Is waterboarding “torture?” A modest proposal for YOU, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Michael Mukasey, and George Bush.

I know, I know. It’s not “torture.” It’s merely “enhanced interrogation.”

Sounds lovely, sort of like “enhanced perfume” or “enhanced natural sweetness” — a way to improve and expand upon the wonderful quality of the experience.

In fact, Dickey Cheney, you recently said:

I think there were a total of about 33 who were subjected to enhanced interrogation; only three of those who were subjected to waterboarding…Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture. We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice, legal opinion out of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where you go for those kinds of opinions, from the Department of Justice as to where the red lines were out there in terms of this you can do, this you can't do. The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately.

So I have a life-enhancing experience for you, Dick, and your buddies who defended “enhanced interrogation,” such as John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, your mutual boss George W. Bush, and I’ll in throw Attorney General (for the next few days) Michael Mukasey, for saying he isn’t sure whether waterboarding is torture or not.

Here’s what we’ll do

I propose that the Fox TV network introduce a new TV reality show called, “That’s Not Torture, That’s Enhancement.”

During each episode of the show, one of you will be strapped to a board and subjected to "enhanced interrogation," consisting of tightly covering your faces with a cloth and pouring a steady and powerful stream of water on the cloth to create the feeling of getting enhanced.

If you put up with this continuously for the hour the show is on air, you win and get awarded a free resort hotel room in beautiful Guantanamo-by-the-Sea, Cuba, yours to enjoy for the next, oh, 20 or 30 years.

However, if you find the enhancement so disagreeable that you want it to stop instantly, you may make that happen by admitting that

A) Waterboarding is torture
B) That you raped and strangled 50 prostitutes in the Washington DC area and that
C) You ate their corpses and picked your teeth with their bones

Since waterboarding is such a reliable means of obtaining useful intelligence, the world will instantly know it is true that you have done these things and you will be arrested and put on trial for your lives.

However, since by your own admission waterboarding is not torture, I am confident that after a half hour you will have admitted to nothing that that you will feel vindicated and enhanced beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Gentlemen, America
is waiting for you

All you need to do, Dick, John, Alberto, George and Michael is step forward and volunteer to be a subject in this televised experiment demonstrating that waterboarding is not torture but merely a charming way to enhance an interrogation.

I’m waiting, guys.

C’mon, c’mon, which of you is going to step forward and volunteer to enjoy an enhanced interrogation experience?

I’m still waiting.

Nobody?

But I’m still waiting.

I’m waiting.

I’m still waiting….

Who does he think he’s kidding?

By gum, New York’s U.S. Senator Charles Schumer must be reading The New York Crank, and yesterday's post here, just below this one, made him break out in a sweat!

Only kidding, of course. But clearly Schumer must be feeling the sting of a furious backlash from his former supporters, like me, for his endorsement of Michael Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General. Why else would Schumer feel the need to rush into print with a New York Times op-ed piece defending his support of Mukasey? Republicans certainly aren’t upset by it.

Mukasey, it’s impossible to forget, is George Bush’s U.S. Attorney General nominee who swore under oath that he doesn’t, umm, understand what waterboarding is or whether it’s torture. Schumer’s brief in his own defense and that of Mukasey is a masterpiece of verbal legerdemain. It's one of those I-was-against-it-before-it-was-for-it-but-now-I’m-still-against-it flip-flop numbers.

Schumer’s arguments are all easily refutable:

1. Says Schumer, the Justice department is in a shambles and has become an agency that prosecutes people for political reasons and allows ideologues to infect decision making, but Mukasey would fix all that. Oh yeah? And what do you think the White House would do if Mukasey started upsetting the setup? They’d whack his hiney and sent him back into judgeship emeritus, is what. Oh, pardon me. They wouldn’t actually fire him. They’d “accept his resignation.”

2. Says Schumer, if Mukasey gets rejected we’ll have a “caretaker” Attorney General who could function without the advice and consent of the Senate. You mean, the way the previous two attorneys generals have functioned under George Bush? There’s still a House of Representatives that could cut off funding, and strangle various Bush programs – including the Iraq war – in the bathtub. There’d still be your Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck, which still would have subpoena power, and the ability to stir up a hornet’s nest under the President’s chair, especially if you pass anti-torture legislation as your op-ed piece promises and the caretaker Attorney General defies it. Heck, some would say that would be grounds for impeachment.

3. Watch this Schumer Shuffle carefully: “I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture – its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant, but also illegal…” Oh yeah? So if Chuck is so strongly against dungeon interrogations, how does he account for this contradictory statement (allow lots of time for it to load) heard on ABC Radio. Schumer offers a wild hypothetical supposition about an atomic bomb hidden, more or less, under somebody's bed that would be a justification for "fairly severe" torture.

And if Senator Schumer feels waterboarding is an unacceptable form of torture but he won't rule out torture what form "fairly severe" would he accept? Branding with hot irons? Yanking out fingernails with a pair of pliers? Raping a child in front of its parent? C'mon Chuck, give us a few specifics.

4. Says Schumer, “Even without the proposed law in place, Judge Mukasey would be more likely than a caretaker attorney general to find on his own that waterboarding and other techniques are illegal…” Right. The man who can’t seem to imagine what waterboarding is or whether it's illegal today would suddenly have a change of heart and turn against the President who appointed him.

He must think we were born yesterday

The Senator titled his op-ed supporting Mukasey “A Vote For Justice.” Please, I want to puke. Schumer began his career as a high school politician in Brooklyn. This stuff might still fool the freshman class. It isn’t fooling most of the rest of us.

But when even a few Dems fall for this stuff, thus almost assuring that Mukasey will be the next Attorney General, there isn't much left to do. Except maybe stand under Chuck's window and protest with a song about waterboarding. Maybe Paul Hipp, the composer, would be willing to rename it The Chuck Schumer Waterboard Shuffle.

Franco’s fascist Spain, unconscionable torture, Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and the utter repulsiveness of their political hackwork.

Why is Senator
Schumer smiling?

During the “transition” from Generalissimo Franco’s fascist dictatorship to democracy after the dictator’s death, filmmakers in Spain still had to be careful what they did.

It was known that people had suffered brutal torture in Franco’s dungeons, and that in 1975, a young student who later was found to be innocent, had suffered the awful form of Franco’s capital punishment – death by slow strangulation using a garrote.

One still didn’t come straight out in Spain under the fascists and talk about such incidents – not even for a while after Franco was dead.

Speaking in code of torture

Instead, in 1975, director Pilar Miro directed a movie about another case of false accusation and torture that occurred in 1910. But this was a subterfuge. People in Spain understood what other event the film might parallel.

Entitled El Crimen de Cuenca, the film tells the story of two peasants who were accused of murder. There were no witnesses to the so-called murder and no physical evidence against the men at all. There wasn't even evidence that a murder had occurred. Consequently, a hard line prosecutor who derided his predecessor for being “a liberal” suggested to the police that they somehow or other get a confession out of the two men.

Torture so brutal it’s painful to watch

What followed – I saw the film this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – was difficult to watch. It involved not only brutal beatings, but also techniques – shall we call them “rough interrogation?” – such as hammering wedges of wood under fingernails, ripping off fingernails with a pair of pliers, “strangulation” of testicles, and “non physical rough treatment” such as denying water to the parched victims.

Not surprisingly, the two peasants eventually gave the police the confessions that the prosecutor wanted. However, the two confessions weren’t consistent with each other.

Moreover, a police theory about where the men had hidden the body, which the brutalized peasants parroted after sufficient torture in a police dungeon, yielded no body.

Finally, the police concocted a theory that the bones of the alleged murder victim had been burned, pulverized and scattered, accounting for the inability to find his remains. The peasants then were made to confess that this new theory was in fact what had happened. Eight years later, the murder “victim” showed up alive and well, and the two falsely accused peasants, who had been spared death at the garrote by a last minute plea deal, went free.

Like the Inquisition and Franco Spain
– except that it’s happening today

What’s remarkable about this film, now more than 21 years old, is how pertinent it is to the current debate over torture presided over or done at the behest of Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. The Cuenca case supports with an historical case study the claim that torture produces, at best, highly unreliable intelligence.

Torture someone enough, by any of a variety of methods, and your victim eventually will tell you what he thinks you want to hear. Anything to stop the pain. That is true of torture whether it happened in Spain before and during the Franco era, or in some secret CIA dungeon today.

Relying on the unreliable

Relying on completely unreliable torture techniques such as waterboarding for intelligence may help explain why after six years, the Bush administration has still failed to capture Osama Bin Laden. Or why, in the pursuit of terrorists in Iraq, we’ve managed many times to massacre innocent civilians instead while the intended target somehow "got away."

Just as bad – and perhaps more horrifying to us as Americans – is the sly acknowledgment that we torture people even as we deny it. (Officially we don’t torture people but we can’t or won’t confirm that we don’t waterboard them or that waterboarding is torture. Wink wink.)

Horrifying, brutal and coy

Judge Michael Mukasey, who now seems inevitable as the next U.S. Attorney General, took an even more outrageously coy stance in his U.S. Attorney General confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in effect saying that he couldn’t speak to torture by waterboarding because he doesn’t know what waterboarding is. If true, he may be the only person in the United States who hasn’t heard all about it.

It has come to the point where you simply don’t expect more from Bush administration nominees, not to mention the President himself. In the end, history will remember them primarily as a bunch of thugs and accomplices of grand larcenists who funneled money from the U.S. Treasury into the big business equivalent of racketeering scams. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to fear that they will find company on the other end of the political spectrum

Two nauseating senators
– sad to say, both Democrats

What I find nauseating is that the likes of Senators Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein, both Democrats, would in effect wink at some the worst human behavior mankind has committed short of mass extermination.

One day, some American kid in uniform will suffer similar torture. The justification the enemy uses will be that the Americans have been doing the same thing for years.

Schumer adds to the outrage by declaring, according to the New York Times, that he “had obtained Mr. Mukasey’s promise to enforce laws that banned any of the harsh interrogation methods known to have been used on Queda terrorists….”

That “promise” from a man who refuses to answer similarly under oath before a U.S. Senate committee isn’t worth the piece of paper it’s not written on. And the Schumer statement itself all but screeches with escape clause weasels.

I have made it a practice until now to avoid heaping negative criticism on Democrats on this blog. They suffer, frequently and unfairly at the hands of right wing bloggers, commentators and editorial writers.

But I find it unfathomable that Schumer and Feinstein have agreed to confirm Mukasey. Perhaps somebody offered them a bone – funds for their states that the Bush administration will decide not to block, for example. Or perhaps – since their reasons for confirmation are so incredible I am forced to imagine a reason – they made an agreement not to reveal some skeletons someone has found in their political closets.

If so, they have made a deal with the devil, and the fruit their deal will bear will be brutal torture in some Franco-like CIA or CIA proxy dungeon.

Odious political hacks

You can compromise over matters like taxes, water rights or criminal penalties. But there is a certain moral place where decent people ought to draw a line and say, "I will not agree to let this to happen." If there ever was a matter that shouted against compromising, it's the matter of torture.

Sad to say, Senators Schumer and Feinstein have revealed their true nature and the truth about them is both surprising and unpleasant.

They are both odious little political hacks.