The Washington Post's lead editorial today lays out the third and fourh Geneva convention and shows how we have clearly been in violation of them. It also gives an analysis of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone's testimony yesterday, stating:

if President Bush and his senior officials would acknowledge their complicity in playing fast and loose with international law and would pledge to change course, they might begin to find a way out of the mess. Instead, they hope to escape from this scandal without altering or even admitting the improper and illegal policies that lie at its core. It is a vain hope, and Congress should insist on a different response.

I got some comments on my last post, suggesting that maybe I was making a stretch between American homophobia and what happened in Iraq. It may be true that it is not possible at this time for us to figure out what were the sociological underpinnings of such abhorent behavior. Also, there is still a lot to be sorted out in public view as to whether this was bad behavior of a few low ranking soldiers, or whether there was some systematic request for the guards to engage in these practices. The reason, however, that I attribute this to homophobia, that is to say a derision and hatred of gay sexuality, is that, in my mind, employing techniques to humiliate that include making a man masturbate in front of other men, making someone pretend to engage in sexual practices with and in front of other men, purposely capitalizing on Iraqi cultural norms relating to homosexuality as a way of making torture MORE humiliating and MORE brutal, to me seems to be the most extreme manifestation of fear and hatred of homosexuality. Potentially, these activities point to a side of these young people, be it their American culture or their human nature that is particuarly ugly. There are lots of ways to intimidate or brutalize people, and these young people chose these methods. Clearly these ideas came from somewhere, and I can't help but identify them with other instances brutality in the United States in which sexuality was an issue.

A heartening editorial in the Army Times.

Wait. So I want to amend my earlier post. The abuse at Abu Ghraib isn't homoerotic. It's not erotic. It's abuse and not erotic and therefore can't be homoerotic. What is so damaging about sexual abuse, harassment, and assault, all things that American soldiers did at the prison in Iraq, is that it uses sex as a means of violating and as a means of control. In addition to completing destroying the United States's credibility as a champion of human rights, it exports a particularly American brand of disregard for same-sex sexuality and violence where gay sexuality is concerned. You all know what falls into this category: frat-boys drunken gay bashing and the Matthew Shephard and Boys Don't Cry-scale atrocities that are part of the fabric of living in the United States. I can't help wondering whether the outcome would have been different if Clinton had forced the Pentagon to really deal with the presence of gays in the military. If the armed forces had done training to encourage service men and women to deal with the legitimate presence of gay and lesbian service people, would we be seeing this kind of sexual intimidation and abuse?

Josh Marshall says what I have been thinking, how the homoerotic nature of the torture at Abu Ghraib is a manifestation of the deep rooted fear and disgust at homosexuality that's part of American culture.

OK, I really am lame. If I wasn't lame before (I mean I know I was) I am definitely without any excuses now. Biking, the March for Women's Lives in DC on Sunday, rocky emotional turmoil, and work have inhibited my ability to post even the most mundane comments about my life. I am off to San Francisco on Friday for a meeting, (not a bad business trip as they go).

I keep having grant plans for this. Setting up a blog roll, posting comments on people's sites, people linking to funny things I said about the WMD's or Grammy nominations or something. But I haven't even figured out to post my email. See beginning of entry.

I raised $190.00 for the American Diabetes Association. It's funny, I grew up in a household that discouraged such things on the grounds that people would feel inappropriately compelled to donate. I think one time some bright-eyed youngster put my Mom on the spot and she never recovered. Turns out, its kind of fun to raise money for something, even if it is a well-funded, non-controversial, mainline health consumer group. Someone in my family got diagnosed with diabetes this year, and has done really well since diagnosis. Which is good, because diabetes sucks. It's a horrible, horrible illness to have. So it seems like a good way to give back.

Plus, it gives me an excuse to get out and ride 30 miles, which apparently, I am not going to do on my own....

So I think last week I successfully got myself back into the biking mode. I rode in to work one time and rode to, well towards, Nyack on Saturday. Then I pried myself out of bed again this morning. Also I did a long walk through Central Park on Thursday, on the way home from school. I ride a bicycle that belonged to my last roommate, which collected dust and animal hair in our living room for almost a year and a half before I haltingly asked if I might borrow it sometime to you know, like, ride. She was more than glad to have someone to use it and she offered me the bike on the spot, and then it was my bike collecting dust in the living room. This bike is a Huffy. Remember Huffy's? Huffy's is the company that made the pink banana seat bike with the tassels dangling from the handles that the girl next door had. This is entirely fictional, as their was never, ever a girl living next door to me when I was growing up, much to my dismay. But my point is that my bike is made by the people that design banana bicycles. It's not so high level, which is mostly evidenced by the fact that shifting up on the left side doesn't really take me into a higher gear so much as it initiates a series of clicking noises.

Last summer I did the 25 mile version of the New York Century Ride on my Huffy, which was actually fine. At the end of the ride, as I watched all the riders come in I scoured the crowd for someone else riding a Huffy I told myself I stuck with the biking thing, I could by another bike, a decent bike, on that has more than 6 gears that work. I am doing another bike ride now, this time a fundraiser, the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure and somehow I feel the need to complete that before I start thinking about buying a bicycle. Plus there are the financial considerations. I am buying an apartment in June. So for now I am laboring on my little Huffy, down through Fort Washington and Hudson River parks. Its quite lovely down there in the morning. I saw what I believe were cherry blossoms.

The thing about biking is, it appears to be a very gear-oriented sport. There is a very specific biker look to the outfits, and the paraphenalia. I rode to Nyack yesterday and I felt distinctly ill-equipped, partly because Nyack is a destination for people who do this frequently. My sweat pants and my orange pullover were billowing in the wind, my sun glasses were distinctly different from the orange and blue creatures that were speeding by me on the George Washington Bridge. Plus there was the speed issue. I was consistently being passed by everyone. If you go to Central Park you feel a little more at home, because you see other people in normal looking clothes, on their bicycles. But Nyack is a little intimidating. Plus its far. I only got as far a Tenafly, before I headed back.