Long Sunday

Women as Weapons of War

"Exclusive" to Long Sunday - an excerpt (courtesy of the publishers) from Kelly Oliver's recent book, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (Columbia UP, 2007).

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.

From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Women as Weapons of War, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to bare arms is a sign of freedom and progress.

Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

Read an interview with Kelly Oliver here. A PDF version of the excerpt can be found on Columbia UP's site for the book here. The publicity page for the book can be found here.

comfort torture

Yesterday, Tuesday April 10, I saw an article by Mr. Joseph Kahn at the New York Times on China's mistreatment of one of its intellectuals. If you read the Times, you've read the same article about a hundred times before. They love writing articles about evil foreign regimes while luxuriating in the pink bubble bath background assumption that "we" aren't anything like that. And thus Kahn was more than willing, when referring to China's treatment of its reformist intellectuals, to use a word that has become, recently, "contested": torture. Earlier this year, in January, I contacted another Times reporter, Mr. Scott Shane, who was unwilling to use the 'T' word in an unqualified way concerning our treatment of detainees at Guantanomo. The contrast between these two uses of the word 'torture' is what prompted me to contact both authors.

The line between the abroad and at home ...

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. [+]

Where is the border?

Wanted: Citizens to Practice Torture On

While the courts in Canada have struck down two essential parts of our "anti-terror" law as unconstitutional, the Department of Defense continues to act as though nothing has changed - perhaps anticipating the rise to power of Michael "Torture Lite" Ignatieff to power. Today I received a "call for participants" for men between the ages of eighteen and thirty (note: men only; women -- oops! GIRLS -- are encouraged to pass it along to their male friends), who live a "sedentary" lifestyle (but don't smoke) and who do less than two hours of exercise a week. These men will engage in a series of tests (building upon, unfortunately, a previous set of tests) to determine if there are culmulative effects to sensory deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat (including "rectal probe"!?), water, and pressure, and so on. The entire project is justified in terms of "helping our troops operate in extreme conditions." Of course, no front line troop is fat, lazy, out of shape, etc. What are, however, living sedantary lifestyles with less than two hours of exercise per week are indefinitely detained terrorists undergoing "torture lite."

Measure twice, cut once, as it were.

The "research protocol" is available here in pdf. The cover email is posted below.

Fascism checklist: legalized torture, legalized surveillance

The LA Times article excerpted below is horrifying. So are the views expressed. Amnesty International is 'concerned' about the upcoming bill, primarily because of it's 'ambiguity.' There is 'worry' that the Bush administration 'would use the language to claim approval of tough methods.' 

What kind of nonsense is this? Why the soft language? Why the diplomacy? WHERE IS THE FUCKING OUTRAGE? The whole purpose of the new bill is to make legal practices that are currently illegal. That's it. That's why the Bush regime wants it. It wants the power to torture--and it wants the rest of us to know that it can torture and surveill and detain without cause, without explanation, without limit.

Defense Lawyers Assail Legislation on Detainees - Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON — Military defense lawyers assailed compromise legislation for interrogating and prosecuting terrorism suspects, contending Friday that proposed rules would prevent them from learning whether evidence used against their clients was obtained through coercion or torture.

At the same time, rights groups that initially endorsed the compromise between the Bush administration and key Senate Republicans expressed reservations, saying it appeared on closer reading to be vague and could give President Bush and future presidents too much latitude.