[PORN] In Which Your Narrator Gets Angry and Inappropriate Regarding Torture

YOU: For one thing, Montag, the whole waterboarding discussion is SO over!

ME: Yeah, this thing has been rattling around inside my head for a few weeks now.

YOU: And who even knows who John Yoo is anymore? OBSCURE!

ME: [sigh]

As a refresher, John Yoo is the fellow who wrote the memo staking out the OFFAL administration’s legal justification for the use of (not) torture.

For the UNITED FUCKING STATES use of (NOT) TORTURE as an INSTRUMENT OF STATE POLICY.

Incidentally, Yoo is also memorable for once positing that it was in the president’s power to order the crushing of the testicles of the child of an uncooperative prisoner in order to get the location of a good fishing hole. (So long as the president thinks it necessary.)

Thus John Yoo “the Baptist” prepared the way for the US’s newest weapon: a 900 foot messiah that accepts monumental handjobs from Oral Roberts University and ejaculates Freedom. When he makes sweet sweet love, even removes his foot from Democratic Iraq’s throat long enough to go ATM, and bust the gift of Liberty across her mascara-and-tear-streaked face.

900 Foot Messiah says, “It’s consensual! No exploitation here!”

And, “Shut the fuck up, bitch!”

And a little mopping up and a satisfying piss later, “Who’s next?”

Thanks for that, John Yoo!

Yoo da MAN!

But seriously…

So what happened just then during the Mukasey appointment? It seemed for a minute there that people were starting to agree that, yeah, this waterboarding thing is torture. But then, not many seem to be talking about it anymore. (“Whew! Thank goodness that’s over with!”) Nonetheless, my own lingering concerns over this issue have driven me to have worked up an outline for a lengthy post about waterboarding and its intricacies… a thousand times… in my head.

Fuck that shit.

Waterboarding is torture. What’s more, it’s a bad thing that our “elected” “leaders” have admitted to doing in a handful of instances. Know what else is torture, and is done as a matter-of-course to Guantanamo detainees, and presumably all/most/many other detainees in the “war” on “terror” as well— i.e. is much more widespread —and in my opinion, a far worse fate than being temporarily drowned?

Prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation.

Described as “the destruction of a human being’s mind,” even by the most permissive definition of torture imagined by our leaders, prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation are torture.

Consider these torture success stories:

• Jose Padilla who committed a thought crime and has been reprogrammed.
• David Hicks who confessed his crimes but underwent reprogramming anyway.