The level of gendered provocation rises when women soldiers are used in interrogation to coerce and delude prisoners by representing sexually charged cultural stereotypes of femininity. This includes using women as bait: One interrogator recounts, for example, how he created a scene designed to entice a young detainee to become a potential informant by allowing him to sit unshackled, in front of a television playing an American movie, with a blond female soldier.
5
The same interrogator maintained in his account of his experience supervising an intelligence team in Afghanistan in 2002 that women were best at assuming the roles of the “befuddled interrogator” or the compassionate solace provider—in other words, the bimbo who can’t do her job, or the sympathetic mom who wipes away your tears.
6
He also sent a female interrogator out to question Afghan women after their male relatives were arrested, assuming she would be less threatening and that this would lead to a naturally favorable rapport.
7
One of my teachers in the interrogation course commented that female interrogators could leverage their gender and elicit confessions best by pretending not to be interrogators at all, posing instead as nurses or even girlfriends.
These sorts of scenes can turn into the starting point for pointedly sexual aggression, but it appears that in many instances, the gendered exchanges have remained relatively controlled. Those who call for the use of women in this manner claim to believe that the cultural particularities of Muslim prisoners will make them more sensitive to their presence. However, I would argue that it is equally likely that the decision to use women in this way is also informed by American perceptions of women. The personae described are recognizable types drawn from an American cultural context. The American military milieu is often characterized as hostile to women because of the prevailing tendency among the men to sexually objectify them. The roles women are asked to play in order to harass the prisoners correspond to sexist characterizations that are leveled at them by male soldiers in other contexts as forms of denigration.
8
The tenor of the interactions between male prisoners and female soldiers changes when they are intended to destabilize prisoners by demeaning them. Several accounts by detainees mention that female soldiers humiliated them by looking at them when they were naked and hurling insults about the size of their genitals. This performance of the “castrating bitch” is described in Sergeant Kayla Williams’s account of her contact with interrogators in Iraq. Though she herself was not an interrogator, she was called upon to help with interrogations at Mosul because she speaks Arabic and is female. The male interrogators on hand brought in a prisoner and removed his clothes, and then instructed her to “mock his manhood,” “ridicule his genitals,” and “remind him that he is being humiliated in the presence of a blond American female.”
9
While Williams felt uncomfortable with and unfit for the role she was asked to play, she found greater fault with the male interrogators who slapped and burned the prisoner in her presence. To Williams, their actions violated the Geneva Conventions, but apparently sexually humiliating words did not. As she details her own discomfort with what she was asked to do, she also speculates on what kind of training one would need to perform the role effectively, which suggests a degree of acceptance of the legitimacy of such actions.
10
Williams later met the female interrogator she had momentarily replaced and discovered that she defended the tactics as legitimate. For the most part, so have her superiors.
Until now, there is only one publicly known instance of a female interrogator being sanctioned for tactics used on a prisoner. Stationed at Abu Ghraib in 2003, she was cited for forcing the man to walk through the prison hallways naked in order to humiliate him into cooperating.
11
According to many accounts, however, the level of sexual provocation of male prisoners by female soldiers reaches far greater heights. Women’s words and actions have been combined with costumes and makeup: Tight shirts left unbuttoned, high heels, sexy lingerie, loose hair, and garish makeup have all been mentioned in detainee and eyewitness accounts. The sexual language used is apparently not restricted to insults; several detainees have claimed they have been threatened with rape. Pictures of seminaked women were hung around the neck of the alleged “twentieth hijacker” in an attempt to unnerve him.
12
Reports have circulated that female soldiers have fondled detainees’ genitals, and that they have forced detainees to masturbate in front of them. Female interrogators have also been described as using many forms of sexually aggressive behavior in booths, ranging from touching themselves to removing their clothing to touching the prisoners. Some of the provocateurs have worked in teams of two or three, all sexually harassing the same prisoner. All the actions are combined with sexual language to enhance effect; sometimes the language is accusatory and demeaning, other times it is designed to effect arousal. A Yemeni detainee claimed that when he refused to talk in an interrogation, a female interrogator was dispatched to his booth in a tight T-shirt; she asked him what his sexual needs were, showed off her breasts, and stated simply, “Are you going to talk, or are we going to do this for six hours?”
13
Another account from a detainee held at Guantánamo affirmed that his interrogator combined sexual provocation with politically inflammatory statements, baring her breasts while reminding him that his attorneys were Jews and that “Jews have always betrayed Arabs.”
14
Key to all these deployments of female sexuality as a weapon is that they are planned. To me they are indicative of the state’s instrumentalist attitude toward gender, sexuality, and cultural difference. In other words, if the military is going to incorporate women, it is also going to capitalize on their particular assets and take advantage of permissive societal attitudes regarding sexual exhibitionism. The effort to gather information about another culture is turned into an opportunity to use gender and sex as punishment. The purported sexual freedom of American women becomes something with which to bludgeon imprisoned men from supposedly less permissive cultures. The fact that reports of such activities have come from several military prisons makes it virtually impossible to dismiss individual instances as aberrations or the invention of an isolated eccentric. The most widely circulated theory that has emerged to explain why these tactics have been implemented—that intelligence experts latched on to outdated Orientalist views of Arab men as sexually vulnerable in the scramble to extract actionable intelligence as quickly as possible—is supported by interrogator accounts of how lectures on the so-called “Arab mind” were integrated into their training once the insurgency began.
15
Military investigations into reports of such actions have either justified them when they are performed under the rubric of an authorized interrogation plan, or blamed individuals for supposedly failing to obtain authorization prior to executing the acts. Like every other “coercive tactic” that has come under scrutiny through recent human rights investigations, female sexual aggression toward prisoners is not unequivocally condemnable by the military’s own legal standards.
That may explain why female intelligence officers would authorize and accept orders to deploy sexuality as a weapon. It is not clearly understood as an infringement of military conduct, nor does the military see it as a violation of human rights if there are legitimate state interests. So a female agent of the state who sexually accosts prisoners to root out terrorism is just doing her job. For civilians accustomed to a certain degree of autonomy regarding their bodies, the idea that one could be ordered to behave sexually may seem to be beyond the call of duty, but soldiers have in theory already agreed to sacrifice their lives, so sexual aggression in the service of a greater cause may appear mild in comparison. In theory, members of the military are entitled to question and refuse what they believe to be unjust orders. The question here would be how to define the injustice. Kayla Williams didn’t find fault with the order; she found herself lacking in ability to perform. In other words, she personalized an ethical and legal issue and thus avoided confrontation regarding the legitimacy of the practice. From what I have been able to gather, this does not seem to be an uncommon position among women in the military. When I asked a few young women who had served how they felt about being asked to use their sexuality as part of their patriotic duty, they seemed to have difficulty understanding the question, or perhaps they thought it was too sensitive to answer. Only one said it made her think of
Playboy
Bunnies dancing for soldiers in the USO—a famous scene from
Apocalypse Now.
I don’t think the sole issue here is the way in which the codes of conduct in war can be construed to justify unconscionable acts. It seems to me that our culture lacks a precise political vocabulary for understanding women as self-conscious perpetrators of sexual violence. We rely instead on moralistic language about virtue, privacy, and emotional vulnerability to define female sexuality, or on limited views that frame women’s historical condition as victims. Since the 1970s, feminists have tried to undermine repressive moralistic language by arguing that female sexual assertiveness should be understood as a form of freedom of expression. While I don’t disagree with that position, the sexual-torture dilemma is making its limitations glaringly apparent. Flaunting one’s sexuality may indeed be a form of self-realization, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, nor is the only context for its appearance democratic. The absence of consent from the recipient turns the display into an act of violence. And when this imposition has been rationalized as part of an interrogation strategy, the act ceases to be strictly a matter of personal responsibility. We don’t like to look at ourselves that way. Our popular culture represents female violence as the product of irrationality—the spurned lover, the irate mother, the deranged survivor of abuse. So the picture of what we are becoming in war cannot be not clearly drawn.
The photos of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib that were made public are profoundly disturbing. The grainy snapshots document political performances of American-ness that both the state and the citizenry may seek to distance themselves from, but that were nevertheless carried out in our name. Whereas photographs of murdered civilians once stood for the injustices committed not only by Franco’s forces in Spain but also by U.S. troops in Vietnam, it is the images of American soldiers torturing helpless Iraqi prisoners that have come to stand for the illegitimacy of the occupation. We’ve tempered the implications of those pictures with explanations for the misconduct that enable us to condone the occurrences. According to officials who have seen the additional images that were censored from public view, the ones we saw represent the tip of the iceberg, and other abuses depicted include urolagnia, rape, and sodomy. But that is not what we see Charles Graner, Sabrina Harman, and Lynndie England doing. The ubiquity of media photos of them posing with Iraqi prisoners has helped to limit the understanding of sexual torture as a calculated practice. The absence of presiding authorities and the shocking gratuitousness of the violence make it difficult to determine who controlled the scenes, or even imagine that there would have been a director in this theater of cruelty. In that sense, what the MPs are shown doing in those photographs is somewhat different from what has been described in numerous testimonies and investigative reports as the carefully orchestrated coercive sexual tactics that have been used in recent military interrogations.
The parade of sadism featured in the Abu Ghraib photographs has a riotous quality, exacerbated by the looks of glee and upturned thumbs of the MPs. Regardless of who told the perpetrators to do what they were doing, their apparent excitement was probably intensified by the communal character of the brutality. Interrogators, on the other hand, are trained never to allow themselves to emotionally engage their sources, since doing so would impair their ability to maintain control. The female MPs involved participate in the sexual humiliation of the prisoners, but not through exhibitionist displays of their sexuality. Their nonsexual demeanor, combined with their looks of complicity, make them seem to be asking to be viewed as “one of the guys”; their performances are directed at other (male) soldiers, rather than at the detainees. Their diminutive presence creates the impression that less harm occurred because women were involved. On the other hand, the female interrogators who sexually harass detainees manipulate male anxiety by enacting their submission to female power as a monstrous, if not grotesque, sexual experience. While human rights experts, lawyers, and cultural theorists are still arguing about whether Muslims are indeed more culturally sensitive to sexual harassment from women, testimony from some prisoners and witnesses indicates that they found this tactic extremely disturbing, degrading, and psychologically scarring.
16
Although the once-popular comparisons to “frat boy antics” supported the erroneous characterization of the acts at Abu Ghraib as evidence of bad behavior by a rogue element, the MPs’ performance of sexual degradation resembles the ritualized humiliation of soldiers by other soldiers that has been an accepted convention of military sexual culture for a long time. Scholars of the military have noted that among the consequences of a military culture that has historically condoned many forms of sexual aggression are the tolerance of heterosexual rape, the exploitation of sex workers, and homophobic violence.
17
“Mock rapes” may occur as part of training for survival as a prisoner of war, while simulated and real acts of sodomy are accepted as part of informal initiation rites.
18
While it is highly likely that Charles Graner and company were following orders from interrogators, it is also likely that, lacking specific training in intelligence or interrogation, the MPs took recourse to ritualized forms of aggression that they already knew from military life.