Tortured Logic

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Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:29:16 -0600

[bushlied] Tortured Logic

 

 

 

Your Tax Money At Work.

 

Aren't you amazed that the right-wing Christian Evangelical extremists

love these people???!!

 

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[bushlied] Tortured Logic

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Tortured Logic

Protecting the kids from Jack Bauer

 

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

12/9/05

http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

 

/ " The issue of sadistic torture goes right to the core of the

psychopathic global elite.

The psychopathic personality is by nature mendacious, sadistic, and

homicidal. " /

Allisone

 

 

The ACLU says that the court hearing the case over releasing some of

the more explosive Abu Ghraib photos might rule on December 15th.

 

These are the photos and videos that Seymour Hersh saw, that he

alleges contain images of US soldiers engaging in the rape of Iraqi

children in order to psychologically torture the parents, who are

watching from behind

bars.

 

The administration is fighting this, of course. They think that

releasing the photos might upset and anger people. They think that

images of US soldiers raping children might enrage people who don't

like America. As if raping their children wouldn't.

 

One of the most astounding reasons the admin came up with for putting

off releasing the photos was that " they needed time to anonymize

those engaged in illicit behavior. "

 

You read that right. The administration wants to delay releasing the

photos so they can protect child rapists in their employ.

 

Makes you feel really proud, doesn't it?

 

They aren't even trying to deny it happened, now. They just want to

protect " those engaged in illicit behavior. " They aren't just talking

about the sadistic, sociopathic creatures in American military

uniforms.

They want to protect the people who unleashed these creatures. They

want to protect themselves.

 

And of course, the debate about whether torture has any place in

interrogation (including, apparently, child rape, rape, murder and

mayhem) continues. Most people are so morally impoverished that they

can only think in terms of whether raping a nine year old girl in

front of her father might cause the father to become cooperative.

 

Left out of this warm, Christian scenario of justice triumphant are

such troubling questions as " Does the father actually know anything? "

and " If he does, will he tell the Americans what they want to know, or

might he be feeling some slight resentment, and perhaps fib to them

instead? "

 

These are the sorts of questions that really piss off people like

Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales and cause them to accuse people of

being unamerican. If you can't stand for child rape, then you

certainly can't stand for American values.

 

Senator John McCain, who was tortured for nearly six years, and is

leading the push to end this disgraceful behavior by the

administration, explained how a tortured prisoner is likely to

respond. Sometimes he would tell his captors the truth. Sometimes he

would lie to them. He would give them lots of useless information,

and strive to make anything useful seem useless, and vice versa. In

short, he told them things they wanted to hear, while being as

useless to them as possible.

 

Most people put it in simple terms. Torture is justified if it works.

(No word on if this includes child rape, or torturing children for

information). I think of it as " The Jack Bauer Syndrome. "

 

Jack is the fictional lead character in Fox's " 24 " television series.

Each season, Jack encounters a vast conspiracy to do great damage to

America, and must track down and stop the perpetrators before they

get to the point where they can actually perpetrate. Jack (Kiefer

Sutherlund) gets to shoot lots of guns and jump out of inescapable

traps and generally act like an all-American hero. This includes the

occasional bit of torture, usually against a bad guy, but sometimes

against a journalist or other third party who might have information

on what the bad guys are up to. He twists a few thumbs, threatens to

kick their dogs, and they tell him where the baggie of toxic nuclear

flu germs is. Jack goes to retrieve the baggie, but gets distracted

when his daughter gets kidnaped again, and has to go torture someone

else in order to get her back, although it's never quite clear why he

would want to. About half-way through the second season, the novelty

wore off, and I realized it was a really stupid show and quit watching.

 

But this leads to the " Jack Bauer Scenario, " much beloved by those

who think that torture -- civilized torture, that is, none of this

sex-with-little-kids-stuff -- is acceptable under certain

circumstances.

 

The scenario is that you have Abdul Terrorist tied to a chair, and

you happen to know that he is the guy who planted the baggie of

atomic poisonous black plague. You know that he's put a timer on it,

and that it's going to go off before episode 24 of the series. You've

got three hours to find it. If you know this much, it's kind of

puzzling that you don't know where the baggie is. After all, Dick

Cheney knew exactly where all of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass

destruction were on far less intelligence. But you don't, and here's

Abdul, sitting in the chair with his hands tied behind his back and

your AK-47 waving in front of his nose, and he's smirking and saying

in an inexplicable Russian accent, " Hew vill neffer find the baggie.

Bwaa-haa-haa! Death to American imperialist pigs! "

 

OK, Abdul has signaled that he is not going to be cooperative

prisoner.

It's time to drag out the thumbscrews and battery terminal leads.

 

In Jack Bauer's world, Abdul breaks down and confesses, and Jack

races to the spot Abdul mentioned, finds the baggie, and disarms it

with one second to spare, and America is spared for another

television season.

 

In the real world, Abdul is either a member of the inner circle,

dedicated to the idea that America needs destroying in order to save

the world (bad guys never see themselves as bad guys, and in the real

world, often aren't actually bad guys at all), or he's a computer

geek who did the " deathtoamerika.com " webpage and doesn't know

anything about any baggies. If the latter, then no amount of torture

in the world can make someone divulge information they don't have. If

the former, you have someone who knows he only has to run out the

clock in order to win.

 

So he takes several jolts and gets a few fingers broken, enough to

make it look convincing, and then finally gasps, " Enough, please. The

baggie is in the dumpster behind the convenience store at Divisadero

and Blackstone. "

 

Jack, if he's really stupid, goes hauling off to the convenience

store for a little dumpster diving, while Abdul gets to watch the

clock progress while hiding a smirk. If Jack is smart, he sends

someone out to look (which will waste a half hour, since the dumpster

is on the far side of town) while he continues to work Abdul over,

because he knows that sometimes torture victims aren't sympathetic to

their tormenters, at least not in the first few weeks. But Abdul only

has to hold out for two hours now.

 

A half hour passes, and he admits the baggie is out at the east end,

in an abandoned warehouse. Since terrorists always hide their shit in

abandoned warehouses this has to be true information, and so Jack

sends another member of his squad out to the east end, only to

discover that there is no abandoned warehouse.

 

Now Jack is pissed, and he brings out Abdul's four year old son and

starts playing a merry round of bugger-the-baby. Remember, this is

Fox: pederasty is ok if it's patriotic. Abdul breaks down and

confesses the truth.

 

The baggie is next door, not even in a locked room. But the last guy

Jack tortured lied. It wasn't set to go off at noon, the favored time

for terrorists. It went off two hours ago, at 9am. Jack would have

heard a small thump if Abdul hadn't been screaming so loudly at the

time.

Abdul looks at Jack. " So tell me: got a tickle in your throat? Bumps

under your arms? Has your hairline receded in the past ten minutes?

Looks like you might be coming down with something, American pig!

Bwa-ha-ha-ha! "

 

No, torture doesn't work. Not even in the simplistic black-and-white

world of Jack Bauer and Fox.

 

But here's the worst part. Torture dehumanizes. It dehumanizes the

victim. But it also dehumanizes the person doing the torture. They

develop a taste for it. They start taking pictures. They are under

pressure to produce information, and come up with ever more inventive

and nasty ways of getting it. They resent their prisoners, and the

two combine for horrific results.

 

Anyone capable of torture is capable of child rape.

 

The people whose faces the administration wants to conceal, to protect

them, are child rapists.

 

They will be coming back home some day.

 

They will still be child rapists and torturers.

 

Perhaps someday, when they become policemen, they might decide you

have information that they need, either to save the city, or just to

impress the captain.

 

So: got any kids?

 

These guys love kids.

 

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