Women and Abuse in Iraq

Women obviously played an important role in the abuse inflicted on male detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. We've seen the shocking photographs of Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner and of Spc. Sabrina Harman with a broad grin and a thumbs-up sign standing behind a pyramid of naked, hooded males. We know that a third enlisted woman, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, has been charged with participating in acts of prisoner abuse.

We also know that women were prominent in the chain of command connected to the incidents of torture. According to Douglas Jehl and Kate Zerneke of the New York Times (5/30/04), Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, intelligence deputy to the commander of American forces in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and the top U.S. intelligence officer there, had responsibility for setting up the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib and for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, often ruling against the release of detainees. Capt. Carolyn Wood of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion led the unit in charge of interrogations at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan where at least two prisoners are known to have died in December 2002, evidently killed while under interrogation. She subsequently headed the Interrogation Coordination Element (ICE) at Abu Graib. At her second post she was allegedly "involved in intensive interrogations of detainees, condoned some of the activities and stressed that that was standard procedure" (Higham, Stephens, & White, Washington Post, 5/23/04). And until relieved of her duties, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski commanded 16 military prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, receiving, according to Jehl and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times (5/27/04), "broad direction from General Fast."

How many other U.S. military women have played some part in this still unfolding drama of horrors we have yet to find out. For instance, we now know that teams of "interrogator experts" were dispatched by Guantanamo prison head Gen. Geoffrey Miller last fall and, write Jehl and Andrea Elliott of the New York Times (5/29/04), "played a major role in training American intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison." Were these all-male teams or were female "experts" among them? Indeed, there is much we do not know about what happened and why.

In the search for explanations, both feminism and pornography quickly came in for a share of the blame. In the past, argued Naomi Wolf, author of the bestselling The Beauty Myth, in New York Magazine, feminist thinkers believed women incapable of sexual abuse, but at Abu Ghraib "some latently sadistic women did exactly what some latently sadistic men would do." Wolf derided the idea of women as the gentler sex. "If anything, women may turn out to be more likely than men to follow guidance that encourages torture," she stated, because of the acculturation that makes them "good at pleasing their bosses." She also blamed the desensitizing effect of ubiquitous pornography, which "has blurred the line between. . . decent and indecent."

Susan Sontag in an essay in the New York Times Magazine (5/23/04) on the response to the Abu Ghraib images also wondered "how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet." And Barbara Ehrenreich, defending feminist goals in the Los Angeles Times, reminded us that a uterus is not a replacement for a conscience.

Other contributing factors also leaped to mind. For instance, Wiley Hall of the Associated Press recently examined -- Iraq aside -- the escalating violence among American girls and noted that schools are reporting an increasing number of girls suspended or expelled for fighting. He quoted former Baltimore school Police Chief Jansen Robinson saying "We're seeing girls doing things now that we used to put off on boys," which Jansen calls "vicious, 'I-want-to-hurt-you' fighting [that is now] a nationwide phenomenon, and it's catching us all off guard."

Hall linked the upsurge in violence among school-age girls to the appearance of "movies and video games such as Tomb Raider in which women wreak violence with the gusto of male action heroes." And he quoted Phil Leaf, director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins University, commenting on the "dearth of effective female role models [now that] mothers who used to be [in the home] are forced back into the job market or get rendered ineffective through abuse of drugs and alcohol."

Perhaps it will turn out that the women prison guards, the women military intelligence supervisors, and the woman prison administrator involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib were abused themselves, or grew up in economically disadvantaged homes without effective adult women as role models. Perhaps they played video games like Tomb Raider, and watched pornographic films. Perhaps they wanted to assert their full equality with men through abusive behavior.

But before we rush to judgment, let's at least remember that they were also selected and trained for a specific task in Iraq; that someone decided to place women in positions of responsibility in a Muslim country over predominantly male detainees; that someone instructed these military women in the tactical use of sexual humiliation to create favorable conditions for interrogation; that someone taught them about the cultural sensitivities they would deliberately violate; that someone advised them -- at least tacitly -- on the vital role the presence of women would play in the "softening-up" prelude to interrogation.

In "It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It," Frank Rich in the Sunday New York Times (5/30/04) cited Watergate-felon-turned-celebrity-preacher Chuck Colson's claim that the prison guards had been corrupted by "a steady diet of MTV and pornography" to show how the Abu Ghraib abuse has been annexed as "another front in America's election-year culture war." Blaming porn or MTV or Howard Stern for the misbehavior of a "few bad apples," Rich comments, lets everyone else in the chain of command off the hook.

Before we leap to attribute the abusive behavior of women at Abu Ghraib to the latent sadism of a few pornography-infused, hyper-violent guards, we need more information. We need to understand both the chain of command and the chain of responsibility -- and just how these military women fit into the Pentagon's plans for handling detainees.

Right now, the questions vastly outnumber the answers. Was this indeed a way for military women at different levels of the hierarchy to win approval from their male bosses, a way to prove their usefulness, a way to get ahead, a way to be one of the boys, a way to share in the wielding of power? Do women serve as prominently in U.S. military prison facilities and interrogation units elsewhere in what former Vice President Al Gore recently called an American gulag? Did women receive special training for their duties and at whose request? Did anyone in authority notice that the psychological humiliation and intimidation tactics implemented by women guards and interrogators evidently did not provide useful intelligence, and therefore consider changing the procedures?

As Newsweek's John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff note in their special report on The Roots of Torture, "ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them." As Mark Danner comments in the New York Review of Books, the sexual humiliations, the threatened assaults, and the forced violations reported at different bases in Iraq "all seem to emerge from the same script." Images of naked prisoners humiliated before grinning female guards actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of government, according to Newsweek.

"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," reported Seymour Hersh in his most recent article in the New Yorker. And we now know that a classified memorandum issued by General Sanchez on Oct. 12, 2003, outlined a new "interrogation and counter-resistance policy" that advocated "an interrogation approach designed to manipulate internees' emotions and weaknesses" (New York Times, 5/27/04).

Hersh considers the source of such orders to be "the notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation [which] became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq." Those discussions were apparently based on a 1973 study of Arab culture and psychology by Raphael Patai, described by one of Hersh's informants as "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." The claim that sex was a "prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world" served, according to Hersh's informant, as the basis for discussions of Arab culture stressing two themes, "one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

So before we leap to too many conclusions, we need to know more about procedures, rationales, policies, and incentives for selecting and training women for deployment in our military police and military intelligence units in the Islamic world. Only then can we decide how much to blame feminism and pornography for the acts of sexual humiliation and torture committed in the U.S. military prison system in Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly elsewhere.

Whatever individual women thought they were doing at Abu Ghraib and the Bagram Collection Point, it looks now as if they were being exploited, used, and blamed for degeneracy that was mandated at the top.  Procedures, rationales, policies, and incentives for selecting and training women for deployment in our military police and military intelligence units in the Islamic world shaped individual actions. Feminism and pornography do not explain women's role in the sexual humiliation and torture committed in the U.S. military prison system in Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly elsewhere. 

Copyright C2004 Carolyn Wakeman

Carolyn Wakeman, associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, recently co-edited Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution and is co-author of To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman.

[An earlier version of this article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]