Conservatives for gay sexual abuse

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Bush administration is removing guidelines from the Army field manual that banned "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners, pursuant to Article III of the Geneva Conventions. [Los Angeles Times] Andrew Sullivan has an excellent piece on this and other important developments in the torture controversy, including Bush's use of a signing statement to void the McCain amendment requiring compliance with Article III. [Daily Dish]

It is mind-boggling to think that the same administration that is pushing for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage would be dropping regulations designed to prevent the "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners - which, in the case of Abu Ghraib, often involved forced homosexual contact between Muslim detainees. In other words, the Bush administration believes that the federal Constitution should have a provision banning marriages between loving gay couples, but that the Army field manual should not have any restrictions against forcing straight detainees to participate in homosexual conduct. (For example, this disturbing photo shows two Abu Ghraib detainees being forced to simulate oral sex, while others, ordered to masturbate, stand in the background.)

Here's an excerpt from a May 2004 Seymour Hersh article on the neocons' obsession with using sexual humiliation as a tool against Muslim detainees (see Hersh's book Chain of Command for an extended discussion of this):

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. [The New Yorker]

I don't understand how anyone, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, could support the Bush administration's strategy of using sexual humiliation as a tactic. And as a straight man, it is especially hard to imagine how Bush's base - which is dominated by conservative, straight men - can rally behind the federal government forcing straight male detainees to engage in homosexual conduct.

"Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule" [Los Angeles Times]
"We Torture" [The Daily Dish]
"The Gray Zone" [The New Yorker]