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WSJ takes on Sully: In Praise of Fake Menstrual Blood
One of the oddest, and saddest, stories on the World Wide Web over the past few years has been the transformation of Andrew Sullivan. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, he emerged as an eloquent supporter of America's war against Islamist terrorists; although we had disagreed with him about various domestic matters pre-9/11, we offered him "three cheers" in a Sept. 17, 2001, item. Perhaps he was a bit overenthusiastically militant at times, but that is a sin of which this column has probably not been totally innocent either.Sometime in the past two years, though, Sullivan turned into a fervent supporter of the "rights" of terrorists. His blog now consists largely of post after post bewailing the "torture" and "abuse" of the enemy. There are some important issues here, but Sullivan ignores crucial distinctions, treating Guantanamo as if it were the same as Abu Ghraib, illegal combatants as if they were legitimate prisoners of war. He even went so far as to endorse Sen. Dick Durbin's outrageous comparison of American servicemen to Nazis. It's all too self-righteous, over the top and voluminous to engage seriously, but one particular Sullivan fixation strikes us as telling. See if you can spot the recurring theme in these passages: "It is perfectly conceivable, given the torture policies promoted and permitted by this president, that desecration of the Koran has taken place in Guantanamo. Many other insane and inhumane interrogation tactics have turned out to be true. Remember smearing fake menstrual blood?"--May 14 "A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to '[obscenity] Allah,' after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran?"--May 16 "Does [White House press secretary Scott] McClellan really want the press to report more widely on what has been going on at Guantanamo Bay? Does he really want more stories about forced nakedness, female interrogators using panties and fake menstrual blood, and many reports from former inmates about deliberate misuse of the Koran? Well, let it rip, I say."--May 17 "Does Glenn [Reynolds] really believe for a second that idiotic tactics like brandishing fake menstrual blood or Stars of David at Muslim inmates are good interrogation practices? Does he think these excrescences have helped gain any useful intelligence in any way? The problem with these abuses is that they are evil and stupid; immoral and counter-productive, as so many experts in interrogation will testify."--May 18 "I'm not playing dumb. Shining shoes is not the same thing as treating prisoners as animals. It's not the same thing as smearing them with fake menstrual blood."--June 21 "Israeli interrogators do not kick the Koran or pee on it or throw it to the ground. They learn it word for word. They quote it back to their prisoners. They win their confidence and infiltrate their networks. They gain good intelligence by eschewing the goon-like antics of the Gitmo clowns. Fake menstrual blood? If it weren't so disgusting, it would be risible. But it's true. Remember that, whatever the Tarantos of this world want to deflect the conversation to. It's true. It happened. In the end, reality will count."--June 22 "From smearing inmates with fake menstrual blood, to desecrating the Koran, to forcing one Abu Ghraib prisoner to drink alcohol and eat pork, to burning Muslim corpses facing West . . . we now have a litany of abuses that are objectively evil and almost designed to lose us support among the broad Muslim population."--Oct. 20 (ellipsis in original) This list is by no means comprehensive, but you get the idea. The "fake menstrual blood" is apparently a reference to a reported incident, recounted in this Associated Press story from January, in which a female interrogator was questioning a Saudi detainee who had taken flight lessons in Arizona before 9/11: The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash. Islam forbids physical contact with women other than a man's wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean. "The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," says the draft, stamped "Secret." The interrogator used ink from a red pen to fool the detainee. So the "fake menstrual blood" that Sullivan describes as "insane," "inhumane," "evil," "immoral" and "disgusting" turns out to be . . . red ink! And not even metaphorical red ink (i.e., debt, also forbidden in Islam), but actual red ink! Sullivan's frenzied reaction seems completely out of place--and it also leads us to think that the use of "fake menstrual blood" may be an effective interrogation technique, just as the Muslim linguist told the female interrogator it would be. Note how when Sullivan (or most anyone else) writes about this, it's always "fake menstrual blood," never just "fake blood." Lots of people are squeamish about blood, but the suggestion here is that there is something sordid about menstruation. This is nonsense. A woman's reproductive cycle is natural and normal. Girls realize this within hours of hitting puberty, but it takes longer for boys to figure out. To a preteen male, the news that women have periods is unsettling. But boys eventually become men, and most of them have intimate relationships with women, which helps to demystify the female reproductive system. To a mature man, menstruation is not a horror. There are, however, exceptions--adult men who remain strangers to the female body. Among them are homosexual men who identify as gay at a young age and thus do not have heterosexual experiences. Also among them are single men from sexually repressed cultures, such as fundamentalist Islamic ones, in which contact between the sexes is rigidly policed. Many of America's enemy prisoners fall into the latter category. If the mere idea of "fake menstrual blood" discombobulates Andrew Sullivan so, it stands to reason that its actual employment might be an excellent way to break the enemy's resistance. Posted by: anon 2005-10-22 |
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