We Have Ways of Making You Talk

Apparently our Central Intelligence Agency stuffed a wet towel up Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s nose just short of 200 times in an effort to get him to divulge further secret plots against America . I wonder whether it was the twelfth or twenty-fifth time when the Shaikh sort of figured out they weren’t going to actually drown him. Perhaps the last 100 times were just an effort to let him know we were serious in our desire to be kept up to date on Osama’s psychopathic and delusional hatred of modernity. We certainly were not seeking the secrets of the Shaikh’s hair care regimen. I would never suggest that anyone working on behalf of our national security would indulge in petty sadism and I’m sure our interrogators were all happy, well adjusted individuals who revere constitutional principles and Judeo-Christian ethics, but for my part they can forego the fraternity initiation rituals and stick to proven investigatory techniques.

Speaking of proven investigatory techniques, the news media report that we also put one of our Al-Qaeda guests in a box with an insect in order to elicit the kind of discomfort that results in comprehensive truthfulness. The reports don’t say what sort of insect it was, and the average journalist is highly unlikely to be able to distinguish an arachnid or a myriapod from an insect, but the whole idea strikes me as somewhat comic. I can just envision a bunch of Jihadis hunkered down in their dank, viper and scorpion infested cave while a Predator drone loiters overhead. Achmed says to Abdul, “We must abandon Jihad and return to agrarian subsistence; else wise the infidel Americans will put us in a box with a very scary bug”.

So what has happened to our mighty nation and our inviolable principles? How have a handful of deluded sociopaths (Al-Qaeda, not the RNC) frightened us so much that we no longer know how to behave like civilized people? It scares me to imagine what sort of nonsense we might stoop to if we were faced with a persistent, effective threat. I’m not certain about some of my fellow citizens, but I would prefer to live in a nation where being a scum-bag is not considered essential to national security..