Torture and Abuse of Gays

Torture and Abuse of Gays and Lesbians in U.S. Occupied Iraq

The United States has always presented itself as a model of fairness and equality. A champion of human rights around the world, the American government is a signatory to wide range of treaties that guarantee equal protection and treatment for persons of diverse races, religions, creeds, and ethnic groups. The American government condemns gender bias, age discrimination, and prejudice against the physically and mentally disabled. So, when George W. Bush's original justification for the invasion of Iraq i.e. "anticipatory self-defense" collapsed, the President quickly substituted the idea of human rights. Yet, the new Iraq that is emerging after five years of often bloody U.S. occupation can hardly be described as a humanitarian paradise. Numerous sections of Baghdad, and the surrounding countryside, have been "ethnically cleansed." Islamic mullahs spout hate as the Shia majority seeks to outmaneuver the formerly ruling Sunni minority. Iraq's new parliament frames an "American-style" democracy with the help of Muslim fundamentalist Shariah law. Women are pushed from the place in public life that they occupied while the secularist Saddam Hussein was in power. and, in a telling orgy of abuse, torture, and death, gay and lesbian Iraqis are sent the message that they have no claim on the title of "human being." The United States military, diplomatic corps, and government, have done little to nothing to protect Iraq's gay men and women. The American claim to be creating a new Iraq - one that is a place of freedom and justice for all - is being sacrificed on an altar of political expediency as American officials permit an increasingly fundamentalist presence to overtake the budding democracy.

In short, the United States government, its military personnel, diplomatic officials, and other representatives have failed to prevent or speak out against attacks on gay and lesbian Iraqis. Monitoring and implementation of international human rights agreements to which the Iraqi nation is a party has been lax or non-existent. Gays and lesbians in danger of torture and death have only infrequently been permitted to obtain asylum in the United States or in those areas of Iraq under its close protection. The United States has also failed to intervene when Iraqi electoral and governmental processes have put in place in elements of Islamic Shariah law that are discriminatory to gays and lesbians, and have permitted the promulgation of an Iraqi constitution that makes these anti-egalitarian ideas a part of the nation's fundamental law.

As his backing is considered essential to the success and stability of the Iraqi state, Americans have not condemned fundamentalist leader Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. Worst of all, the United States of America has set a terrible example for the Iraqis to follow by failing to pursue full gay and lesbian rights within the United States itself. Anti-gay campaigns such as those against gay marriage and civil unions, against the inclusion of gay people under employment anti-discrimination laws, resistance to gay hate crimes legislation, and the military "don't ask don't tell" policy contribute to Iraqi and international impressions that the world's great champion of liberty and equal rights does not care about its own gay and lesbian citizens, let alone those of other nations. This study will examine each of these issues and propose possible solutions. The United States must maintain its commitment to human rights. It must set a good example, and stand by its principles. Gay and lesbian Iraqis must be rescued from a fate that is worse than anything that befell them in the days of the dictator Saddam Hussein.

Part II.

Background: The United States Invasion of Iraq and Humanitarian Claims and Responsibilities

A. The Invasion

In 2003, George W. Bush invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq based on claims that the country's ruler, the dictator Saddam Hussein, was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and so presented a clear and present danger to the United States of America, its allies, and the wider international community. In the months previous to the American invasion, Hussein had permitted United Nations weapons inspectors to look for such weapons. As of March 2003, none had been found. The United Nations Security Council did not endorse American requests to pass a new resolution permitting the Americans to invade. Failing to obtain this new resolution, President Bush declared that the resolution authorizing the weapons inspections, Resolution 1441, had in fact authorized the use of military force as a means of enforcement.

Though, three of the five Security Council members - France, Russia, and China - were adamantly opposed to military action unsupported by evidence of weapons of mass destruction and denied the applicability of 1441, the Bush Administration had already been preparing other justifications with the American public. The Bush Administration played the propaganda card, using the full force of the federal bureaucracy to continually insinuate a connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mentioned again and again in the same sentence or paragraph, the two became conflated in the public mind. A lack of real evidence to prove that Hussein's regime was, in fact, harboring or developing chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, was transmuted into a threat to terrible to contemplate. Governmental officials worked the Iraq threat into virtually every speech. Saddam and 9/11 were pounded into the public consciousness. President Bush was now beginning to present his new doctrine of "Preventive War" - a new paradigm of international relations in which a state would take its defense into its own hands before a threat had actually presented itself. It was, in effect, an original interpretation of hard power doctrines in which even a superpower such as the United States could be seen as constantly at the mercy of all-powerful, all-pervasive, and ever-threatening dark forces; terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein's Iraq would be deserving of attack under the doctrine of preventive war by being a "rogue state," one whose rulers,

Brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the rulers; display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they are party; are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes; sponsor terrorism around the globe; and reject human values and hate the United States and everything it stands for.

The Bush Administration's definition of a rouge state, therefore; permitted the American government to justify undertaking potentially unilateral action to protect itself. The norms of the civilized world - humanitarian precepts that are spelled out under international laws and treaties - are directly conflated with American values, needs, and expectations. In this view, what conflicts with America's goals can be seen as violating the interests of humanity as a whole. This would prove an essential point in understanding the tragedy that afterwards befell Iraq's gay and lesbian citizens.

B. Occupation: America's Duties and Responsibilities under International Law

Having quickly defeated the Iraqi army and driven Saddam Hussein from power and into hiding, the United States faced new duties and responsibilities as an occupying power. According to Nicholas Wheeler,

Preoccupation with the motives of the interveners "takes the intervening state as the referent object for analysis rather than the victims who are rescued as a consequence of the use of force." According to this thinking, placing the victims at the center of the analysis, as opposed to the interveners, "leads to a different emphasis on the importance of motives in judging the humanitarian credentials of the interveners."

The United States occupation of Iraq was legitimated by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, an act that established the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, as the state's government. Oddly for an invasion that was now being justified almost completely in humanitarian terms, Resolution 1483 gave the CPA an almost free hand in the administration of the conquered territory, abolishing the Oil for Food Program, and with it, virtually all other forms of international oversight to which Iraq had previously been subject.

While granting the United States and its allies an apparent mandate to re-structure Iraqi society in accordance with forward-looking humanitarian principles, the CPA quickly displayed a thorough lack of preparation, or seeming understanding of its mission. There was no coherent plan for the maintenance of law and order, the administration of justice, or for anything approaching a democratic alternative to Iraq's prior highly autocratic system of governance. Indeed, the CPA's Regulation # 1 stated the following:

The CPA is vested with all executive, legislative and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives, to be exercised under relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war. This authority shall be exercised by the CPA Administrator.

The "laws and usages of war" to which this highly authoritarian decree referred no doubt included such international obligations as the Geneva Convention, the Convention against Torture, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and others that should have made the achievement of equal rights a high priority within the occupied territory of Iraq. These responsibilities notwithstanding, the American public was already being conditioned to view the war in Iraq as a battle against extremists, that is, against the Islamist radicals who had threatened the "American" way" of life on September 11, 2001. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had already inflamed America's own Christian fundamentalists with talk that the terrible events of that day were to blame in part on "the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle... I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

That such intolerance was not unique to America, "champion" of liberty, can be seen in many nations around the world. Homosexuality is condemned by Muslim fundamentalists as much as by their Christian fundamentalist counterparts. Yet, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was reasonably tolerant of "discreet" gay and lesbian relationships.

It was only with the emergence of radical Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq following Saddam Hussein's overthrow by the United States that there began an open movement toward religiously-inspired policies and violence. Though occurring under the radar of most of the world's media, by 2006 numerous articles began to appear in humanitarian outlets that indicated that gays and lesbians faced dire threats in the "new" Iraq. There were reports of kidnappings, torture, and murder, of attacks by Iraqi militias, and anti-gay fatwahs by Iraq's fundamentalist Muslim leaders. In May 2006 the British gay and humanitarian rights organization, Iraqi LGBT - UK, drew attention to a fatwah issued by Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani. Sistani, as they pointed out, not only called for the murder of gay men in Iraq, but also is ultimate commander of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary wing, the Badr Corps. In the words of Iraqi LGBT - UK,

The Badr Corps is a terrorist organization and uses terrorist methods against political, religious, sexual and ethnic dissidents. It is behind much of the sectarian violence in Iraq today, including suicide bombings, kidnappings and the assassination of Sunnis, moderate Shia, trade unionists, women's rights activists, gay people and secularists."

Though Sistani, under pressure, withdrew the fatwah, his action did not begin to quell the terrible tide of anti-gay violence, nor provide an answer to the all-important question of how such horrors were occurring under the noses of the United States military and American advisors, officials.

Articles 2, 7, and 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been read specifically to endorse the rights of gays and lesbians.

Both the United States and Iraq are signatories to this international treaty. Article 2 states the following:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

A clear interpretation of this would be that, "Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country," that there exists no restriction as far as sexual orientation, nor any other question of personal identity.

Though not mentioned explicitly, the definitions of belief and personhood given in Article 2 appear sufficiently broad to include sexual identity, not to mention that the listing of forms of belief, language, ethnicity, color, etc. are all subsumed under the single term of "everyone," in the first sentence of the Article and therefore represent but a more detailed exposition of the term. To fail to endorse the right of gay Iraqi men and women to the protection of their government, the United States is failing in its responsibility toward the gay and lesbian citizens of the country its military continues to occupy. Article 7 reiterates the principle of equality before the law, re-stating that idea in terms of "equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration."

And it is Article 12 that applies particularly to the rights of Iraqi men and women to live their lives as they please, to be free from "arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor [be subject] to attacks upon his honor and reputation."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights underlies nearly the whole framework of modern international human rights protocols. The idea that the United States appears to be ignoring its enforcement is certainly troubling.

C. To an "Independent" Iraq: Implicit American Support for Anti-Gay Order

On June 28, 2004, two days ahead of schedule, a smiling George W. Bush and Tony Blair congratulated themselves on having completed the transfer of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an "independent" interim Iraqi government under Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Though United States forces would remain in charge of Iraqi security, President Bush celebrated the import of the occasion with a message scrawled on a note to Blair, "Let Freedom Ring!" seemingly auspicious beginning for the new nation, but one that hardly reflected the realities on the ground. The "young democracy" that was supposedly forming on the shores of the Persian Gulf was quickly descending into an orgy of violence and destruction, particularly that aimed against those not deemed to conform to the views of the newly-empowered Shiite majority. Their identity based on their membership in a particular branch of Islam, the Shiites found ready support in their neighbor to the east, the rigidly fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran had based nearly its whole national identity on a strict adherence to Shia doctrine. In the Muslim world as a whole, the Shia are a distinct minority, and so the emergent Shia of Iraq would need their allies. They would also be under the sway of the anti-gay rhetoric and policies emanating from Iranian mullahs - and soon they would have their own fundamentalist firebrand - the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani.

In June 2006, the United States military admitted that it was aware of a "rash of anti-gay killings" that had occurred in Iraq during the course of the previous eight months.

While claiming that American forces readily responded to individuals under actual attack, a spokesman for the military, Army Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, Chief of the Media Relations Division of the Multinational Corps in Iraq, made reference to the difficult situation faced by the American superintended international force. Said Breasseale,

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, when we're in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, 'Here's these issues that are going to repel 80% of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you,'" he said. "We're trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing."

In other words, America's obligations under international treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were being ignored in favor of an especial respect for local prejudices and cultural and religious dictates. To risk tampering with the general Iraqi attitude of hostility toward gay men and women would prove too great a barrier to improved relations in other areas. Article One of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, signed in 1966 and in force since 1976, states categorically that all peoples possess the right to self-determination, and with that right, the inherent privilege of determining their own political status, and direction of social, cultural, and economic development.

As of the particular time of the United States Military's announcement of its knowledge of these anti-gay killings, American forces had been present as an occupying power in Iraq for more than three years. Following the one year rule of the CPA, the "international" forces continued in Iraq as effectively the sole actual Iraqi security forces. The United States military made up the vast bulk of these forces and, except in few areas in the extreme south, around Basra, assumed overall authority and control for the operation of these same forces. During that time, a civil war broke out between the American-supported Iraqi government, and various factions opposed to that government. The occupying forces that were supposed to be restoring order in the world's newest democracy were, in fact, sitting in the middle of a contest between rival forces for the right to shape that new state, and with it - the Iraqi soul. International agreements to the contrary notwithstanding, President Bush resorted to the subterfuge that all was well with the new nation, that its people had freely decided among themselves on the current forms of government, the rights accorded to Iraqi citizens, and the general form the new society would take,

After more than three years of war the Bush administration discourse emphasized two contradictory features of Iraq:

The country now had a legitimate constitution, election, and government;

It was also on the brink of a civil war, more precisely, a communal civil war.

So how was self-determination being allowed to Iraq's gay and lesbian citizens? Where in this wonderful new plan had the democratic Iraq adopted policies that were not only discriminatory, but actually fatal, to gay Iraqi men and women? The obvious conclusion would appear to be found in Major Breasseale's statement that diplomatic pragmatism was overriding the Iraqi constitution as much as it was ignoring international human rights agreements. Yet, the details that emerged of real conditions on the ground would continue to horrify. The actual situation of Iraq's gay and lesbians was much worse than could be imagined. The Bush Administration had done virtually nothing in the way of planning prior to the invasion so as to insure stability, and a smooth transition to democratic rule.

Part III. The Full Horror of Occupation: Implicit American Support for a Bigoted Iraqi Regime

A. Catalogue of Atrocities

The stories of murder only briefly acknowledged by the United States military in June 2006, were but the first officially confirmed reports in what proved to be a litany of horrors. Numerous atrocities had been committed against gay Iraqi men and women during the course of the Occupation. The tragedies involved persons who, as representatives of organizations officially recognized by the new Iraqi government, or somehow included within the actual Iraqi state apparatus, would clearly be seen as acting in an official capacity when perpetrating their atrocities. Iraqi policemen and militia members frequently enacted parts in this vile drama while American soldiers, diplomatic personnel, and economic advisors look on and did, or said, nothing. In a report published on May 17, 2006 in the Times of London, an Iraqi man received a scribbled note that sentenced his gay son to death - "The father was told that if he did not hand his son over, other family members would be killed."

What was beginning was the first act in a religious war upon gay men and women in the rapidly Islamizing nation. Iraq's delivery from the man whom George Bush had compared to Adolf Hitler, and whose regime Bush Administration propaganda had made the very definition of atrocity, was now being given over to a situation that was oddly like the one that the President and his officials had consistently warned the American people was endemic under the old order,

Months of detailed narrative accounts by the president, other administration officials, and an echoing press had conditioned the American audience to interpret the phrase "rape rooms" as an embodiment of the evil that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In this case, the term itself was to tap into the narrative of horrific abuses as told by the president in previous remarks. The rape rooms' mention captured an entire construct of an enemy that does not adhere to the principles of civilization as we know it.

Did the horrors of rape not include gay men and women? Was civilization as we know it not threatened by the return of such conditions in American-supervised, and American-protected Iraq?

Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani issued a fatwah in October 2005 that called for the deaths of all gays in Iraq. The sentence was to be carried out by the Badr Corps, the paramilitary branch of Sistani's organization, their mission, in the words of Ali Hili, a 33-year-old gay man who had fled from Iraq, "the 'sexual cleansing' of Iraq."

In the name of this "sexual cleansing" Iraqi men and women were not only being driven from their homes, like Hili, but kidnapped, tortured, and killed, and in an expression of the ultimate horror proffered by George W. Bush to the American people - made to perform as virtual sex slaves in male prostitution rings. In a sign of the true depths to which the situation had fallen in the American president's new Iraq, a sixteen-year-old Iraqi boy described how he had been blackmailed with pictures that showed him in bed with another man:

I'm a homosexual and was forced to work as a prostitute because one of the people I had sex with took pictures of me in bed and said that, if I didn't work for him, he was going to send the pictures to my family."

The young man alluded further to the conditions of religious tyranny and repression of sexual identity by describing the fate that would befall his family if he were "exposed" as a gay man. "My life is a disaster today. I could be killed by my family to restore their honor" - a telling comment on the cultural devolution that had taken place in the less than two years between the appearance of this story and the beginning of the American occupation of Iraq. "Honor killings" play a central role in maintaining many elements of Islamic religious law. In a pattern that began under the severe pre-Invasion regime of American sanctions, traditional attitudes have revived.

The idea of a family suffering loss of honor because of the sexual misconduct of one its members is but a part of the extremist response to the adverse conditions that have only worsened since the Occupation began. Across the Muslim world, heterosexual women have been brutally stabbed to death even by their own fathers for transgression of the strict Shariah code that appears now to be serving in place of any pretense of a modern system of law and order in the new Iraqi state.

For families with gay sons and daughters, the shame can only be that much greater, for the practice of gay sex is roundly condemned by the Koran. Youths like the sixteen-year-old who was forced into prostitution face tough choices that affect every aspect of their young lives.

The psychological torture of this young man has been complemented by innumerable accounts of the severe physical tortures suffered by other gay Iraqi men and women. In the words of Manfred Nowak, conditions are "out of control."

Bodies turning up local morgues evidenced "signs of severe torture."

The killings confirm the real-life intent of Al-Sistani's fatwah which declared that, "The people involved [in homosexuality] should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing."

The Badr Corps follows a policy imported from neighboring Fundamentalist Shiite Iran, in which gay people are effectively watched, blackmailed, cajoled, and if need be tortured and put to death as a means of fulfilling the Ayatollah's decree:

Badr militants are entrapping gay men via Internet chat rooms," Hili says. "They arrange a date, and then beat and kill the victim. Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married. Badr will typically give them a month to change their ways. If they don't, or if they fail to show evidence that they plan to get married, they will be arrested, disappear and eventually be found dead. The bodies are usually discovered with their hands bound behind their back, blindfolds over their eyes and bullet wounds to the back of the head."

Operating under the noses of American occupation forces, the attacks on Iraq's gays and lesbians represent a sustained campaign of terror, and a gross violation of international treaties and norms of human and civil rights. American personnel, in fact, fail to take any action at all. Gay men are not offered protection or asylum. According to Tahseen, a 34-year-old photographer and stage actor, and gay man, the Americans, "Laugh at us and don't do anything."

Unfortunately, American authorities perceive that they must cultivate a relationship with men like Al-Sistani, regardless of whether his views represent the supposed ideals of the planned new Iraq. Years of Baathist persecution of the Shiite minority, combined with the destructive effects of the Occupation, have created a situation in which the Shiite world is riven by faction. The leadership had fragmented, devolving upon local families and their leaders, onto people like Sistani who have emerged as both secular and scared authority figures.

The feeling is that the new Iraq cannot survive without their support.

B. American "Moral Lapses": Abu Ghraib and the Wider Problem of Violence in Iraq

Yet, humiliation, unlawful imprisonment, torture, and sexual abuse were hardly unusual occurrences in occupied Iraq. While George W. Bush and American government and military officials would have had the public believe that these atrocities were solely the work of Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, it would soon become apparent that Americans were compiling their own "catalogue of horror" in the nation they effectively controlled. On April 28, 2004, the television news magazine 60 Minutes broke the story of terrible atrocities being committed by Americans at Saddam Hussein's former prison of Abu Ghraib.

The American military was using Saddam's continuing to use Saddam's former prison as a place of detention for those whom it had rounded up for being involved in activities that were supposedly against the new Iraq, Coalition forces, and other supporters of the American-backed Iraqi state. In July 2004, Amnesty International put forth a catalogue of abuses that included, "hooding, prolonged periods of standing and kneeling, sleep deprivation, beatings, and electric shocks."

More particularly, detainees were subject to large-scale sexual abuse in a deliberate attempt to achieve abject humiliation and so force prisoners to give information or admit to their alleged crimes. Proud of their work in helping to punish and contain suspected terrorists and anti-government and anti-Coalition agitators, common American soldiers and low-level non-commissioned officers actually took photographs of the repulsive scenes. Intermixed with photographs of the soldiers themselves having sex with each other, the photographic record told a horrible tale of atrocities that seemed only to stimulate the warped imaginations of the perpetrators,

One prisoner tells of being covered with phosphoric liquid from a chemical light and raped with a stick: "Then they broke the glowing finger and spread it on me until I was glowing and they were laughing. They took me to the room and they signaled me to get on the floor. And one of the police he put a part of his stick that he always carries inside my ass and I felt it going inside me about 2 centimeters, approximately. And I started screaming, and he pulled it out.... And they were taking pictures of me during all these instances."

That American soldiers could willingly perpetrate such horrors while the American president and other high officials like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, could call such actions, but the work of a few "bad apples," reveals the extent to which American policy was actually complicit in creating the atmosphere in which such abuse could thrive. Remarking on the "bad apples" defense, Major General Antonio Teguba stated that, in no uncertain terms, "This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated."

The United States was not merely an innocent bystander in a general scene of horror that included savage assaults on gay Iraqis, but an active player in an insidious drama that was mocking a mockery of the very definition of "civilization."

C. American Neglect of Treaty Obligations and Its Failure as an Occupying Power

The horrors of Abu Ghraib standing as they did alongside the outrages being committed against the gay men and women of the "new" Iraq, stood as powerful testaments to the lack of good faith inherent in the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The United States was in violation of several international agreements that defined its role as an occupying power. From the first, the Bush Administration maintained that, in its "War on Terror," Al-Qaeda and other similar terrorist detainees were not subject to the protections afforded by prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. In essence, the Administration position as put forward by first White legal advisor, and later Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, was to give American military personnel a free hand in holding and interrogating these prisoners while, at the same time, affording American soldiers a form of immunity from the constraints of international law.

The 1907 Hague Conventions, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the First Additional Protocol of 1977 explicitly forbid attacks upon civilians and civilian objects during wartime, in addition to such acts as are "expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians [or] damage to civilian objectives... which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."

Many of those swept up in U.S. raids and incarcerated and tortured at Abu Ghraib, and similar locations, had neither been accused of any offense, no more importantly, proven to have actually ever committed any offenses against either the Coalition or the new American-supported Iraqi government. These persons; however, have no recourse according to Bush Administration officials, the various United States laws explicitly condemning torture, false arrest, sexual misconduct, and the like, being applicable, so they argue, only within the borders of the United States.

The position is curious given the obvious facts "on the ground," in Iraq, that is to say, the reality of American control within that nation, and the clear precept within American law that international treaties, such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions are deemed to be part and parcel of actual American law and judicial procedure.

Further, the numerous sexual assaults discovered and condoned at Abu Ghraib represent clear and obvious attempts to insult the Muslim faith of the detainees. The Cairo Declaration of Rights in Islam, while emphasizing the rights and freedoms of Muslim within the confines of Shariah Law, is interpreted by many Islamic thinkers to cover considerably wider aspects of human and civil rights. Besides an implicit exhortation to attend to the educational, health, childrearing, and other survival needs of men and women in developing countries, they consider the Cairo Declaration to be a prescription for the conduct of soldiers toward civilians during time of war:

These rules differentiate between soldiers and civilians and provide certain protections and guarantees for each.... [and] include the ban upon killing civilian populations, including women, children, the old, the sick, monks, and people in places of worship. Likewise, these orders provided some protection for the combatants, including the safety of the wounded and the ban on burning the enemy alive, killing prisoners of war, looting, and the destruction of property in the conquered territories.

Shariah Law alone would bar the appearance together of unmarried men and women in a state of undress. Prisoners were subjected to things much worse than this, to overt sexual acts, while male prisoners were frequently exposed in front of female guards.

Most disturbing perhaps to the gay citizens of Iraq, were the uses to which gay identity were put at Abu Ghraib - the stories of prisoners forced by American soldiers to commit homosexual acts, to pretend to be gay, as means of affecting upon these persons the ultimate humiliation.