US interrogators deliberately weaponized Islamic etiquette and religious imagery against detainees.

Evidence

In a public lecture in 2008, following the publication of his 2005 book, For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism under Fire, Chaplain Yee argued that Islam was used against detainees by interrogators. Female interrogators were told by command, Yee revealed, that the possibility of “creative approaches” made them particularly useful in intelligence gathering; they were encouraged to exploit “conservative Islamic etiquette” that segregated men and women and that regulated contact between men and women. Female interrogators, for example, stripped naked in an effort to frustrate the male detainees, rubbed their bodies on shackled Muslim prisoners, and grabbed Muslim male prisoners’ genitalia. Male and female interrogators forced prisoners to shave their beards and disrespect the Qur’an by throwing it on the floor. Yee mentioned cases of interrogators dressing as priests and forcibly baptizing prisoners and also of wrapping them in Israeli flags, believing that this would agitate them to the point of making a confession. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1100

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to representations of terrorism as rooted in individual psychosexual pathology rather than political context. — connects to: US officials instrumentalized racist Arab caricatures to design torture regimes — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 194
• SEED: Angle: how U.S. interrogators weaponized ‘cultural knowledge’ of Islam, reading Rafael Patai’s Orientalist text as operational manual.