Baphomet was allegedly worshipped as a deity by the medieval order of the Knights Templar.[3] King Philip IV of France had many French Templars simultaneously arrested, and then tortured into confessions in October 1307.[5][6] The name Baphomet appeared in trial transcripts for the Inquisition of the Knights Templar that same year.[6] Over 100 different charges had been leveled against the Templars, including heresy, homosexual relations, spitting and urinating on the cross, and sodomy.[3] Most of them were dubious, as they were the same charges that were leveled against the Cathars[14] and many of King Philip's enemies; he had earlier kidnapped Pope Boniface VIII and charged him with nearly identical offenses. Yet Malcolm Barber observes that historians "find it difficult to accept that an affair of such enormity rests upon total fabrication".[15] The "Chinon Parchment suggests that the Templars did indeed spit on the cross", says Sean Martin, and that these acts were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to if captured by the Saracens, where they were taught how to commit apostasy "with the mind only and not with the heart".[16] Similarly, Michael Haag suggests that the simulated worship of Baphomet did indeed form part of a Templar initiation rite:[17]
The indictment (acte d'accusation) published by the court of Rome set forth ... "that in all the provinces they had idols, that is to say, heads, some of which had three faces, others but one; sometimes, it was a human skull ... That in their assemblies, and especially in their grand chapters, they worshipped the idol as a god, as their saviour, saying that this head could save them, that it bestowed on the order all its wealth, made the trees flower, and the plants of the earth to sprout forth."
— Jules Michelet, History of France (1860)[6]
Middle East historian Juan Cole has argued, using the testimony of a former U.S. military officer, that desecration of the Qur’an was modeled on the kind of desecration of the Bible anticipated in the U.S. military’s SERE training program (SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). SERE prepares U.S. personnel to withstand torture in case they are captured by an enemy. The reverse-engineering of SERE methods for use at Guantánamo was later confirmed in Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side and by governmental sources, such as retired Rear Admiral Don Guter, judge advocate general of the Navy from 2000 to 2002. This real-life enactment of SERE scenarios—with U.S. personnel in the role of the torturers rather than the tortured—was a foolish policy with disastrous effects.
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In addition to mockery and systematic distraction, professional interrogators used grotesque methods of sexual harassment to impede religious observances. For Muslims, impurity prevents prayer. In Inside the Wire, former Army translator Erik Saar recounts a shocking exploitation of Islamic rules about ritual impurity. Saar was translating for a female Army interrogator who was having trouble getting information out of a young Saudi detainee named Fareek. She told Saar that she wanted to break the strength of Fareek’s relationship with God: “I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can’t go back to his cell and spend the night praying. We have to put up a barrier between him and his God.” So she did a striptease. When Fareek wouldn’t look at her, she walked behind him and “began rubbing her breasts against his back.” According to Saar, she told Fareek that his sexual arousal offended God. Then she told him that she was having her period, and showed him her hand covered in what he thought was menstrual blood (it was red ink). She cursed him and wiped it on his face. As she and Saar left the room, she informed Fareek that the water to his cell would be shut off that night. Even if he managed to calm himself down, he would be too defiled to pray. As for Saar himself, he writes that “there wasn’t enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean.”
That episode is not the only documented example of such torture. The Bahraini detainee Jumah al-Dossari suffered a darker, more explicitly religious adaptation of the method in late 2002, according to a legal motion filed in U.S. District Court (District of Columbia) by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan and others on his behalf. During al-Dossari’s torture, a female interrogator had his clothing cut off, then removed her own and stood over him. Just before wiping what she said was menstrual blood on his face, she kissed the crucifix on her necklace and said, “This is a gift from Christ for you Muslims.”
According to a 2005 Department of Defense report, “lap dances” and the smearing of fake “menstrual blood” were “authorized” interrogation techniques that only required “advanced approval.” The military brass would no doubt prefer their interrogators to avoid allusions to the blood of Christ, but they did not have a problem with the fake menstrual blood. The official purpose of such techniques is “to highlight futility of the detainee’s situation.”
Many detainees perceived their incarceration as a general attack on Islam. Al-Wadi said that the early days at Kandahar were “like a religious war between Muslim prisoners and American soldiers who seemed to hate Islam.” The sense of a religious war intensified at Guantánamo, where the Bahraini detainee Abdulla Majid al-Noaimi wrote these lines: “The book of God consoles me, / And dulls the pains I have suffered. / The book of God assuages my misery, / Even though they declared war against it.” Other events have bolstered this perception. During the trial of Abu Ghraib’s Specialist Charles Graner, ex-detainee Amin al-Sheikh reported that he had been compelled to eat pork and curse Allah. A Guantánamo detainee informed Capt. Yee that a group of prisoners had been forced to “bow down and prostrate” themselves inside a makeshift “satanic” shrine, where interrogators made them repeat that Satan, not Allah, was their God.
The Secret Weapon | Commonweal Magazine
There are striking similarities between the reported detainee abuse at both Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and the techniques used on soldiers going through SERE school, including forced nudity, stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and exhaustion from exercise. The unnamed interrogation chief from Guantánamo notes in his statement that on his watch detainees were exposed to loud music and yelling. "The rule on volume," he said, "was that it should not be so loud that it would blow the detainees' ears out." The chief claimed interrogators would crank up the air conditioning to make detainees cold, and that one prisoner was also given a "lap dance" by a female interrogator "to use sexual tension in an attempt to break a detainee." The interrogator was later told not to do it again.
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Mock prisoners at SERE school get kicked and slapped with an open hand. They are forced to "low crawl" through mud and dirt at the fake prison and get constant "PT," or physical training -- exercise -- to wear them out. Without access to a bathroom, prisoners urinate and defecate in their clothes.
In addition to sexual humiliation, psychological duress is a big part of the program and comes in a variety of flavors, including an overall assault on a soldier's values. Mock interrogators desecrated an American flag, stepped on a copy of the Constitution, and "kicked the Bible around," the Ranger said -- an echo of the abuse of the Koran alleged at Guantánamo. Soldiers were ridiculed for their lack of knowledge of the Constitution and U.S. history. "They begin to preach propaganda and attack your institutional base," the Ranger said. "Everything about SERE school is a mind fuck."
As 2014 rattled its way towards the grave, a Senate report into the agency's interrogation techniques confirmed that it used brutal and ineffective methods to try squeezing information from suspects rounded up after 9/11. What was generally missed in the coverage of this coverage is that "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape" (SERE), a torture survival program that the CIA's methods were based on, had already caused a national scandal back in 1995 because of the use of similar techniques. That year, television and newspapers reported complaints of physical and sexual abuse by US Air Force (USAF) cadets who had been through the SERE program.
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Even at that point, SERE had already caused controversy. In 1995, ABC News reported Cadets at the USAF's Colorado training base suffered abuse during SERE sessions in 1993. One male cadet told the ABC program 20/20, "They dressed me up as a woman. They put me in a skirt, put makeup all over my face, and made me follow around one of the NCOs as like his little toy." He was then partially stripped, tied to a bench, and another cadet was "made [to] get on top of me and act like he's having sex with me."
Another cadet described this humiliation and mock rape, saying, "The perception I got was they were trying to make him out to be sort of the—the love slave of the people who were running the compound. They would sit him up on a stand on their laps and call them, you know, their little girl or whatever, and—but they basically, like I said, treated him like he is their little love toy or whatever, in front of the entire camp."
A female cadet came forward with even more serious allegations. She had complained within the USAF, prompting two inconclusive investigations by USAF generals. She then sued the USAF for damages.
According to official reports of her 1996 hearing, the cadet entered SERE training in 1993 where "she was selected as the victim in a simulated rape and exploitation scenario." As she told the court, "she was forced to lie on the ground, her shirt was removed and her legs pried apart. She was hooded during the proceedings and does not know the identities of the participating cadets. Other cadets stood by and observed, joking about what was occurring." The papers say that the SERE training involved deliberate humiliation alongside sexual violence, as "the simulated rape was filmed and the videotape shown to other cadets."
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But the judge also emphasized that the Cadet's abuse was "sexually charged," and "included having to kneel down while a male cadet put his crotch in her face and made sexually explicit comments to her, having her fatigues soaked with urine, and being forced to put a stick in her pants and call it her 'masturbation stick.'"
Of course the Knights Templar worshipped Baphomet and engaged in all the kinds of things they were accused of during their trials; the exact same thing goes on in the modern day in our US military which should sadly be much better than that.
Thanks to the modern country of France for making the Olympic opening ceremony mocking the Last Supper to remind me that American citizens, myself included, have no right to ask France to take the splinter out of their eye until we take the plank out of theirs. I had almost forgotten that this goes on long before I knew Substack was a thing and signed up for it. So now that I’m on Substack here it is.
The master & servant archetype always drives the human condition especially since the internet has become the camel for Aitmatov's Mankurt.