Every day there’s new revelations about the Iraqi prison torture. Today there are some new first-hand accounts from inside the prison :

Hilas also said he witnessed an Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy’s screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures.

“The kid was hurting very bad,” Hilas said.
. . .
Hilas also said he watched as Graner and others sodomized a detainee with a phosphoric light. “They tied him to the bed,” Hilas said.
. . .
One day, the detainee said, American soldiers held him down and spread his legs as another soldier prepared to open his pants. “I started screaming,” he said. A soldier stepped on his head, he said, and someone broke a phosphoric light and spilled the chemicals on him.

“I was glowing and they were laughing,” he said.

The detainee said the soldiers eventually brought him to a room and sodomized him with a nightstick. “They were taking pictures of me during all these instances,” he told the investigators.
. . .
He said a bag was put over his head and he was made to strip. He said American soldiers started to taunt him.

“Do you pray to Allah?” one asked. “I said yes. They said, ‘[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.’ One of them said, ‘You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped. And he said to me, ‘Are you married?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.’ One of them said, ‘But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.’ ”

He said the soldiers told him that if he cooperated with interrogators they would release him in time for Ramadan. He said he did, but still was not released. He said one soldier continued to abuse him by striking his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. “Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion,” he said. “They ordered me to thank Jesus that I’m alive.”

The detainee said the soldiers handcuffed him to a bed.

“Do you believe in anything?” he said the soldier asked. “I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he said, “But I believe in torture and I will torture you.’ ”

Notice the sanitized language in there? The detainees being “sodomized”? The Army translator “having sex” with a young boy? Let’s cut through the bullshit and call this what it is : rape

This is sexual assault of the worst kind and it should be described in harsh language that accurately describes how brutal these monsters are. To use terms that are mostly used to describe consensual sex acts, the reporters here are subtly downplaying the seriousness of this abuse. Not that I think they’re trying to be apologists or anything, but when you tone down the language, you also tone down its impact.

Of course, prison rape has become something of a joke here in the States over the last few years. As Human Rights Watch noted “Rape…was no aberrational occurrence; instead it was a deeply-rooted, systemic problem. It was also a problem that prison authorities were doing little to address.” Granted, this is describing prisoner on prisoner rape, the public’s response to this problem has been to either ignore the problem or laugh at it altogether. Hell, laughing at prison rape is so mainstream it was a joke in a 7-UP commercial.

The implication behind American reactions to homegrown prison rape is clear : if you’re in prison, you did something that makes you deserve to be raped. When you add some post-9/11 xenophobia and hysterical fear about future terrorist attacks, it’s not hard to see why people have been willing to look the other way for so long. If Americans can’t be bothered to care about our own prisoners, who would have expected them to give a shit about some foreigners?