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….

Poisoning our own tree: how ham-handed “interrogations” sanctioned by the Bush Administration could set the 9/11 plotters free

For someone who doesn’t believe in capital punishment, I can be pretty inconsistent when it comes to the people responsible for 9/11. Personally, I yearn to reproduce for them the last moments of some of their victims who, their clothing on fire, leaped from 90th story windows of the World Trade Center to their deaths to escape the inferno in their offices.

In my heart of hearts I would wouldn’t mind seeing the 9/11 plotters taken up in a helicopter to a height of 90 stories, doused with kerosene, dangled from a rope, set on fire, and then dropped to some rocks or concrete below. I know better than actually to advocate this, and I do not advocate that you advocate this. Nevertheless, in the darkest and angriest recesses of my thoughts, I yearn to see an eye for an eye, a flame for a flame and a fall for a fall.

That said, if the rule of law still works in this country, the 9/11 plotters currently in custody not only may escape the death penalty but walk free as well. Thanks to the Bush administration’s stubborn and stupid reliance on waterboarding and possibly other forms of torture, they may be sent home to attempt another 9/11 all over again.

This all has to do with torture and a long-standing principle of law that “fruit from the poisoned tree” may not be introduced as evidence. In other words, any evidence obtained illegally, or any evidence found in a search prompted by illegally-obtained information, may not be used as in a trial. To do so violates constitutional law.

It has been known at least since 2004 that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (left), one of the key 9/11 plotters in custody, was waterboarded.

Now, with charges finally being prepared against Mohammed, reportedly the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, and with the death penalty clearly on the table, a legal fight seems to be brewing that eventually may go all the way up to the Roberts Supreme Court.

When that finally happens, probably some years from now, it will be interesting to see which way the court goes. As we’ve just noted, Federal rules of evidence exclude not only evidence obtained under torture, but also otherwise-legitimate evidence found thanks to information provided by someone who was tortured.

How will the court decide? Will it set the bastards free? Or will it trash the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to bring the accused plotters to their deaths? Justice? Or freedom? To my knowledge America has never had to choose between them before.

Now, thanks to the Bush Administration’s cavalier attitude toward both, the future of American freedom as well as the future of these accused killers is in doubt.

FBI hero demonstrates he has more effective ways to make evildoers talk than the waterboard brigade could imagine. Like home-baked cookies.

For all those imbeciles who support torture of suspected terrorists – and they range from virtually every one of the imbeciles in the White House to (I’m embarrsed to admit it) that imbecile Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer – here’s a pie in your face. Or maybe a plateful of cookies.

In an interview on 60 minutes broadcast this last Sunday evening, an FBI interrogator showed the world and those nincompoops at the CIA how to get detailed, valuable intelligence out of top enemy tough guys without one yanked fingernail, one taser zap, one night in a freezing room, one night with rock ‘n roll blaring at an unbearable pitch – or one millisecond on a waterboard.

The interrogator, George Pirro, did it with politeness, a bit of fakery, a few kind words, pretending to show some warmth to Saddam, a package of baby wipes, and on Saddam’s birthday, a box of cookies baked by the interrogator's mother.

Yes, as we’ve crankily pointed out before here and here you can get people to talk with water torture or “enhanced interrogation” as the imbeciles call it, hoping the rest of us will be gulled into thinking that if you change the name, it isn't torture any more. The problem is, you can’t trust the talk. Torture victims, or "enhanced interrogation" victims, if you insist, often will say whatever you want them to say to make the torture stop.

Perhaps with less torture and more of the Pirro technique, we’d have Osma Bin Ladin in custody right now.

Or perhaps the Bush administration doesn’t want him in custody. Given the Bush administration’s insistence that torture works (and simultaneous denial that we torture anybody) one begins to wonder whether we don't have some evildoers right there in the White House. Not to mention the campaign trail.

“Proud” of torturing prisoners yet? Well, I guess you’re just not a loyal reader of The National Review. But here's a song to bring you up to speed.

I come to this late, but nevertheless amazed by a disgusting excuse for a human being named Deroy Murdock, a National Review Online Contributing Editor, who on November 5th of this year wrote, “Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.”

Boy, if there was ever a need for a patriotic song about waterboarding, Deroy Murdock has the reason nailed. I propose the following, more or less to the tune of "Varsity Rag." Put on your clown suit and sing away, Deroy!

Hang by their thumbs,
Hang by their toes
Force lotsa water
Into their nose
Everybody does the Torturers Rag

Hotter than hot
Colder than cold
Climate control
Makes ‘em feel old
Gets as much applause as waving the flag

You can pass
Many a class
Here at the CIA
Just get ‘em tased
You’ll be amazed
The info they’ll give a-way
('though you can’t trust it.)

Hotter than hot,
Meaner than mean,
Staged executions
Make quite a scene
Everybody does the Torturers
Everybody does the Torturers
Everybody does the Torturers Rag
(I love that scrrr-eaming)
Every body does the Torturers Rag.

While I've got your attention, please note a few other bizarre points that Murdock made. Specifically:

• Waterboarding is not torture. (Fine. In that case, in the interest of convincing us of his point, will Mr. Murdock please volunteer to undergo the procedure for an hour or so – preferably on TV so that we all can enjoy the experience with him?)

• Waterboarding should not be discussed because then terrorists will know “what to expect, if tortured.” (As if they don’t know by now, anyway.)

• People who get waterboarded talk. (True, although it’s not clear either that what they say always can be trusted or that they wouldn’t have talked otherwise. Besides, if it’s so effective, how come we’re afraid of telling those captured terrorists – or innocent bystanders who sometimes get swept up in the net – what we’re going to do to them? Does that make water torture less effective?)

They say that nothing cures supporters of torture like a taste of their own medicine. But no, I’m definitely not advocating water torture for Deroy Murdock, unless, as I just suggested, he volunteers. What I do advocate is that whenever he shows up to speak in public, or just shows up in a restaurant, we all burst into song and treat him to a rendition of Torturers' Rag.

Or would that make him complain that we're torturing him?

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.