Les Enfants Terrible

ARE HIGH HEELS A TORTURE DEVICE? A high level military report on detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay has been released and falls well short of accusations irresponsibly thrown around by anti-war fanatics. The report...

"...has concluded that several prisoners were mistreated or humiliated, perhaps illegally, as a result of efforts to devise innovative methods to gain information..."

Here is how one detainee described a hunger strike incident.

He said that after one of them, a protest of guards' handling of copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stepped on, a senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop.

The same detainee described the camp environement as one in which officials sought...(gasp)...obedience.

Mr. al-Mutairi, the released Kuwaiti detainee, described the camp environment as one in which authorities sought to keep prisoners thoroughly obedient.

The second hunger strike was a reaction to female interrogators.

The second hunger strike was to protest treatment during interrogations, including the use of sexual taunting by female interrogators.

Of course, these are the same people who think a woman who displays an ankle has committed a sexual crime. Still, it is the women who are on the hot seat in the treatment of prisoners, as this description from an FBI agent notes.

...they had seen female interrogators forcibly squeeze male prisoners' genitals, and that they had witnessed other detainees stripped and shackled low to the floor for many hours.

A group called "Physicians for Human Rights," a notoriously leftist organization, also leveled this charge against women interrogators.

...female interrogators flaunting their sexuality to humiliate devout Muslims, including smearing red fluid said to be menstrual blood on prisoners.

The report does not verify these charges, and PHR will not divulge their source, leaving one to wonder why it was included in the report at all.

The report is ambiguous at best regarding the legality of some of the interrogation techniques. A quick perusal of the charges that seem to have been proven though, and it looks as though the prisoners had their Koran's mistreated, were shackled at times, were forced to be obedient, and received the occasional lap dance, complete with a courtesy squeeze.

So far, there is no evidence that stripper poles had been installed in interrogation rooms.