Most news of the torture scandal in Iraq has involved male prisoners. Luke Harding, a
Guardian reporter in Baghdad, puts the focus today on the
women needn’t have been incarcerated to come in for abuse, either. American soldiers on the
street apparently feel they have a license to treat them like trash.
Harding quotes Huda Shaker describing her humiliation at a checkpoint on the outskirts of
the city, when one soldier pointed his gun at her and demanded to search her handbag. “He
pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest,” she said. “Then he pointed
to his penis. He told me, ‘Come here, bitch, I’m going to fuck you.'” Professor Shaker, Harding
informs us, is a political scientist at Baghdad University.
Astounding as that is, can we expect anything else when American leaders at the top of the
chain of command, beginning with the nincompoop in the White House, pay nothing more than lip
service to morality? Rummy boy says U.S. interrogation methods are just
fine. So, golly gee, what’s to worry?
