by Dr. Susan Block

And now the latest POW porn release from the CIA Sexual Torture and Degradation Department: Anal Food Rape. Already, it’s quite the blockbuster, the shocking but not unexpected sequel to previous POW porn releases, lurid stories and photo sets showing scenes of detainee abuse, produced and directed by the Bush-Cheney crime family, still number one in the military torture fetish porn genre. Scripted by the same Top-Gun team of military psychologists, Drs. Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, a.k.a., Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, a.k.a., “the American Mengales,” who also brought us water-boarding, hoods, naked pyramids, snuff films, forced masturbation and facial panty-wearing, this latest XXXtreme POW porn release is particularly disturbing, disgusting and painful… and that’s just the PR.

Onto the sick details. CIA records (courtesy of the Senate Intelligence committee) reveal that interrogators “anally-infused” a hunger-striking prisoner named Majid Khan with a “lunch tray” of pureed “hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins.” Sounds delicious when paired with a nice Chardonnay… but up the butthole? Ouch, yuck and, as Jon Stewart so vividly illustrated with that expectorating Monty Python clip, BARF!

This “enhanced interrogation technique” (EIT) was at first presented as an “enema,” but later redefined as “rectal rehydration.” Since when are mashed garbanzo beans and nuts hydrating? Next they’ll be calling it a “colonic” and charging $200 a treatment. That’s just a joke, but the reality is much worse. American taxpayers footed an $81 million bill for this diabolical mess, mostly paid to those psycho psychologists with the anal feeding fetish.

Whatever you call it, squirting your sauce up a detainee’s defenseless buttocks is clearly against the rules of the CIA Directorate of Operations Handbook, the Geneva Conventions and basic decency. Moreover, “enhanced,” injected, lubed or bareback—it simply doesn’t work. Not that “working” should excuse any kind of rape, but the report also lets us know that no terror plot was ever thwarted thanks to these Weapons of Ass Destruction or any abusive interrogation tactics. This makes sense. Tortured individuals are notorious for saying ANYTHING to get the pain to stop.

Three Reasons to Commit Anal Food Rape

So… if it’s so horrible and ineffective, why do such a thing? I can think of three possible reasons (none good):

1) Cold Calculating $adism. Say you’re already a bit of a sadist. Why else would you get into this line of work? Perhaps you were sexually abused at boarding school, or maybe you’re just a psychopath with a psychology degree. You feel symbolically castrated by the falling of the Twin Towers accompanied by a desire for payback—and that $81 million paycheck. Your exciting new job as an EIT specialist has got you pumped even though you’re temporarily stuck living in the same lousy housing as the prisoners, making you feel the need to assert your dominance deeply and forcefully. Next thing you know there you are, forcibly separating the hapless enemy’s backdoor defenses and administering “anal feedings” costing thousands of American dollars each, like a demented, wildly overpaid, über-bad nurse-dietician. When it comes to sexually controlling problem patients, Ken Kesey’s fictional Nurse Ratched has nothing on the reality-based Anal-Destroyer Doctors Jessen and Mitchell. They put the `rapist’ into “therapist.”

2) CIA Protocols. You’re just following orders. Just doing your job. Your superior officer or the psycho psychologists or the voices in your head tell you to anally force-feed prisoners, so you anally force-feed prisoners. You do it because it’s just the way things “get done” around here, at least since Abu Ghraib. So you silence the inner voice of compassion screaming “This is so wrong (and criminal)!” and you do it, you commit anal food rape, hoping it won’t be done to you… unless you’re (very secretly) hoping it will be done to you.

3) Convenience. The prisoner won’t eat, and it’s lunchtime (yours). You figure, let’s just stick a carrot up his ass and call it a meal. Puree it and you can even call it medicine, especially since it’s doctor’s orders. It’s quick, clinical and seemingly effective. After all, the silent, hunger-striking bastard’s getting “fed” and howling all kinds of “information” within seconds of his rectal-infusion, isn’t he? Which means you can get off duty in time to stuff your face in the interrogator cafeteria.

There are worse fates than rectal infusion (like getting bombed to smithereens). Indeed, I know distinguished dominatrixes that will perform their own version of anal feeding with a strap-on and some condensed milk upon the eager asses of high-paying clients who feel such “torture” takes them to the heights of bottoming ecstasy. The key difference, of course, is consensuality. The hummus and pasta concoction is also pretty different; got to admit I’ve never heard of that before. At least, they didn’t mix in cayenne pepper and thorazine (as far as we know).

Seriously though, this latest release seems to take humanity to a new low on the sexual depravity scale. When American military personnel shoot their stuff up a guy’s caboose like that, is it any wonder that he and all his relatives then want to shoot up our trains, blow up our planes and chop off our heads?

Torture Play vs The Bonobo Way

How can we break this deadly cycle? Some say we can’t, that torture and murder are in human DNA, like our close genetic cousins, the common chimpanzees. For years, scientists, philosophers, filmmakers and military psychologists have used the “killer ape” paradigm to explain the worst in human behavior. But is all this bombing, beheading, police brutality and rectal infusion truly and inevitably humanity’s destiny?

Maybe, maybe not. The rare and very recently discovered bonobos, who are at least as close to us genetically as common chimps, reveals another side of the great ape story. Bonobos have never been seen killing each other in the wild or captivity, as observed by Drs. Takayoshi Kanō, Frans de Waal, Richard Wrangham and others. Though they can be violent, bonobos are much less so than common chimps and humans. They also have a lot of sex, and their culture, which I call “The Bonobo Way,” empowers females much more than any other great ape species. Though bonobos do like to combine food and sex, rape is rare. Bonobos use the give and take of sexual pleasure, affection and empathetic communication to diffuse violent tension, greatly reducing the rate of sexual assault and completely avoiding the murders and wars that plague common chimp and human cultures.

Bonobos present us with a new, much more hopeful, great ape paradigm that models reciprocity over brutality. Can the Bonobo Way of peace through pleasure and empathetic communication also work for humans, even in the depths of a prison? No, I’m not saying interrogators should have sex with the prisoners. Actually, according to the Senate Intelligence report, they’re already doing that, albeit nonconsensually—which isn’t at all the Bonobo Way.

But sex is just one way that bonobos share. Studies at Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo conducted by Dr. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods have shown that bonobos are remarkably good at all kinds of sharing and communication, including getting information, establishing trust and gently persuading each other to open up and reciprocate. The Bonobo Way wins through Weapons of Mass Seduction.

But how does that work among human enemies, each one branding the other a “terrorist”? There’s a hopeful hint in the Senate report which shows that while the forced anal feedings and other torture tactics never helped prevent a terrorist attack nor gleaned any useful information at all, other more bonoboësque, “rapport-based” interrogation techniques actually did work. Apparently, giving a prisoner special privileges and decent treatment in exchange for cooperating, gets better results than waterboarding his head and shooting pita spread up his butt.



© December 11, 2014. Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is an internationally renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels.



This article is reposted here in Counterpunch “America’s Best Political Newsletter”