If you are ever tempted to think that the fight for gay rights and against homophobia will be in any way secondary to other fronts in the coming civil war against Apocalyptic Judeo-Christian Fundamentalist Neo-Conservative Fascism, think again.

Digby has written great posts about this issue before, notably when he pointed out that American soldiers refer to any and all violence directed against male prisoners as "fucking." Now he makes another crucial point, which seems obvious when you think about it, but also grows in complexity when you try to consider the implications: there is clearly some sort of policy (formal or otherwise) that encourages soldiers to stick things up the asses of Muslim prisoners. Virtually every report that comes out about prisoner abuse mentions this particular abuse.

As Digby points out, this is nothing other than rape. It resembles the strategy of the Serbians who set up rape camps in Bosnia in order to terrorize the Muslim communities there. But our rape camps are for men.

This whole emphasis on anal rape may have some "strategic" rationale, perhaps cribbed from Israeli manuals on the use of sexual humiliation in the interrogation of Muslims. (Remember the Israelis who were employed by the "consulting" agencies that ran the "Military Intelligence operation" at Abu Ghraib.)

But I strongly believe that any "strategic" explanation for this pattern is merely a very thin veneer. It is really painfully obvious that our soldiers--and, probably more importantly, our military leaders, civilian and in uniform--get off on raping male prisoners. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush--of course they are obsessed with forcing objects up men's asses. How could they not be? Doing this is one of the most basic purposes, if not the primary motive, of the Iraq war.