Should we tolerate intolerance?
But...
This book also talks of how we have women use their, shall we say, feminine wiles to break the will of prisoners.
One female civilian contractor used a special outfit that included a miniskirt, thong underwear and a bra during late-night interrogations with prisoners, mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren't their wives ... In one incident, described in the document dated June 19, 2004, "The detainee appears to be genuinely traumatized by a female escort securing the detainee's leg irons," according to the U.S. Southern Command summary of videotapes shot when the teams were used.
Is this awful? Isn't it the man who has the problem? The man who grew up in a society that effectively hates women? That's the sentiment I sometimes see when people accuse others of being homophobic. "It's not gay people who are weird, it's you who's weird for not tolerating them."
Maybe I'm verging on "he's was asking for it" territory here, but I do believe it's an interesting question: How tolerant should we be of these prisoners' intolerance? Shouldn't we use their faults and hatreds against them?
Remember that scene in Saving Private Ryan where the Jewish guy proudly displays his Star of David to all those captured Nazis? Would a Jewish interrogater doing that today be accused of torture?
Sodomizing, beating, etc. prisoners is always absolutely unjustified (what are we, Turks?!), but having women rub their breasts in their face to make them feel uncomfortable? I don't know. I hate finding gray areas in the subject of something as heinous as torture...
The article I linked to also tells of a woman wiping a Muslim man's face with fake menstural blood. (Even a Jewish interrogator would probably hate this one.) While this seems like a pretty good instance of "non-lethal" force, I'm going to come down against it on the grounds that it's ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING.)
2 Comments:
I would, for the most part, agree. I like using someone's prejudice against them as much as the next guy, but this is where Religion gets all odd. How do we feel about making far right Christians watch hardcore gay porn, or kosher Jews eat a nice cheese-sausage sandwich? I mean almost any religion can be used as quasi-torture, right? Basically you're mentally torturing someone by needling their religious/moral values. Threatening them with hell in the next world rather than this one. I just wanted to put it in context.
But this is certainly the least of our worries in the torture department. It actually seems like a pretty creative non-violent technique, at least to my decidedly non-religious ears.
This whole situation is just a mess; a real disaster zone.
Should feminists also be mad at the fact that the military is using women as props to take advantage of Muslims' sexist attitudes? Probably.
Or how about the decidedly retro/conservative take these articles themselves take on the whole affair. They read in a style like, "Why are we using our women in such a way? How could our gentle, delicate women be turned into such violent, torturing monsters?"
And again, should not feminists then be mad at the media for portraying female interrogators as un-feminine? Or too feminine?
Arghhhhh!!!!
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