http://www.counterpunch.com/By DIANE CHRISTIAN
One of the Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo tortures recently revealed is US women smearing menstrual blood on Islamic prisoners and fondling or rubbing them sexually to defile them. The tactic includes taunting prisoners that they will then have no water to purify themselves to pray. Some prisoners were also shown pictures of their wives with their heads superimposed on naked women's bodies posed beside Osama Bin Laden. "I see my wife everywhere, everywhere' Mamdouh Habib, an Australian ex-detainee reported.
This differs from the physical tortures-electric shock to head and genitals, bloody beating, sodomizing, suffocating, and drowning. The women's participation was not just to torture, degrade and abuse, but specifically to pollute and defile spiritually.
The women who smeared menstrual blood and rubbed their breasts on men who sometimes spat at them as whores are not the young women revealed last year posing with men on leashes and mocking prisoners' genitals. The women who brandished menstrual blood were part of an interrogation cadre doing what they were told would break the spirit of jihadists. Rumsfeld and Bush professed shock at sexual tortures last year; they have not spoken about this variation. Do they find it disgusting? Or do they applaud these women as their valiant and covert warriors, doing a tough and disagreeable job that needs to be done? President Bush often deplored the degrading treatment of women in Afghanistan and Iraq, citing the liberation of women as part of our mission in 'bringing freedom' to these cultures. The liberated women we present in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantánamo are not attractive to cultures that value modesty.
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The tactic reveals the religious heart of war-the object is to kill the culture not simply the carrier. As the Greeks slaughtered a pig on the altar of the temple in Jerusalem, and the French revolutionaries installed a whore on the altar of Notre Dame, so the Americans smear menstrual blood on captives and show them their wives naked with Osama Bin Laden.
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Ms Christian ends by saying: In Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo even bad blood gets put to our good blood purpose- it can bloody our enemy by defiling him. Sexual spiritual torture provides new insight that the war on terror is terrible.
(in one of the snips she talks about good and bad blood)
however you look at it, women are once again being used by men as a tool in their warring.