Isn't forcible sodomy worse than waterboarding? Because we did that too. Let the GOP defend that.

[dorkulon]

I don't know why we aren't bringing sodomy up first and foremost when it comes to the outrages of torture. What kind of people can defend that? Obviously waterboarding is bad, but I don't think it hits the imagination like anal rape. There just isn't any situation in which it's appropriate for a government to order the anal rape of a prisoner--right? Even a right-winger would be hard pressed to argue with that.

[opihimoimoi]

1. Some of them Right Wingers love that Shit...ask Larry.....Dave, and Cheney

[madmom]

2. Don't count on it. Think a moment ( and I by no means want to imply any

bigotry on my part)the repugs will start with "if it's ok for gays....."

I agree 100% with your position, why are we not talking about EVERYTHING that was done?

[donco6]

22. They'd just be equating rape with sex, and we've already . . .

. . . dealt with that over many years. I wouldn't throw out the strategy completely because of that possibility.

Though I can hear it being raised, and feel the bile starting in my throat even now.

[dorkulon]

24. The whole point would be to elicit such idiotic statements.

Either it would shut torture apologists up, or force them to make such idiotic statements that they lose their following.

[donco6]

25. It's worked before.

Here in Colorado we had Repubs stupidly saying we should let unmarried mothers with AIDS pass it to their babies so they can be sure to feel really bad about their poor choices. Yeah. I don't think that guy has ever said another word.

[dorkulon]

26. Yikes. It's a good example of what I'm hoping for though.

I have a feeling the minute one of these assholes endorses ass-rape, we're on our way to justice.

[indepat]

3. The GOP will defend anything a 'puke president does, no matter how illegal, unconstitutional,

inhumane. :P

[dorkulon]

4. So let's make them do it.

I have been waiting for a long time to hear anyone--Stewart, Matthews, any pundit or interviewer--ask one of these torture apologists to defend forcible sodomy, when they say they don't think waterboarding torture. It's a simple question: "Do you think anal rape is torture?" It hasn't happened.

[jwirr]

5. And remember Hersh is saying it was done to children. Forcible

sodomy to a child! Let them defend that.

[MiaCulpa]

11. Link to Hersch video here

In this Kos diary:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/7/14/193750/666

This is kidnap of children, torture of children, rape and sodomy of children...not to mention the dead people. Dead tortured people are murder victims.

[indepat]

14. Let me repeat: absolutely anything done at the behest of a 'puke president is

a.o.k. peachy-cream hunky-dory in the eyes of all true-believers. :P

[dorkulon]

23. And let me repeat: Let's make them defend it.

I want to see these fuckheads on TV defending the practice of shoving a flashlight up a prisoner's ass.

[Kaleko]

12. Exactly. That's how we need to frame the debate.

[dorkulon]

13. My only problem with that is

all we have to go on is a comment Hersh made one time and never backed up. It would be fairly easy for the right to dismiss it as a false allegation. We do, however, have solid evidence that we have raped adults.

[Jennicut]

41. Wikipedia says that Hersh said his statements regarding this were misconstrued

Per Wiki:
Some of Hersh's speeches concerning the Iraq War have described violent incidents involving U.S. troops in Iraq. In July 2004, during the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal, he alleged that American troops sexually assaulted young boys:
“Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has. They’re in total terror it’s going to come out. ”

In a subsequent interview with New York magazine, Hersh regretted that "I actually didn’t quite say what I wanted to say correctly...it wasn’t that inaccurate, but it was misstated. The next thing I know, it was all over the blogs. And I just realized then, the power of—and so you have to try and be more careful." In his book, Chain of Command, he wrote that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy by a foreign contract interpreter at Abu Ghraib, during which a woman took pictures.

So it was a foreign contract interpreter and NOT US troops that did this? I don't know, its from Wiki. Who knows how accurate they are?

[dorkulon]

43. Thanks for that info

I've been wondering why Hersh never went any further with that story.

[Jennicut]

45. Yeah, it seems like it never fully panned out.

Not to say the abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan were not horrible but that particular one never seemed to me to be true because no other info ever came out about it.

[ColbertWatcher]

6. Good point. So, instead of calling it sodomy, we should call it anal rape. n/t

[lunatica]

27. the way the Republicans make up crap they'll say it's common in our jails

And it can't be helped. They'll equate what the criminals do in our jails and just call it a sexual outlet common among criminals. Then they'll accuse a Democrat of not stopping the rapes.

[dorkulon]

28. There's a difference between prisoners raping prisoners and US interrogators doing it at the behest

of the president.

[lunatica]

32. I know that...

I was guessing at how the Republicans would spin it. Rush would say and has said it was just frat house fun.

[notesdev]

46. Not much of one

from the point of view of the target.

Is there all that much of a difference between a government official raping you himself, vs. using his power to confine you with someone he can be certain will rape you?

[dorkulon]

48. Well I'm not trying to minimize the horror of either scenario

It's obviously a travesty that rape occurs so regularly in our prisons. It's unbelievable to me that Americans seem not to care about it. But there's clearly a different public reaction when it's done by gov't employees, e.g. Amadou Diallo.

[noamnety]

7. This is why the admininstration is covering up the photos.

As long as photos of rape aren't released, the country can stay in denial, giving the apologists an excuse for defending our actions.

That's the whole logic behind not releasing them - to cover up what we did because the world gets pissed at countries (and their troops) engaging in war crimes (go figure).

[dorkulon]

8. But sodomy is already documented in the Taguba report and ACLU-obtained documents

We don't need the pictures to prove it. We already know it was done.

[noamnety]

9. Nope, not the same.

People believe their eyes. They don't read long reports.

That's a lesson we learned from previous wars - the photos were always the thing that swayed mass public opinion, while the academics/intellectuals stood around scratching their heads wondering why people couldn't figure out from reports why what we were doing was wrong.



See my point?

[dorkulon]

10. Not that I'm against releasing the photos--I think we should--but

if this issue were being raised every day on TV and in the papers, whenever the torture "debate" is discussed, it would be in the public consciousness. Instead, it seems waterboarding is exclusively debated.

If instead, all Dem pundits were reiterating that the American gov't authorized forced sodomy, and forced Republicans to at least acknowledge that it happened, at least people would know about it.

[jwirr]

15. This horrible picture is what ended the Vietnam War. I sat here looking

at it for about five minutes to see if I saw the same thing now as I did then. It still has the power to make anyone realize the horrors of war. If I remember correctly the girl in the middle was terribly burned by napalm all over her body.

[lunatica]

37. Actually the photo is taken from a much more shocking video

Of the children running in terror. It also shows the soldiers basically just standing there while the camera rolls. But the soldiers did take the burnt girl, Kim Phuk, to their American medics and hospital and saved her life.

I remember the video vividly, and yes, it helped stop the war, but there was already a huge anti-war movement in the US. I also remember the photos of the Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire and that one video of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot by a South Viet Nam soldier.





These videos and photos are the reason the Bush Administration refused to allow journalists to go independly to Iraq and Afghanistan. It's one of the 'lessons' learned by the neo cons on how to keep the American public in the dark.

[jwirr]

39. Yes, but that single picture was on national news and was an immediate

sensation. I think because she is small and looks like a child. I do not remember if she is a child or an adult but I will never forget that picture. There were of course many terrible pictures.

[The Wizard]

50. I believe

that was the Saigon Chief of Police shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head.
These photos are still powerful.
Pictures are particularly powerful with Republicans as most are functional illiterates.

[mindwalker_i]

16. Hey as long as we didn't force them to get married

it's all good with the Republicans.

[notesdev]

17. For a moment ...

... I thought you were talking about the experience of many Americans in American prisons. Good thing we have that 8th Amendment thingy to protect us, right?

[dorkulon]

18. Certainly one of the overlooked issues in ll of this is that we routinely torture American prisoners

Solitary confinement is widely recognized as torture, but it's often done in our prisons.

[rcrush]

19. Any investigation, truth commission, prosecution will be pure theatre.

No one is going to bring up the rapes and murders. Waterboarding will be the only thing they will talk about. We may get a Gonzales or that John Yoo. No one important tho.

[dorkulon]

20. Maybe--but why?

Why aren't Democrats bringing this up?

[rcrush]

21. Their owners wont let them.

:shrug:

[OneGrassRoot]

29. Another "perspective" that we tend to forget.....

What many of the torture apologists are thinking is that the person being tortured is GUILTY. Therefore, they don't give a shit at all.

So the horrors of torture (other than the torture of children and other innocents, and, hopefully, rape of ANYONE as a means of torture), are lost on them. Think "24" and Jack Bauer.

What should be focused upon perhaps even more so than the fact that 1) torture doesn't produce more effective results; 2) we weren't dealing with a ticking time bomb scenario is that

a POLICY of torture (with pictures and videos to promote it!) PUTS OUR OWN TROOPS IN GREATER DANGER, as well as American citizens, both at home and abroad.

Those who promote torture as effective have rarely served in the military (hence it being a favorite tactic of chickenhawks).

Their policies are NOT patriotic in any sense of the word, and they most CERTAINLY have not made us safer.

[dorkulon]

30. OF course, it's a foregone conclusion that at least some of the prioners are not guilty.

That is indeed something that must be said again and again, because it invalidates all of this BS about "sympathy for terrorists".

[HooptieWagon]

31. GOP - The pro-Torture and forcible-Sodomy party. n/t

[DU GrovelBot]

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[spanone]

34. trust me, they will.

[dorkulon]

44. Thats just what I'm hoping for.

I want to see them do it, and see public opinion shift away from them as they do.

[RagAss]

35. Did they send Catholic priests to do this deed ???????

[Joanne98]

36. But but sodomy during a time of war is a Christian act. It saz so in the Bible!

[PurityOfEssence]

38. No. Forcible sodomy doesn't make the victim fear imminent death

Seriously.

Even for the deeply prudish and sexually weird, violation of that sort isn't quite the same fear as the "I'm gonna die right now" experience of waterboarding.

[dorkulon]

42. I think from a PR perspective that it would be signifigantly harder for

a conservative to rationalize rape than waterboarding. And maybe this makes me a prude, but I actually think I'd opt for the waterboarding myself.

[Touchdown]

40. Forced sodomy makes heroes, consensual sodomy beaks down unit morale.

:eyes:

[bridgit]

47. Without having to go anywhere near the pains and psychic disruptions; torture...

is among the primal missives harbored within claims to master/disciple relationships and exchanges between the sick and the will-be. Alluded to here as such and ref't within the OP; torture is the expectation of homo-erotic satiation to include release under mis-authorized duress. Torture is wrong on so many levels as to constitute anathema...it simply cannot be period

[The Wizard]

49. The righrt wing will defend ass rape

They've been doing it to the country for years.