There is a brilliant and much-needed piece at Commonweal that highlights the relationship between faith, sex, and violence at Guantanamo. Michael Peppard pulls from a variety of sources to recount torture techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan that specifically targeted detainees' religious beliefs. These tactics mostly fall into two categories - desecration of the Qur'an and deploying sexuality to make detainees impure, preventing them from being able to pray.

My description is too whitewashed -- it's important to read the original accounts:

Former detainees say [the Qur'an] has been handled with disrespect by guards and interrogators-written in, ripped or cut with scissors, squatted over, trampled, kicked, urinated and defecated on, picked up by a dog, tossed around like a ball, used to clean soldiers' boots, and thrown in a bucket of excrement. A Russian ex-detainee, Timur Ishmuratov, remembers how it would be laid on the back of a handcuffed, bent-over prisoner, so that it would fall to the ground if he stood up. With just a Qur'an and a pair of handcuffs, a Muslim detainee could in this way be made to torture himself.

And then:

In Inside the Wire, former Army translator Erik Saar recounts a shocking exploitation of Islamic rules about ritual impurity. Saar was translating for a female Army interrogator who was having trouble getting information out of a young Saudi detainee named Fareek. She told Saar that she wanted to break the strength of Fareek's relationship with God: "I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can't go back to his cell and spend the night praying. We have to put up a barrier between him and his God." So she did a striptease. When Fareek wouldn't look at her, she walked behind him and "began rubbing her breasts against his back." According to Saar, she told Fareek that his sexual arousal offended God. Then she told him that she was having her period, and showed him her hand covered in what he thought was menstrual blood (it was red ink). She cursed him and wiped it on his face. As she and Saar left the room, she informed Fareek that the water to his cell would be shut off that night. Even if he managed to calm himself down, he would be too defiled to pray. As for Saar himself, he writes that "there wasn't enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean."

So, are these "non-contact techniques" torture? As Peppard asks, "Could they really be as bad as what happened at Abu Ghraib, as bad as waterboarding or sexual violation?" I answer an unequivocal yes. Sadly, the fact that these techniques became so widespread in the American detainment and interrogation actually indicates just how torturous they are -- if they did not cause deeply excruciating pain to the detainees, they would not have become so embedded in the culture of violence of these institutions. It's by now quite apparent that the interrogators had no qualms about physical torture -- so we can't claim that they engaged in this spiritual and psychological torture as a "milder" alternative to practices like waterboading or sexual violence.

These prisons have used their detainees' religious faith, ritual purity, and spiritual practices to invent forms of violence new to the modern world. Part of our national response to the cruelty perpetuated during the past eight years must be a particular attention to these new forms of violence and an explicit and enforced commitment to never again twist an individual's spiritual life into an instrument of their pain.