where the bushgang sex torture came from - naming the names

http://www.maxblumenthal.blogspot.com/

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The Intellectual Origins of Torture at Abu Ghraib
One of the things that struck me most about Seymour Hersh's article "The Gray Zone" is the notion that the neocon cabal's interest in applying sexual humiliatiation tactics on Arab prisoners has intellectual origins. Hersh cites a book by Hungarian Jewish author Raphael Patai as the major inspiration of the tactics prescribed for extracting info from Iraqi detainees:

"The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

While Patai is an interesting character whose work now deserves greater analysis and attention, I am more interested in the co-author of "The Arab Mind," Norvell De Atkine. De Atkine is a former Army officer who heads the JFK School of Special Warfare's Middle East department, which is essentially a university for US Special Forces and PSYOP specialists. Psychologists at JFK have performed some of the military's most extensive studies on the effects of stress and trauma on soldiers and interrogation subjects For his part, De Atkine has trained Navy Seals and officers from allied countries like Turkey in the JFK school's counterinsurgency programs and considers himself an expert in anti-guerrilla warfare.
De Atkine is also a friend of Daniel Pipes, perhaps the foremost neo-conservative intellectual figure and a Bush-appointed fellow of the federally funded US Institute of Peace. Together, De Atkine and Pipes wrote a tendentious attack on the "neo-Marxist" influence in university Middle Eastern studies programs in 1996 entitled Middle East Studies: What Went Wrong? De Atkine is most acclaimed in neocon circles for a piece he wrote called"Why Arabs Lose Wars," which draws on mostly anecdotal evidence to assert that recent Arab military failures are the symptom of Arabic cultural dysfunction.
The web of neocon intellectual connections extends far beyond what I have discussed but I'll have to follow up later.
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The Arabs vulnerability is their modesty.

Ours must be our pride.

Except modesty isn't on the list of the seven deadly sins, and Pride is #1.

http://www.wgoeshome.com

nt

so ensconced in their political ideologies that they really have no respect for truth, human life or any other values other than power!

covers it.