You Think Waterboarding Is Bad?

Posted by on . 9 comments.

You probably used to think of waterboarding as a pretty nasty alternative interrogation technique (to use the official Bush-speak).

But remember that waterboarding is only one of the nastier torture tactics the Bush administaration has admitted to using. What unspeakable practices and devices we routinely used in our no-longer-so-secret CIA prisons around the world is not yet known.

But we do get a little peep every now and then into the practices that some of our so-called allies in TWAT are wont to use.

These are the members of that whole other “coalition of the willing” we don’t hear very much about, the friendly countries to whom we outsource some of our torture of terrorist suspects. The ones to whom we hand over terrorist suspects with a nod and a wink. In exchange for their solemn pledge that even though they may have tortured prisoners in the past, this one will be treated with kid gloves. And in exchange for the interrogation reports that are generated when these hardened al Qaeda operatives, who are so well-trained in interrogation resistance techniques, decide to sing like canaries (presumably in gratitude for not being tortured).

Over to Reuters, speaking of Binyam Muhammad, a prisoner who is currently held at Guantanamo Bay, but who has earlier enjoyed the hospitality of the Moroccan government. He is one of the detainees who fingered Jose Padilla, leading to his arrest.

Muhammad is an Ethiopian electrical engineer accused by the United States of receiving explosives training from al Qaeda, which he denies.
[...]
Muhammad has claimed in court documents that he gave false confessions implicating Padilla while held in a Moroccan prison, where he was beaten and slashed on the chest and penis with scalpels before being sent to Guantanamo.

Incidentally, Muhammad was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Somehow, in some perfectly mysterious manner, he ended up in a Moroccan prison before ending up in Guantanamo. Mysterious, indeed, are the ways of Allah.

But I’m just babbling to vainly try and distract you from the full horror of what you just read.

Here’s who we have become in the time of Gonzales and Bush: the United States of America now uses in legal proceedings statements that were voluntarily given by prisoners in between bouts of having their penis slashed with a scalpel.

I cannot begin to imagine what goes through your mind when the most powerful government in the world, the most unscrupulous government in the world, hands you over to Morocco, and you find yourself deep in the bowels of their enlightened prison system, at the mercy of men with scalpels who start systematically carving up your penis.

I cannot imagine it at all. But I imagine that if you offered someone a choice between that and waterboarding, they would pick waterboarding. And count you as a friend for life.

Comments

  1. Carl Gordon says:
    April 5, 2007 at 11:54 am

    The demands I put on myself for some kind of clear thinking through all this second-rate bullshit has put me on the ropes. But I just keep trudging and shoveling along. I’m finding that I have a lot of limitations in regards to the weighty task of not only shoveling this crap but putting up with the smell of GOP mendacity. Put another way: I don’t handle bureaucratic or political bullshit well.

    One of my more firmly held beliefs about the experience of being human is the fragility of human personality, in some if not all of us. The first assumption is that life is difficult. It doesn’t matter if you are tough, rich or smart. Living is stressful at best (Not counting the sentiments of Hallmark cards). Another assumption is that humans are flawed. So this dichotomy of our individual fragility and our desperate need to be connected, is a miserable condition, but this shit seems so unnecessary. The puffed pipe and glass of whiskey is a ineffective and childish escape, but then, such is every other human endeavor. Stopping to smell the roses means you’ll probably get hit by a charging yak. But I find the ever increasing maw of Bush’s insignificance and incompetence up the road a ways, like some existential sink hole, and let’s face it, history will not be kind to any of us after these last 6 years, even if you’re a member of the loyal opposition. To the troops, Bush is the grim reaper, with a stupid grinning Mickey Mouse mask on, waving a friendly greeting as he breaks wind and motions them to dive in. My psychic malaise continues.

    But I have to be more positive about all this, as the fleeting smell of indolent joy beckons me with eager largess, as I lap at the nether regions of the goddess of hoopla. Are the broken scales of Bush weighing heavy with ‘stoopidity’? The solution: Each day a compromise with frightened ennui and mindless escape………

  2. sac says:
    April 5, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    I saw the entirety of Carl’s comment up there on a t-shirt in Tijuana. It’s that catchy.

  3. sarabeth says:
    April 5, 2007 at 12:51 pm

    leave him alone.

    he always makes more sense than you ever did.

  4. sac says:
    April 5, 2007 at 12:54 pm

    Oh yeah, well nu uh.

    Also, I agree with what he said.

  5. Carl Gordon says:
    April 5, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    Listening to all this GOP blather gives me feelings of senselessness of purpose mixed with equal parts introjections therapy and hamburger Gestalt Helper, now with knuckles and femurs. And just like a voyage of innovation unto unexplored territory, listening to the blather of right wing yokels reminds me of the first time I opened an owl pellet. What a world of discovery! I had stumbled across a Barn Owl roost in an abandoned nun’s dildo one spring afternoon while skipping along the banks of the river Dung. Below the chute where all the naughty bits did their disgusting and unsightly business away from the prying eyes or our lord, was a small pile of damp, furry boluses (soft masses of chewed food). I examined each one, picking them up and carefully placing them on an old sack that belonged to the kindly old flatulent Father Flannigan, for what use had he of such underused apparatus. The fact that they were tough enough to survive the long gestation within the nun’s perch left no impression of sin nor the eternal torment and suffering me and my loved ones were now damned to eternity for, as essentially my sinful transgression not only cooked my goose but all the assholes I lived with at the time. This was my finest discovery to date, and I treated the pellets with the care and respect they deserved, just like those Egyptian artifacts I had watched archeologists excavate on T.V. or the current GOP spin on their latest blunder or fuckup. But then I said fuck it and put on “Cranked up really high” by Slaughter and the Dogs and awaited Sister Ann Daniel with a handy 5 iron and an uncontrollable urge to tee off her fucking skull.

  6. matt says:
    April 5, 2007 at 4:18 pm

    i think carl has a bright future.

  7. Carl Gordon says:
    April 5, 2007 at 4:55 pm

    Medication:

    Flexiril 20mg, three at night.

    Vicodin 750mg, 3 – 5, three times a day as needed.

    Soma ??mg, 5 – 10 a day as needed.

    Things have been rather scatter-shot lately. Been running around analogous to the oft’ mentioned headless chicken. It doesn’t help that the quality of “leadership” around these parts and other nether regions compel further numbing of undesirable neural impulses or forays into strange parallel realities in order to escape full soul deflation.The last couple of weeks have weighed in rather heavy on my despair to pleasure scale.Maximum distress is displayed for all to see when somebody upsets “the process”. It may explain the seemingly apparent stagnation of modern civilization at the hands of these dildos, when you consider the coincidence of giving every pinhead over eighteen the vote and the inability of humanity to take the next big step in humanist evolution. No, we’re much to busy worrying if the carpet matches the drapes, the molding is way too post-modern, and the light fixture might clash with the new spring fabrics as described in the latest issue of Pee-Hole magazine.All I can do is quote the great philosopher John Belushi, in one of his less than restrained moments: “My advice to you is to start drinking heavily!”. It’s Friday, and Sergeant Friday would say, “Smoke em if you got em!”.

  8. sarabeth says:
    April 5, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    Carl is George Bush’s stream-of-consciousness coach. He comes here in his spare time just to let off steam, knowing that his secret is safe with us.

    (His future may not be bright, though, since it’s tied to Bush.)

    How can you not love a guy who can go “I had stumbled across a Barn Owl roost in an abandoned nun’s dildo one spring afternoon”?

    Though, for my money, there’s nothing to touch the timeless magic of “It could be a burka or a burnoose, or even a loose chartreuse caboose.”

  9. Carl Gordon says:
    April 5, 2007 at 6:20 pm

    Thanks, I’ll accept that as a complement. The little demon perched upon the sleeping maiden of my under-utilized talent (which automatically eliminates any of my sisters – putana!), the horse with the opaque eyes representing GOP Myopia (blind = night, horse = mare), the young lassie in a rather suggestive (for Victorian sensibilities) reposeful stance, arms askance, legs akimbo thusly, beckoning for the light of reason and the free mule she’s been dreaming of. But you got the metaphor all wrong. My dreams (and part of my waking hours) border on grotesque, not merely nightmares. I could go on about oddly shaped ornaments found within Roman dwellings, or grottoes, during the first century, but eight years of Catholic schooling implies a mutation of character, plants and/or animals. Whilst it served me well in surviving my “formative” years, this mutation transformed normal features and/or behaviors into genuine extremes, meant to be frightening and/or disturbingly comic. Within this tale of tragedy and trifle, the flowers of youth found within my garden have been mutated into beautiful harbringers of death. While the physical features of the plants have grown more exquisite, their interior workings have become a frightening caricature of normal plant-life (hint, hint, nudge, nudge). Grotesque also defines two separate modes of my existence, comedy and tragedy. The result is a disturbing fiction wherein comic circumstances prelude horrific tragedy and vice versa, the “true” nature of God discovered, during one of my youthful outbursts, and accompanying chemical heavenly vision, whilst standing in a hog-pen. Now smarty-pants, let’s see you de-construct that one!