Two interesting articles from The Guardian, sorry for slagging them off the other day...

Torture as pornography The pictures of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi detainees are reminiscent of sadomasochistic porn, says military historian Joanna Bourke. And we should not be surprised

Friday May 7, 2004, The Guardian

Viewed as the inevitable result of men's sexual urges (the "animal in man"), sexual humiliation and the violation of prisoners of war was viewed as a military problem only when it directly threatened the conduct of war or the reputation of an imposing power. As General Patton predicted during the second world war, "There would unquestionably be some raping." It was "a little R&R" for the personnel. Factors facilitating other forms of atrocity facilitated rape. Uniforms provided anonymity. Potential victims were dehumanised; perpetrators deindividualised. In military conflicts, the penis was explicitly coded as a weapon.

What is particularly interesting in these photographs of abuse coming out of Iraq is the prominent role played by Lynndie England. A particular strand of feminist theory - popularised by Sheila Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin - attempts to argue that the male body is inherently primed to rape. Their claim that only men are rapists, rape fantasists or beneficiaries of the rape culture cannot be sustained in the face of blatant examples of female perpetrators of sexual violence. In these photographs the penis itself becomes a trophy. Women can also use sex as power, to humiliate and torture.

However much the American secretary for state may wish to discourage the use of the word "torture", there is no other word that can describe these acts. In torture and other extreme forms of abuse, the infliction of pain and shame does not necessarily aim at extracting information. Beatings, humiliating rites and verbal insults are often used to make prisoners describe acts or reveal names already known to the police or military. Often, the questions are of little practical value to the torturers and the regime. The redundant interrogations are frequently accompanied by the demand that prisoners sign a document, declaring that they have seen the errors of their ways. The apparent futility of these demands indicates the nature of the torturers' enterprise. They want to destroy the victim's sense of identity.

The evil of torture is not restricted to wanton violence inflicted on the body. Many types of extreme pain and physical suffering, whether in war, during acts of religious martyrdom, or simply as a result of poor health, are endured with dignity and patience. The evil of torture lies elsewhere: it denies its victim the minimum recognition offered by society and law and, in doing so, it destroys the respect people routinely expect from others. More importantly, torture aims to undermine the way the victim relates to his or her own self, and thus threatens to dissolve the mainsprings of an individual's personality. Torture is an embodied violation of another individual. The sexual nature of these acts shows that the torturers realise the centrality of sexuality for their victims' identity. The perpetrators in these photographs aim to destroy their victim's sense of self by inflicting and recording extreme sexual humiliation. As in Jean Améry's description of being tortured by the Nazis, sexual violation is so devastating not because of the physical agony suffered so much as by the realisation that the other people present are impervious to the victim. Torture destroys "trust in the world . . . Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world."

The display of cruel pleasure taken in punishing Iraqi prisoners has reverberated throughout the world, confirming in many countries the negative stereotype of westerners as decadent and sexually obsessed. Many people have questioned the motives and conduct of the war in Iraq, but these pornographic images have stripped bare what little force remained in the humanitarian rhetoric concerning the war. In the Arab world, the damage has been done, and is irrevocable.

· Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck College London and author of An Intimate History of Killing (Granta). She is currently working on a book about rapists in the 19th and 20th century.

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What the US papers don't say

Michael Hann examines the air of secrecy and silence surrounding the US media's treatment of George Bush's 'war on terror'

Friday April 30, 2004

American contractors and soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in a prison outside Baghdad? A huge story, by anyone's standards, surely, especially when pictures of the abuse were broadcast on the US TV network CBS.
So it was no surprise that newspapers around the world made huge, horrified play of the events at the Abu Ghraib prison. It was more of a surprise, however, that the story did not receive the same level of coverage in the US papers.