Written by: Athena Kalaganis

Edited by: Abigail George

On November 3rd, Dick Cheney, the Vice-president to George W. Bush, died at the age of 84. As the news broke, public figures were quick to sanitize his legacy. Kamala Harris, who received his endorsement for the presidency, described Cheney as a “devoted public servant,” referencing his three decades long career in American governance. Concerningly, many statements on Cheney’s passing have overlooked, or completely omitted his legacy of violence as the chief architect of the War on Terror (WOT). Proudly known as  “Darth Vader” of the Bush administration, Cheney’s considerable influence in the 2000s led to the administration’s new legal classification of “enemy combatants,” allowing the US military to apprehend and question people believed to be associated with terrorists without consideration of the Geneva Conventions. This radically altered the lives of many marginalized people and sparked a precedent of ill treatment towards immigrants still present in American governance today.

Over the course of the War on Terror, the US military inflicted numerous human rights violations upon civilian populations, one of the most notable being those reported at the Abu Ghraib prison complex. Opened in the 1960s by British contractors and located in the outskirts of Baghdad, Abu Ghraib was a site of Bush and Cheney’s systematized patterns of violent interrogation techniques, notably including sexual violence. This pattern has been reflected in the current Trump administration’s immigration detention facilities and Israeli prisons. The male victims of sexual violence at Abu Ghraib have been failed by both feminist scholarship at the time and by the lack of consequences suffered by the Bush administration. 

Abu Ghraib 

Between 2003 and 2006, Abu Ghraib became the US military’s largest operated detention facility in Iraq. In February 2004, US Major General Antonio Taguba investigated reports of abuses and concluded that he witnessed a “systemic and illegal abuse of detainees […] intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force.” His reported abuse included non-consensual videotaping and photographing of male and female detainees naked and in sexually explicit positions and acts, forcefully dressing male detainees in women’s underwear, attaching electrical wires to a male detainee’s genitals to “simulate electric torture,” and rape.The Taguba report was leaked by the Wall Street Journal in May 2004, emerging shortly after photographs were released of Abu Ghraib atrocities, which featured naked, hooded male prisoners often near smiling female guards, amused by the humiliation they perpetrated. Talib al-Majli, unlawfully detained at Abu Ghraib in 2003 for 16 months, said, “to this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me, (…) The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life.” He claimed to be able to identify himself in the infamous “human pyramid” photograph in which hooded naked detainees were stacked on top of one another, and that he  “would rather have been dead than to be in that position.”

Over 100,000 Iraqis were detained as unlawful combatants by the US between 2003 and 2009, and as many as 3800 at once were held at Abu Ghraib. Approximately 70 to79 percent of those detained in 2003 were believed to be detained by mistake. Majli is only one of thousands of victims who faced long-term sequelae, including physical and emotional trauma, inability to find and maintain work, and communal ostracization, without having received any form of compensation from the American government. 

Rationalizing Abuse

The torture and sexual violence inflicted upon  Abu Ghraib prisoners was often overlooked. During the WOT, feminist scholarship experienced “limitations” in terms of taking into account the sexual abuse perpetrated by female guards on male detainees. By positioning themselves as defenders of Muslim women, organizations such as the Feminist Majority Foundation advocated for the WOT due to its understanding as an “attack on Islamic fundamentalism.” 

When the photographs featuring female soldiers were leaked, the feminist default was not to acknowledge the Iraqi victim, but to recognize the patriarchal constructions of the female soldiers that led to their abhorrent behaviour. For instance, Barbara Ehrenreich, American author and activist, lamented the fact that a uterus is not synonymous with moral superiority. She recognized the harm caused by the women yet believed that harm had been committed as a result of the female soldiers’ desires to operate within the patriarchal institution of the US military without wanting to subvert its operations. Her rationale was motivated by the idea that the inclusion of women in the military could change the culture of male violence. A higher distribution of women in the army cannot tame the militarism of the world’s most powerful army. Believing it can, places women as a monolithic moral counterbalance to men. Thus, Abu Ghraib detainees are not victims of WOT violence in their own right but unfortunate consequences to the failures of the female soldiers to reform the American military. 

WOT feminist scholarship interacted with the sexual assault of men through an Orientalist gaze. Prejudiced blindposts kept analysis from sincerely engaging with the victimhood of the Muslim male; the other only existed as an aggressor. Eileen L. Zubriggen, feminist scholar known for her works in gender psychology, contextualized male victimhood through a heteronormative binary where the female soldiers act as “men” perpetrating sexual violence upon male detainees acting as female victims. These arguments subconsciously reinforce the problematic idea that sexual violence can only be committed by men against women and that the Muslim male is only a victim when made to act as a woman. Western feminism highlights feminine victimhood either through the justification of the actions of soldiers or in theoretical imagination, distancing analyses away from the abuse of Iraqi men by agents of the imperial core. 

While the analytical feminist response recognized the military as a pervasive force of violence, Bush responded to the Abu Ghraib scandal by isolating the brutality of the event as the work of a few “bad apples.” Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, revealed that Dick Cheney wanted to repeal any constraints imposed by the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of detainees. When interviewed by CNN in 2014, Cheney addressed the interrogation techniques being called “brutal and ineffective,”stating “I would do it again in a minute.” 

Repercussions and Contemporary Parallels

11 individual US soldiers were charged in military courts, with nine sentenced to jail time in 2004. None were held liable for sexual crimes. A year ago, Virginia defence contractor CACI International Inc. was required by a civil US court to award damages to three Iraqi prisoners for its implication in interrogation, yet nobody from the Bush administration was held legally responsible. 

Abu Ghraib was not an isolated case of torture at the hands of the American military. Another lasting symbol of the WOT’s legacy of abuse is the Guantanamo Bay naval base, the American military prison off the Cuban coast notorious for torturing and indefinitely imprisoning detainees without fair trial. While retaining 35 WOT prisoners, most of whom have not been charged with a crime, the base is featured in Trump’s plan of mass deportation. Reports of sexual assault at the hands of guards are emerging from CECOT, the maximum-security prison Trump has ordered deportations to. Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Asadullah Haroon claims that “there isn’t much of a difference in the torture of prisoners of Palestine, Guantanamo, Bagram [Afghanistan] and Abu Ghraib.” 

Sexual abuse is not an aberration of the past but a persistent tactic of the imperial core. Muslim victims have been failed by both the feminist scholarship of the WOT and the lack of accountability of the Bush administration. The grim legacy of Dick Cheney lives on, and under no circumstance should it be ignored.