5 May 2004, Matt Bivens, The Daily Outrage
Our government is shocked -- shocked! -- to find that its representatives have been torturing people.
But this is the same government that, while insisting that of course it never tortures anyone, has for two years now boasted of a tough-minded new-and-improved product: "torture lite."
What is torture lite? That's like asking "What is fat-free yogurt?" Answer: It's torture. (It's yogurt.)
Or if you prefer the mouthful-of-marbles approach, choose from any of the various elliptical media characterizations, like this one offered a year and a half ago by The Washington Post: "a brass-knuckled quest for information ... in which the traditional lines between right and wrong ... are evolving ..."
Evolving? Did those jeering Americans giving us the thumbs-up from Abu Ghraib look highly evolved?
The Post came up with its circumlocution after interviewing ten top Bush Administration national security officials, including several who'd witnessed "the handling of prisoners" who had been:
kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles ... At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques.
Those who cooperate are rewarded with creature comforts, interrogators whose methods include feigned friendship, respect, cultural sensitivity and, in some cases, money. Some who do not cooperate are turned over-- "rendered," in official parlance-- to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture [is well known].
Ah.
So when the "reward" is "cultural sensitivity" ... what's going on before then?
Making men stand around in women's underpants, of course. As was explained ad nauseam this week, it's par-tic-ularly humiliating for A-rabs.
"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," one Bushocrat who has "supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists" told The Post, adding -- "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this [i.e., on torture]. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA."
MUCH MORE: "We're Shocked -- Shocked!"
