Guantanamo Bay’s latest tactics damage us all

Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” would be pursing her lips right now and blaming S-A-T-A-N.

I’m not invoking the name of the devil, but I’m in a lip-pursing mood myself this week.

The latest tactics revealed from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay seem designed to confirm the Arab world’s worst suspicions about us.

Why would we turn to the worst aspects of our culture to combat the hatred in theirs? Asking female interrogators to sexually humiliate Arab prisoners is both morally wrong and a public relations disaster.

The Associated Press recently reported scenes from Guantanamo that echo with all the bizarre sexual aggression of an MTV music video.

Former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar worked as an Arabic translator at the prison from December 2002 to June 2003. He drafted a manuscript that describes the way the U.S. military used women to attempt to break the will of terror suspects.

He wrote of seeing “a short skirt and thong underwear on the hook in the back of the door” in an interrogation team’s office. “Later I learned that this outfit was used for interrogations by one of the female civilian contractors,” he wrote, ” … on a team which conducted interrogations in the middle of the night on Saudi men who were refusing to talk.”

His manuscript describes the tactics of female interrogators who rubbed their breasts on the prisoners’ backs, taunted them for getting erections and tormented them with fake menstrual blood. FBI observers have also criticized an incident in which a woman on an interrogation team grabbed a prisoner’s genitals.

Sexual assault, always a display of power and aggression, strikes human beings where they are most vulnerable — their sexuality. Whether it’s wielded by Catholic priests, rap musicians or female military members, it’s abhorrent.

Last week a watchdog group, the Parents Television Council, criticized MTV for producing “incessant sleaze” designed to appeal to American teens. In one week last March, this group counted 3,056 flashes of nudity or sexual situations and 2,881 verbal references to sex on that channel.

MTV, along with the worst of the U.S. advertising and entertainment industry, drowns teens around the world with the relentless images of our culture’s worst export: a soulless fascination with sexual aggression and violence.

When young Americans grow up and go to war, is it any wonder this stuff lies within the realm of their imagination?

Every generation tries to shock the one that precedes it. But this one had the help of entire industries full of irresponsible adults, not to mention baby boomers parents who hit the snooze button.

Only dim and vulgar minds could concoct the twisted ideas reported from Guantanamo. And whether these ideas come from younger staffers, or older, presumably more MTV-free brains, we don’t know.

Here’s what we do know: Employing female interrogators to sexually torment terror suspects damages us all. It exploits and debases the women. It’s a reprehensible assault on the prisoners. And it’s likely to be toxic as a Britney Spears video on the hearts and minds of the Arab people we’re trying to win over.

Americans’ use of the female body to sell jewelry, alcohol and cars, not to mention music CDs, has never been a cause for misty-eyed patriotism. It’s a dichotomy that the most powerful nation in the world manages to degrade its own women so gleefully, with everything from trucker mud flaps to Internet porn.

Muslim extremists certainly haven’t set any examples for dealing fairly or humanely with women: They shroud their wives and daughters in burkas, restrict them from going out in public and stone them for suspected adultery.

But moderate Arabs, like moderate Americans, often value modesty and self-control. They attempt to defuse the power of sexuality with cultural mores that set limits and tone down the volume in their young people’s lives. They look askance at the images of American pop culture — for good reason.

They don’t necessarily hate our freedom, but they frequently hate our values.

These dark tales from Guantanamo reveal a soulless side to the America that our president paints lately in such grand rhetoric. They lie in stark contrast to the shining image he describes of American goodness and freedom.

They must come to an end.