib conduct “un-American.” “That’s not the America I know,” he said. Well, the America I know is shot through with the same nexus of sex, violence and racism that last week made US senators quail and Donald Rumsfeld’s smirk temporarily vanish. When I say “sex” here, I include two inextricable elements from America’s Abu Ghraib public relations disaster: sexism and homophobia. Sexual abuse is part of it, too, including sexual abuse designed to control and humiliate.

Let me pause for a second to state how uncomfortable it is for me, usually a sunny sexual cheerleader, to acknowledge how often sex is used as a weapon and sexual difference a reason to attack another person. It’s a vile side of something that I believe should be one of our greatest sources of pleasure and happiness, and yet – are you listening, Bush? – it is not un-American. Nor is it un-American to conflate gender hatred and homophobia with racism, making racial hate the excuse for treating someone with sexualized violence.

From slavery down through the present, “uppity” African-Americans have been targets of rape, sexualized violence, and emasculating humiliation. How long has it been since NYPD cops sodomize Haitian immigrant Abner Louima with a broomstick? Wow, Mr. Bush, that sounds just exactly like the goings-on at Abu Ghraib.

Now, how about frats? If even half of what I’ve heard about sexual abuse in frats is true, Abu Ghraib is a big, out-of-control Animal House. (And speaking of hazing, I wonder what sort of rites got the Bushes into Skull and Bones? I guess we’ll never know those details, but maybe that’s what got him drinking so heavily in the first place.) Sororities? It’s not all poodle skirts over there either. (Obviously one element in US shock is the involvement of women in the Abu Ghraib abuse. Then last week we heard about the nuns and the deaf kids.)

Homophobic and genderphobic violence: Recently and locally we have the murder of transsexual Newark teenager Gwen Araujo. A few years ago it was Matthew Shepard, crucified on a fencepost. A few years before that, a couple of nice boys in US Navy uniforms beat gay naval Petty Officer Allen Schindler to death after evidently deciding they couldn’t bear to ride on a boat with a fag. (They took the time to mutilate his penis, while they were at it.) Around that time a gay man named Billy Joe Gaither was tortured and burned to death after he’d been lured out of an Alabama gay bar by a homophobe who promised him sex. And a young transsexual man in Nebraska, Brandon Teena, was brutally gang-raped and murdered in 1993 for being “different.” A soldier was murdered – beaten to death in the barracks – for having a transsexual partner; their story was told in the Showtime movie “Soldier’s Girl.” The queer press is almost never entirely empty of these reports. They happen all over. They happen relatively often. They are never anomalies: each of the perpetrators has learned homophobia at Daddy’s knee, on the football team, in basic training. They are not always even recognized for what they are: If a homophobia angle showed up in San Francisco’s recent police brutality scandal, for instance, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
And speaking of sex problems among people in uniform: Can you say “Tailhook”?

Mr. Bush, this is the country you decided you wanted to run. It is full of good-hearted men and women who would never conduct themselves this way – and also full of ‘Mer’can good ol’ boys (and some gals, too) who in the name of their own version of American values act out with prejudice, hate, and sometimes violence, and we should never be surprised, in this country full of sexual contradictions, when that violence is sexualized. It’s not just our (un-American?) criminals we have to fear: sometimes it’s our boys in blue, our next-door neighbor, our people in uniform, our local priest. Some of us – people of color, women, queers, and other outsiders – have more to fear than others.

And when you give a bunch of Americans carte blanche to fuck with other people, sometimes they’ll do it literally.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Maybe Bush’s declarations that this is unacceptable will have some effect, though I have to confess I believe otherwise. Clearly we need to recommit to the Geneva Convention, not just in Iraq, but at home. There remains a rough-and-tumble underpinning to some American policing and justice that, especially when tinged with racism and homophobia, is unacceptable; if America really wants to erase this behavior, we have to hold people who perpetrate it accountable everywhere. A few soldiers and perhaps a couple of people in the chain of command will go down over Abu Ghraib, but will anyone from the Pentagon or the Congress turn the College of the Americas, where similarly rough intelligence-gathering methods are part of the curriculum, upside down and shake?

Sex is implicit in this partly because our culture isn’t committed to making sex a positive experience for everyone. When that’s a true American value, this sort of conduct will look far more aberrant than it does now. Now, sex and violence are far more common than we want to admit. It will take a deep level of commitment to change the US into a place where no one would ever think to hurt or humiliate another about sex, or in a sexualized way. Frankly, the changes we’d need to see are impossible with Ashcroft sitting in the top cop’s chair. And they’re not likely when the country’s top soldiers aren’t all soldiers in the first place, but privileged men and women who do not understand the unhinging pressures of war.

In fact, if Brownmiller’s insights on war and sex crimes are correct, the notion that we should go to war for any reason other than being forced to protect ourselves is, inextricably, part of the problem.

And that we have any troops at all who think humiliation of the enemy is good war policy will turn out to be a problem for a long time to come – an unforgettable provocation to many angry young Islamic men who can’t forget, and swear to avenge, the picture of one of their fellows in panties.