In the Shadow of Mata Hari =or= A Very Ugly Suspicion

A few years ago I wrote a post called The Ghosts of Gomorrah that spoke of the “perversion in uniform” revealed by the Abu Graib incident during the occupation of Iraq.  I fell into conversation with a couple of kids the other day (well, not really kids, just folks a lot younger than myself) who put that thought back on the horizon from a different perspective, a different line of approach, but still, the same thought I’ve never felt quite full completed.

I’ve said it several times before, I’m gonna say it again:  only an idiot assumes the buoyancy of perversion in the ocean of humanity is the same as the buoyancy of ice floating in salt water.  Some things simply do not float at the surface, they find a common density well below the surface and are never seen unless some unusual force causes an upwelling, a shift in the relative densities.  When you synchronize the analogies war tends to stir the deep waters of humanity to reveal a great deal, some things noble, other things not.  I’m thinking it quite likely the Abu Graib incident was a temporary shift that may well have revealed something that normally rides the inversion layer 300 fathoms down as it were.

In the post The Ghosts Of Gomorrah I questioned the origins of that apparently totally female unit of MP’s with a taste for needlessly humiliating helpless males.  I asked if the Army assembled that unit out of individuals specifically chosen for that trait, or was it just a coincidental convergence resulting in a point of national shame?  In the aftermath of course the spin doctors wanted us to believe the latter option.  The Army made a scapegoat out of one of the MP’s involved (no knowing if she was the leader, or just the most politically expendable), and of course the hope was the whole sad sick affair would fade into the footnotes of history as an aberration duly punished.  Since I’m contra-social and not terribly prone to taking anything seen on the six o’clock news at face value the thought I’m entertaining today is drawn from following the other line of logic concerning the incident, the one that begins “it was a fully plotted and planned operation.” 

Back engineering to arrive at the facts as presented on the evening news puts several very interesting questions on the table, even more interesting when the full implications are considered.  First among them?  If you were an army officer who had been ordered to create a unit whose prime mission was to deliver a form of perversion based propaganda to outrage the enemy beyond any possibility of a negotiated settlement how would you know where to begin? How could you attempt to build such a unit, how would you know where to find the kind of soldiers host and home to the required attitudes and skill set?  Assuming of course you yourself were not a major player in the world of the perverted? 

The answer is of course you would avail yourself of the shadow services of the (sic) intelligence community.  Now these folks aren’t omniscient (they’d like it believed they are, but no, they have to find it out and figure it out pretty much like everyone else), they have to have sources and resources from which to work.  Those are not something you toddle down to your local Hallibuttfuck outlet and order out of a warehouse on a requisition form, no, of course not, systems like that have to be built.  It takes time to assemble the network of spies  and informants, it takes time to get your people into position to even begin the process of building such a network.  Tossing this self evident thought out to serve as sea anchor the next thing that has to be asked is this: how could the intelligence community have been able to be of assistance unless they’d known a long time in advance there would be a need for a supply of perversion in uniform?  Or did they respond with something they already had available that would likely work, but that had been built for totally different reasons?

I’m prone to believing the latter option is the most likely, which is where the whole situation gets very interesting indeed.  Why would the intelligence community have a need for a significant number of people skilled in dealing humiliation and degradation?  People skilled in interrogation to the point of torture isn’t hard to understand (gross and reprehensible, but understandable), but humiliation?  That’s what’s always bothered me about the Abu Graib incident.  The pictures that got out didn’t show the prisoners being tortured, no, they showed the prisoners being subjected to the exact same kind of mistreatment a Dominatrix deals out to clients who desire to be humiliated.  I’m sure there was torture involved, but that wasn’t what was advertised.  Torture the enemy would have expected, but simply humiliation for its’ own sake would not have been, and humiliation without torture, without interrogation, would have been in the eyes of the enemy a solid proof of their belief (an attitude probably deliberately fostered by the unimpeded operation of the American fetish porn industry) that all American’s are psycho-diseased animals undeserving of being allowed to continue polluting Allah’s earth, which is what the initial assumption (of the mission objective) was in the first place.

That... is totally bad.  But that isn’t the bottom of the thought.

The Dominatrix holds a unique position in the modern world.  She (and yes, always a she) is everyone’s nightmare for hire.  Personally I can’t imagine wanting to hire a nightmare, sheesh, I’ve got plenty of my own, I consider the existence of the Dominatrix and the world she belongs to as in and of itself, by itself, full justification for the Second Amendment rights that allow me to own and carry lethal force on my body, the more instantly lethal the better, but that’s just me.  There are others who for whatever reason accept such things, and their numbers would seem to be growing.

Their numbers may be growing, I’ve heard some claim as many as one in ten to some degree or another, but they’re still a minority and they’re still very much both prisoners and victims of the ethical conflicts and social confusions that have come to be imbedded in the American culture, and they are very much an occult subculture living a degree of secrecy the intelligence community no doubt finds quite comfortable.  Would seem “the life” and “the lifestyle” would be a fine match for each other, which is where this thought starts down for the bottom.

In my youth I heard it rumored from several fairly reliable sources that the outlaw motorcycle gangs were a common duty assignment for the Military Intelligence operatives watching the American population.  In those pre-homeland security days it was known that MI spied on the very population they protected, but didn’t act on what they learned.  If something needing attention passed their sight they handed the information off to the appropriate agency in the alphabet soup, the FBI, the CIA, sending things through proper channels including a duly appointed judge to safeguard the constitutionality of what might transpire.  Not so sure how that all works now.  Anyway, the MI agents were rumored to live with and as the bikers to keep an eye and ear on what crossed their world.  Makes sense, really, so many of the bikers were ex-military unable to really reintegrate themselves into the mainstream, the sort where jobs as gun running dope smuggling mercenary warriors in someone’s private turf war were the sort of stories to be heard.  Someone did and does need to keep an eye on them.  The guys earned their pay, and a fully deserved degree of respect for what is really a rather brutal life of danger.  Work for a soldier, indeed.

But that was in my youth, and my youth was in much simpler times.  With the advent of the internet, with the establishment of a truly global economy not all turf wars are fought using stolen military hardware by dark of night.  A great deal of those turf wars are fought online, fought using blackmail rather than chain mail, social coercion more than physical violence.  And who is in an ideal position to hear about that?  Yea, right.  The Dominatrix brigade.

The convention of the Dominatrix is that she’ll protect someone’s privacy as a condition of employment, that regardless of the incentive she’ll not compromise her professional status by  revealing the names of those who contract her services to portray and/or enact some  nightmare of choice.  A quite understandable convention, so many of those nightmares are structured from the obscene set in the service of the conflicted and confused, hardly what  someone would want showing up as some private investigator’s attachment to their resume.  Fair enough. 

But that’s just to speak to the social side of things.  What about the things that might be learned from some cubicle dwelling guilt ridden corporate socio-drone indulging in the mandatory fad of bdsm to balance the ethically compromised demands of their job?  Compromises that genuinely do have bearing on the welfare of the nation? Someone likely to be babbling about their problem during the delirium of a self initiated tour of hell?  You know, things released during the liberating confessions enabled by the skilled psychological manipulations backed by the practiced whip hand of a truly professional beyond professional  dominatrix? 

I’m thinking that in these modern times when the idealistic young women are standing forth to stand beside their brothers in the defense of the nation a tour as a professional dominatrix working the deepest underbelly of the big cities is as likely a duty assignment for them as riding with the Oakland chapter was for their fathers and grandfathers.  I’m thinking it’s frighteningly possible that the ranks of the pro-doms are stomped under with officers of various ranks who don’t know each other as such, but who are fully connected and networked through the uber-secret channels of the intelligence community. 

That... is scary stuff.  Why would that be scary for someone who doesn’t indulge in such things?  Because if the intelligence community has invested in the darker realms of BDSM as a means of gathering intelligence data, or equally possible say persuading potential assets into providing them with services then the intelligence community simply cannot allow the fad of bdsm to run its’ course and fade back to being some minor fraction of a percent of the population.  They’d have to work to keep the fad alive, keep it popular, hopefully keep it expanding while at the same time keeping it a thing of shame and secrecy.  That is one truly ugly suspicion that if true will in the end do massive harm to the nation as a whole.  But... it does make it a transparent no-brainer how the whole thing at Abu Graib was facilitated.

Sheeeit (*shivershake*).  That...is a damn good bottle of whiskey.  Almost wash the bad taste out of a boys mouth.