Monkey See Monkey Do

So we found 150 or so prisoners in a cramped room in the Interior Ministry in Baghdad. They had clearly been beaten. All of them were Sunni, The whole Interior Ministry is Shia. Sunnis are furious.

Sunni Arab leaders on Wednesday demanded an international investigation into allegations of the torture and abuse of detainees in Iraq, in what may become a major test case of Iraqi leaders’ willingness to tackle persistent reports of human rights abuses at the hands of the country’s security forces.

The demands follow Tuesday’s pledge by Shia prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to open an internal investigation into the discovery by US troops of 173 prisoners, many starved and physically abused, in an interior ministry facility in the south Baghdad district of Jadriya.

I'm sure we'd have a lot more currency in settling this dispute between Sunni and Shia if we weren't, you know, torturing prisoners OURSELVES. Now we see how blowback works. By mainstreaming torture in Iraq, we've moved the country even closer to civil war, and damaged efforts for a nonviolent political solution. There's no doubt about it.

By the way we're allegedly now throwing people to lions:

Two former Iraqi detainees tell ABC News in an exclusive interview that they were repeatedly tortured by U.S. forces seeking information about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.

Thahee Sabbar and Sherzad Khalid are two of eight men who, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union and the group Human Rights First, are suing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The men claim they were tortured for months, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and international law.

Khalid -- a 34-year-old married father of four children -- says he worked in the grocery business until July 17, 2003, when U.S. soldiers interrupted a business meeting he was having with Thahee Sabbar, who sold sugar and bananas. U.S. soldiers, they say, interrupted their meeting and arrested them.

Khalid says U.S. soldiers tied his hands behind his back, put a hood over his head, and beat him to the point of breaking his tooth and bloodying his nose. Sabbar claims he suffered similar treatment, with soldiers dislocating his shoulder.

Khalid told ABC News that U.S. soldiers at one point threatened him with live lions.

"They took us to a cage -- an animal cage that had lions in it within the Republican Palace," he said. "And they threatened us that if we did not confess, they would put us inside the cage with the lions in it. It scared me a lot when they got me close to the cage, and they threatened me. And they opened the door and they threatened that if I did not confess, that they were going to throw me inside the cage. And as the lion was coming closer, they would pull me back out and shut the door, and tell me, 'We will give you one more chance to confess.' And I would say, 'Confess to what?'"

The twin themes of sexual humiliation and threatening people with animals keep cropping up in these abuse reports. There's a book called "The Arab Mind" from which many of these ideas spring. These ideas don't necessarily reflect what the book says, but the conclusions they reach are vile and racist and a window into how this government thinks about Arabs.

In one of his recent New Yorker articles about Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh quoted an unnamed academic on the Bush administration's view of Arab culture. In the White House discussions of the subject, the academic said, two themes emerged: "one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation." And, he explained, "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior" was a book with what Hersh described as a "25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression"—Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind.

However, either Hersh's source didn't read Patai closely, or the White House didn't. Patai never says that Arabs understand only force. His position is closer to the idea that Arabs would rather trash-talk than fight, but that once the fighting starts, then "psychological mechanisms come into play, making it practically impossible for either side to stop fighting, unless totally and hopelessly defeated, or unless mediation can bring about a settlement of the dispute." This insight, however, seems of limited value, since it applies to practically all societies.

I'm dubious of any notion that there's a pan-Arabism among such a diverse and widespread group of people, all with their own societies and concerns and cultures. But the notions that "they only understand force" and "you can make them ashamed of themselves through sex" are really sick. They do nothing but confirm the worst suspicions about human nature. They project ideas like "they only respond to force" as a pretext for using force. And I don't even what to get into the reflected repression of these beliefs about Arabs and sex.

The point is that... well, Digby says it better than I would:

The frightening thing is that presumably smart people actually believed that hard core terrorists would be so upset by masturbation and sexual humiliation that they'd crack like little bitty babies. The men and women in charge of our security are obviously puerile adolescents who think that "arabs" are so fundamentally different from us that they are a lesser species.

Indeed.