“Young Guys, Fresh From The Military”
by digby
As Limbaugh famously said, these guys probably just need a release:
Private security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were pressured to participate in naked pool parties and perform sex acts to gain promotions or assignment to preferable shifts, according to one of 12 guards who have gone public with their complaints. Click here to see the slideshow. In an interview with ABC News for broadcast tonight on the “World News with Charles Gibson,” the guard, a U.S. military veteran, said top supervisors of the ArmorGroup were not only aware of the “deviant sexual acts” but helped to organize them. “It was mostly the young guys fresh from the military who were told they had to participate,” said the guard, who talked on a phone hook-up arranged by the Project on Government Oversight, which first revealed photographs of the parties. “They were not gay but they knew what it took to get promoted,” said the guard, spoke on condition that ABC News not publish his name. The State Department said it was investigating the allegations and the circumstances surrounding the photographs which show naked and barely clothed men fondling one another. The guard who spoke with ABC News said the drunken parties had been held regularly for at least a year and a half.
What’s with all the homoerotic hazing rituals?
If this is the way men bond in these all male environments, I guess I understand why so many of them are against lifting Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military. Once you remove the taboo a whole lot of them will have to deal with their own urges without the cover of coercion and humiliation. I can see why they’d be afraid, but really, these men should just admit that they like this sort of thing and leave those who don’t alone. They’d feel a lot better and so would the men who are forced to participate in order to be accepted into the pack.
Once again we see projection at work. Many of these men obviously have gay feelings and act upon them in this predatory, coercive manner. So they assume that out gay men are doing the same thing. Of course they’re not because they can be with people who consent and wouldn’t need or want to force anyone, as do most sexually healthy people.
I’d feel sorry for these guys if they weren’t such creeps.
Gary Farber has much, much more on our reliance on these wonderful guys in Afghanistan:
Worried about the war in Afghanistan being a quagmire, with more troops being asked for, for a decade-plus committment, to support a corrupt, incompletent, government that few in Afghanistan see as legitimate?
Don’t worry, be happy! The Pentagon has got more private “contractors” there than troops!
.