Why is Homosexuality a Weapon in the War on Terror?

Remember that episode of 30 Rock, where Jack Donaghy leaves the comfort of NBC, and goes to work for the Bush/Cheney administration? Soon Donaghy realizes that working for Bush II isn't all that it's cracked up to be, so he concocts a plan to get fired by using millions of federal dollars to develop a "gay bomb," a weapon that would turn all our enemies into homos.

Well, if you think that fictitious story sounds crazy, just wait until you read what the actual U.S. federal government was doing at the start of the War on Terror. Working with allies? Nope. Ensuring that U.S. soldiers would be protected once they entered Baghdad? Nope.

Instead, the CIA was wondering what would happen if they faked a gay porn video with Saddam Hussein "playing" with a teenage boy. Might that weaken Saddam's stranglehold on power?

“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said a former Bush administration official, according to the Washington Post. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”

The good news is that CIA officials never went forward with the video. At least of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they decided to make one featuring a character playing Osama Bin Laden, surrounded by gay cohorts.

"The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys," Jeff Stein writes for the Washington Post. The actors for the video were cast by tapping into the CIA's "darker-skinned" workforce.

The entire concept would be laughable on some level, if it didn't seem to indicate a pattern of the U.S. military resorting to homosexuality as a weapon in the War on Terror. Some of the others are equally as disturbing.

As Wired magazine writes, the most visual (and perhaps visceral?) example of the U.S. military using homosexuality as a means to fight terrorism comes from Abu Ghraib, where nude human pyramids were all the rage. Nothing like a U.S. soldier standing next to a stacked up group of naked Iraqis, rectums on full display for the world to see. The goal? To physically humiliate these detainees by forcing them to do a whole lot of naked same-sex touching. That'll get 'em to talk, right?

There's also evidence that the CIA, a few years before the attacks of September 11, tried to infiltrate al Qaeda by blackmailing a gay spy. "Help us out with intelligence," the CIA was inclined to say, "or we'll tell people you're gay and you'll be killed."

Sure, it's not surprising to see folks try some creative efforts to obtain intelligence. But is shame from the thought of being gay really the best tool in our arsenal? Much like endorsing torture, it just doesn't seem all that effective at getting us useful intelligence. At best it makes the CIA seem like a bunch of frat boys, and at worst, it fans the flames of stereotypes.

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