The above compelling perspective was drawn by Naomi Wolf in her May 29, 2009 commentary in Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/busted-pentagon-why-the-p_b_209046.html

According to Ms. Wolf, the British Telegraph asserted that President Obama is refusing to release the second group of Abu Ghraib photographs because they depict actual rapes, one of a male soldier raping a female detainee (probably Iraqi) and another of a male translator raping a male prisoner. The Pentagon “formally” denied it, she adds, but Ms. Wolf suspects the Telegraph is right. That given the sexualized style torture already disclosed, illegal and immoral, and mandated from senior leadership, such escalated behaviors of sexual sadism most likely revealed in these photos would be a probable and horrifying consequence of the U.S. torture “program”.

There is evidence, Ms. Wolf points out, that meetings were held with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice in attendance where sexual humiliation was discussed as policy. The Defense Authorization Act of 2007 was written, she contends, to allow certain kinds of sexual abuse such as forced nakedness, understood by domestic and international law as illegal and a form of sexual assault. In documents obtained by the ACLU, Rumsfeld is on the record as consulting with subordinates about a policy of sexual abuse. Again, such sexual torture was mandated from the senior leadership, not independently embraced by lower level soldiers “misbehaving.”

She writes:

Is systemic sex crime practiced by the US in a consequence of the lawlessness of `the war on terror’ surprising to those of us who work on issues of sexual abuse and war? It is totally predictable: when you give soldiers anywhere in the world the power, let alone the mandate, to hold women or men helpless, without recourse to law, kidnap them as a matter of policy – as US military kidnapped the wives of `insurgents’ in order to compel them to turn themselves in – strip them naked, and threaten them, you have a completely predictable recipe for mass sexual assault. The magisterial study of rape in war, Susan Brownmiller’s Men, Women and Rape, proves that.

She continues:

I also pointed out in `Sex Crimes in the White House’ that the escalation of the sexual abuse showed the same classic pattern shown by sex criminals everywhere – you start with stripping the victim, keeping him or her completely in your power, and then you engage in greater and more violent excesses with more and more self-justification.

Ms. Wolfe asks who is Obama protecting by not releasing the photos? The victims? They would want the crimes exposed. Our potential or avowed enemies? Word of the sexual outrages is already widespread, from accounts of victims. The perpetrators? So it would seem. These pictures are, she stresses, “evidentiary evidence.”

Ms. Wolf also makes a disturbing speculation as to why President Obama wants to employ the right of preemptive detention with the 100 detainees in Gitmo:

It ain’t because they are `too dangerous,’ his pathetic justification. It is because their bodies are crime scenes. It is because the torture, including possibly the sexual assault, they experienced is likely to be so horrific that if they were ever to have their day in court it is others whom Obama needs who would be incriminated.

Accountability and responsibility for the perpetration of this sexual abuse needs to occur for this country to recover its collective soul as well as to ensure a functional domestic constitutional law and empower a functional international law.

So many of the seemingly “holiest” of authority figures have tragically and stunningly proven to be chronic sexual predators. The perpetration of the original abuses was horrifying enough on the victims. But the literal, in many cases, decades of cover-up by the perpetrators and by their denying or incredibly minimizing “protectors” out of cronyism or authoritarian intimidation added further pain onto the victims, along with exponentially increasing the ranks of additional victims. So it will be with this wave of sexual crime on the victims. I am not just speaking of only the detainees, innocent suspects and actual terrorists combined. I am speaking of our own soldiers.

What of these tragic human hybrids of both perpetrator and victim? The direct perpetrators of the torture violence? Our male and female soldiers following the torturous orders to torture? They were victims of a lawless and immoral senior authority and catalyzed into monstrous agents of inhuman acts in the name of patriotism and loyalty to superiors.

And what of the vengeful reciprocation our "dark side" depravity and barbarism will inspire and role model for other countries? We have not only recruited more righteous enemies for ourselves and our soldier children, but seriously increased the likelihood of horrific abuse if they become captured.

As Rachel Maddow once declared, “We live in an ethical freakshow of a universe.” It seems to be intensifying.

And to quote another wry woman, Dorothy Parker, “What fresh hell is this?” We need to face down these hells, not desensitize ourselves to them, though their frequency and depths have reached obscene proportions on so many fronts.

For our new administration and our citizenry to grant a “pass” to the unpardonable, will cause us to be colluders and enablers in lawlessness and sadism. For us to continue to honor and protect those who carried the mantle of leadership but profoundly betrayed it and us, would be a further travesty of justice.

We need to break through our collective denial and minimization of these crimes and wrap our minds around their repulsive realities. We need to awaken our consciousness and conscience. Are we collectively capable of issuing a morally courageous mandate?

I think of that adage by Edmund Burke about evil thriving when good men and women do nothing. Time to assert courage and will, good people of America. Time to lead our new leader out of this moral quagmire.