‘Rectal Feeding’ is CIA Sodomy

by SB Veda

I was as shocked as anyone as the CIA’s ‘coercive interrogation’ techniques were described in gruesome detail by the Senate Committee Report on the matter, released on December 9th. There is too much in the report to deal comprehensively with the crimes in the space of a single article – which is why I would like to focus on one technique alone: ‘Rectal Feeding’.

Forget, that I had never heard of such a thing before in my life – and the thought of it, sent ripples of revulsion throughout my trunk, I am at a loss to understand why the media hasn’t called ‘rectal feeding without due medical cause’ what it is: a form of forced sodomy, sexual assault or rape. According to an excerpt from well respected UK daily, The Guardian, the non-medically sanctioned practice of rectal feeding was performed to humiliate and assert total control over detainees. Isn’t that what motivates sexual predators to rape women and men?

You can read the excerpt for yourself, below:

CIA operatives subjected at least five detainees to what they called “rectal rehydration and feeding”.

One CIA cable released in the report reveals that detainee Majid Khan was administered by enema his “‘lunch tray’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins was ‘pureed and rectally infused’”. One CIA officer’s email was in the report quoted as saying “we used the largest Ewal [sic] tube we had”.

Rectal feeding is of limited application in actually keeping a person alive or administering nutrients, since the colon and rectum cannot absorb much besides salt, glucose and a few minerals and vitamins. The CIA administered rectal rehydration to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “without a determination of medical need” and justified “rectal fluid resuscitation” of Abu Zubaydah because he “partially refus[ed] liquids”. Al-Nashiri was given an enema after a brief hunger strike.

Risks of rectal feeding and rehydration include damage to the rectum and colon, triggering bowels to empty, food rotting inside the recipient’s digestive tract, and an inflamed or prolapsed rectum from carless insertion of the feeding tube. The report found that CIA leadership was notified that rectal exams may have been conducted with “Excessive force”, and that one of the detainees, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, suffered from an anal fissure, chronic hemorrhoids and symptomatic rectal prolapse.

The CIA’s chief of interrogations characterized rectal rehydration as a method of “total control” over detainees, and an unnamed person said the procedure helped to “clear a person’s head”.
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The CIA chief interrogator’s description is eerily similar to what Stanford University’s describes as the main motivation for rape: “Sexual assault is NOT a crime of passion, driven by a strong desire for sex; it is a violent crime driven by a desire for dominance.”

So, I’m asking why isn’t this more obvious to the US Media? It is perhaps understandable that they might wish to view their military intelligence establishment as being overzealous in interrogating, resorting to the use of illegal violence – but sexual violence – that would take atrocity to a new level. It might well be downright indefensible (that is, unless you’re Dick Cheney, who called the report a ‘bunch of hooey’).

There is ample evidence on record of rape as a weapon of war. The pillage of villages by marauders has been known since the dawn of recorded history. The 20th Century saw the use of rape as a deliberate military strategy. As early as 1971, The Pakistan waged a sanctioned campaign of rape during Operation Searchlight, a military campaign to clamp down on dissident Bengali citizens of Pakistan’s erstwhile eastern flank. Their brutality only made the Bengalis more determined, and with the aid of India, the Bengali nation of Bangladesh was liberated from the tyranny of what was formerly known as West Pakistan. It might seem like a happy ending but the victims of those crimes against humanity are still suffering in the aftermath. It takes generations to heal from these kinds of atrocities, and the country continues to grapple with the war crimes perpetrated both by the Pakistani Army and East Pakistani collaborators.

Rape has been documented as a weapon of war more recently in the Balkans, Rwanda, Haiti, The Congo, Mozambique, Chechnya and Afghanistan to name just a few. It has been used for purposes of ‘ethnic cleansing’ to ‘improve the gene pool’, and disperse communities.

This is the first I have hear of rape or the threat of rape being used as a sanctioned method of obtaining responses to questions. But Americans are all for being first, aren’t they?

According to Global Justice Center, the laws of war prohibit the use of all weapons or tactics of warfare that cause superfluous injury, unnecessary suffering, or violate “principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.” Sexual violence, therefore, constitutes a prohibited weapon or tactic of war under the criteria set by the laws of war. Yet, despite the endemic use of rape as a weapon, no state has ever been held accountable for the use of rape as a prohibited weapon of war.

This must stop. Moreover, recognizing the injustice and preventing its continuance offers the US a path to virtue.

The UN Security Council of which the USA is a permanent member, passed a resolution condemning sexual violence as a weapon of war but has yet to identify a mechanism for enforcement. Maybe the biggest, baddest, baddaassed military in the world should do something about it.

And let’s start with some real American Justice. True life Law and Order: SVU.

I call upon the Unites States to send a message that it is serious about punishing the perpetrators of these inhuman acts against its prisoners by being the first nation to hold its military accountable by pursuing sexual assault cases against the perpetrators of non-medical rectal feeding. President Obama needs to send a message that profound in order to begin writing the wrongs and setting the United states of America back on a path resembling that laid out by her founding fathers. And, this virtuous campaign can be championed throughout the world by the USA, giving new impetus to the all but forgotten human rights initiative of Unites States’ foreign policy.

Otherwise, this is just going to go on and on and on, and in the process, the USA will continue to be an object of contempt, animus, outright disgust. And who, other than the Dick, Cheney would be so delusional as to defend them?