[anniegetyourgun]

If it were that easy (humiliate Iraqi insurgents by making them strip naked), then perhaps the Coalition needs to issue flyers via airdrop that says if they are found to be involved, they will be stripped searched. This should cause fear and trembling on the part of the fighters.

[FreedomCalls]

Al-Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam's regime, he was electrocuted, beaten and hung from the ceiling with his hands tied behind his back. "But that's better than the humiliation of being stripped naked," he said. "Shoot me here," he added, pointing between his eyes, "but don't do this to us."

He may just get his wish. Soldiers may be less likely to take prisoners now. Dead men tell no tales.

[muawiyah]

This one doesn't quite prove that "Don't ask, don't tell" isn't working, but it comes close.

Eventually we'll get a first hand accounting from the guy who was sodomized.

[Let's Roll]

And how sick is a culture that prefers torture - the real thing - to any kind of humiliation that has to do with sex?

In a truly just world, the NARAL and PP acolytes would have to show how liberal they really are and accept the rule of islam - because after all, all cultures are equal, right?

[daybreakcoming]

"They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman," al-Shweiri said"

And this is what we want to liberate..........sigh

[mtntop3]

Perspective on all this is overdue. The world would do well to consider just what did occur under Saddam's regime.

From: Republic of Fear, by Samir al-Khalil; Pantheon; 1990:

"The first chief of Internal State Security was Nadhim Kzar, a 1969 appointee of Saddam Husain's (traditional spelling)....He (Kzar) nurtured a reputation for ruthlessness and sadistic practices, which struck fear inside the (Bathist) party itself. For instance, he had a penchant for conducting interrogations personally and extinguishing his cigarette inside the eyeballs of his victims. Kzar invigorated an organization that was inefficient..." (p. 6).

"Torture and bizarre practices in Iraqi interogation centres have been going on systematically ever since 1968 with hardly a mention abroad. The activities of the Iranian SAVAK on the other hand, were covered by the international presss notwithstanding the Shah's close ties to Western governments. This does not highlight the deviousness of Western intentions as much as it points to how much closed, secretive, and terrrorized society in Iraq is than its Iranian counterpart under the Shah ever was. Iraqis in exile in the 1970's refused to go to organizations like Amnesty to publicize their plight because of almost paranoiac fear." (p. 65)

"Torture is the apex of (the Iraqi) system...The range of cruel institutional practices in contemporary Iraq - confession rituals, public hangings, corpse displays, excutions, and finally torture - are designed to breed and sustain widespread fear..." (p. 67)

"...the object of (Iraqi) torture is the erasure of difference; it is the business of surgically intervening in the biological fact of irreducible individuality so as to 'disprove' it in reality. The confession is proof of a deviancy that was not thought to exist before. Victims who survive are hardly ever the same as the persons who went in. No matter how well the scars heal, the memory of the bodily invasion is permanent according to the testimonies of victims...Torture goes about fashioning them anew, and if death is a frequent result, at least someone cared enough to try...(p.69)

We are speaking here of millions of lives (and this does not even go into other realms of Iraqi torture, such as the horrible mustard-gassing of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children). This does not make acceptable what the recent unfortunate photographs indicated - but it does provide perspective and the emphatic nullification of media sound/print clips from (selected) Iraqis who assert that Saddam was "bettter." That is an assertion that was, sadly, inserted through fear into their very being at an early age.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The fact that he is still alive and well speaks volumes about how much torture the little crybaby endured.

[Jeff Gordon]

"They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman," al-Shweiri said.

It is hard to sympathetic with a guy that thinks like this.

[new cruelty]

Al-Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam's regime, he was electrocuted, beaten and hung from the ceiling with his hands tied behind his back.

"But that's better than the humiliation of being stripped naked," he said. "Shoot me here," he added, pointing between his eyes, "but don't do this to us."

This reads like it was written by Scrapple Face or the onion. If nothing else, our M.I. has learned that all that is needed to break the will of "die hard" al-Mahdi fighters is to look at them while they are naked.