Fridae

Less than a month after photos of prisoners being abused and humiliated at the now-notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were first broadcast by the CBS television network on April 28, photos showing prisoners being forced to perform sex acts - and in some cases, gay sex acts - have surfaced.

The photos, which were broadcast during CBS's 60 Minutes II program last week, showed American and British troops laughing and giving thumbs up signs as they stand next to naked, sometimes hooded, prisoners stacked into a human pyramid and other positions being tormented by their captors.

One photo showed two hooded, naked prisoners, one standing and the other kneeling in front of him, simulating oral sex while another photo showed an American solider pointing to a hooded Iraqi man masturbating.

According to The New Yorker magazine, a victim claimed he was forced to strip naked and pose in sex acts with other male inmates and that some of the men were sodomised with various objects.

Detainee Idhia al-Shweiri said in the magazine that the ordeal was worse than the torture he endured as a prisoner under Saddam Hussein. "They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman," he said.

He said U.S. soldiers asked him to remove his clothes only once and for about 15 minutes. "I thought they wanted me to change into the red prison uniform, so I took off my clothes, down to my underwear. Then he asked me to take off my underwear. I started arguing with him, but in the end he made me take off my underwear."

Al-Shweiri said that he and six other prisoners - all hooded - had to face the wall and bend over a little as they put their hands on the wall.

"They made us stand in a way that I am ashamed to describe. They came to look at us as we stood there. They knew this would humiliate us," he said, adding that he was not sodomised.

"They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. We are men. It's OK if they beat me. Beatings don't hurt us, it's just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered," he said.

Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the gay Southern Voice newspaper r that "the events reflect the most base, paranoid, or extreme elements of military homophobia."

"There are many different layers to homophobia - gays and straights can't trust one another, gays are rapists, homosexuality is a mental illness - but these instances of torture in Iraq represent the most extreme, fringe paranoid elements of homophobia, that to be gay is to be subhuman."

"Putting Iraqi soldiers in the position of committing mock homosexual rape � the torturers are playing off the idea that gays are subhuman, that they are animals," he added.

Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society, said while homosexuality is considered a sin in the Muslim faith, "no different than the concept of sex between two people who are not married," it only becomes a problem when it is flaunted, affecting the entire society.

"The viewings of assimilation of homosexual acts, piling people on top of one another would be viewed as tremendously outrageous and shameful to the greater Muslim population," Bray said.

After photos emerged, Muslim and gay rights activists blasted U.S. military and government officials for allowing the abuse to occur on their watch.

Some gay rights activists also claimed that the U.S. military's apparent use of gay sex acts was intended to demean and humiliate prisoners and is evidence of rampant homophobia in the armed forces.

According to media reports, the photos were taken late last year by members of the American 800th Military Police Brigade. After an investigation, seven soldiers have since been removed from duty and six face court martial. The Army's Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, who ran the prison, has been suspended.

The U.S. military says Specialist Jeremy Sivits of the 372nd Military Police Company would be the first to stand trial in Baghdad on May 19 for conspiracy to maltreatment, maltreating subordinates and detainees and dereliction of duty for negligently failing to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty and maltreatment.