The Pentagon should probably feel good about today’s latest (Page One!) installment in the faux torture controversy, offered up by the Washington Post. You know this story has to be collapsing of its own absurd weight when the tugging on our national heart strings now involves this egregious “abuse” of Muslim men: They are being forced to endure the deep indignity of being questioned by women clad in tee-shirts.
This is the 21st Century America of Maplethorp, Piss-Christ, MTV, and R-rated movies that would have been X-rated 10 years ago — the America where a poor Muslim man trying to watch a professional football game can’t get through the first quarter without enduring the deep indignity of three Viagra commercials. Anyone who raises the slightest complaint about the unflinching coarseness all around us is labeled by the self-same Washington Post as a modern day Mrs. Grundy. Yet, we are now supposed to get worked up over the anxiety caused to jihadists — who would otherwise be home eagerly watching the latest beheading on al-Jazeera — from being exposed to women whose appearance and conduct is probably too tame for daytime television in this country.
And, by the way, what is it that the Islamo-fascists want? They want to get out of Guantanamo Bay and get back to the jihad where, if they are lucky, as their Wahhabist belief-system defines luck, they will kill us while martyring themselves and thus be entitled to their 72 virgins. My question for the Washington Post: Just what exactly do you reckon these demure, dignified fellows figure on doing with the said virgins?
The most inane line of this inane article: “Some of the accounts resemble the sexual aspects of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib. Photographs that became public last year showed a servicewoman there holding naked prisoners on a leash and posing next to a pile of naked prisoners.” Puleease get a grip here. The article describes exposure to women wearing tee-shirts, the smearing on some prisoners of small amounts of red dye that they were led to believe was menstrual blood, and one highly dubious allegation by a prisoner that he was provocatively approached by three women in their underwear before being beaten by a team of soldiers. Some of this sounds idiotic if it actually happened, but it certainly is not Abu Ghraib. Isn’t there any actual news that is worthy of page one?