Waterboarding Camp

You don’t have to look too far around the blogosphere to find people who love torture. According to some, torture is just awesome. Pretty much, conservatives love torture and liberals hate it. This difference of opinion baffled me for a while. I mean, conservatives believe that the government needs to be greatly limited and that government is full of corrupt, self-serving politicians as evidenced by the more than 11,000 pork barrel projects. The government we installed in Iraq is corrupt. The government we installed in Afghanistan is corrupt. Meanwhile, here at home, corruption is so widespread it can’t even be calculated: in Illinois alone, the cost of government corruption to taxpayers is estimated at $500 million a year. I mean, the government can’t even order the president a goddamn helicopter without fucking it up.

That’s why so many conservatives are so dead set against nationalized healthcare. Yeah, it’s true that here in the US we spend more than twice as much as other industrialized nations and yet we suck ass compared to them when you look at major health indicators like life expectancy, infant mortality, and immunization rates. But the mega-corporations now providing us with insurance and medications who care so very much about our well-being are making healthy profits. I mean, consider the fact that former UnitedHealth CEO William McGuire got $1.4 billion in stock options while the company made $30 billion in after-tax profits and spent $32 billion in insurance underwriting and marketing costs. Healthy! Oh, and, by the way, you have a preexisting condition so your claim has been denied. Sorry. Please pay the 87% increase in your premiums over the last six years, though, or you’ll be among the uninsured in less time than it takes to say, “not covered: elective,” loser. Do you know why we didn’t have a bigger outbreak of swine flu? Because we couldn’t afford it. Yeah, it’s true that Obama’s plan would merely be competitive with existing plans, so your health coverage would not change. It’s also true that businesses would benefit because they would no longer have to pay high insurance premiums or carry the administrative overhead for employees that opted into the single-payer program. But still, government is bad! And politicians cannot be trusted!

That’s why I’m kind of surprised by the conservative reaction to torture. I mean, if you don’t trust the government to pay for your fucking prescription, how can you trust it to secretly subject people to torture? I mean, okay, the government has awesome power all the time, but why would you give a government you don’t trust tyrannical power?

I think that, for moral guidance, conservatives often ask themselves what Jesus would do. Regarding torture, many apparently already have. And it turns out that Jesus loves torture! According to a poll taken by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 62 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that “the use of torture against suspected terrorists to gain important information” is often or sometimes justified. Only sixteen percent of that group believed that torture is never justified. That number was lower than any other group polled. There was also just as strong a correlation between regular church attendance and support for torture. A similar poll last year offered pretty similar results, finding that 57 percent of white Southern evangelicals believed that torture was often or sometimes justified. Other polls give similar results. And note that the Pew Forum didn’t ask about “Harsh Interrogation Techniques” or any other euphemism for torture. It asked about plain old “torture.” So, Jesus is all over torture. Jesus hearts torture!

But, still, while this explains that some Jesus-loving people love torture, it doesn’t explain why. Then I saw a survey of the best and worst things liberals and conservatives could imagine. It explains a lot.

Source: Frank G. Musket & Harvey H. Temple, The Douchebaggery of the Masses: Political America from Ignoramississippi to Dumbfucklahoma, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 1191, 1207 (2009).

Many who are in favor of waterboarding argue that it works. But, really, who gives a shit whether it works or not? I mean, it’s not torture, right? Listen, the so-called “torture” memos released by Obama give all the US law that matters. They all agree about the definition of torture. The most important US law, 18 USCA §§ 2340-2340A, defines torture as an act that inflicts “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Another important US law, 28 USCA § 1350, also discussed in the memos, governs civil suits for torture and its definition is pretty identical: “severe pain or suffering ... whether physical or mental….” That’s a fine definition of torture in my book.

The memos go on to find that waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever.” And, since it’s a “controlled acute episode,” it can’t be said to cause any suffering either. In addition, though “waterboarding constitutes a threat of imminent death,” it causes no “prolonged mental harm.” That’s all from the “Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative” torture memo of August 1, 2002, written by Jay Bybee, by the way. But all the other memos agree.

So, waterboarding is kind of like riding a roller coaster or something: no physical or mental pain or suffering whatsoever. Just thrills and chills. That’s why it’s not torture and that’s what makes it so awesome. Okay, when the CIA tried waterboarding on their own operatives, the operatives lasted only an average of fourteen seconds. And conservative shockjock Erich Muller only lasted six seconds and afterward he said it was “absolutely torture.” But we all know how sensitive these rightwing radio dudes can be. I mean, the memos — written by lawyers — tell us it’s not even painful! And since when do any of us, conservative or liberal, have any reason to not trust lawyers? It must be as they say, a kind of awesome amusement park ride where you feel panic during it but afterward you laugh and laugh. In fact, I’m sort of surprised that we don’t have detainees begging us to waterboard them. At the very least, if we just explained to the detainees how much fun waterboarding is, we could probably get their consent to waterboard them and then none of this would be an issue.

Jay Bybee, who wrote that waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever,” was then Assistant Attorney General under Bush but he is now a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, one step below the Supreme Court. That means that, in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington State, waterboarding is perfectly legal as long as Jay Bybee is your judge. It’s also legal in Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, wherever the fuck that is. Oh, and Alaska, too, but you already knew torture was legal there.

And here is the truly awesome thing: I looked up the definition of child abuse in California. And child abuse occurs when someone “causes or permits any child to suffer, or inflicts thereon, unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering” according to California Penal Code 11165.3. So, instead of “severe,” child abuse is “unjustifiable” physical pain or mental suffering. But that doesn’t matter because, according to the Jay Bybee memo, waterboarding “inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever!” So, you don’t even need to justify waterboarding your kids! In fact, waterboarding is more appealing than spanking as a way to discipline your children. After all, spanking hurts! Even Bybee agrees: he writes that a facial slap “may hurt.” But waterboarding doesn’t hurt at all! No pain and no suffering!

So, I was thinking about this, and about how conservatives and Jesus are all loving torture almost but not quite to death (usually), and I decided that there is a money-making opportunity here. So I’m going to open a summer camp for kids in California. Judge Bybee’s got my back and it looks like Obama won’t prosecute anybody for any of this shit, either. Here is the brochure for stoogepie’s Waterboarding Camp. Please pass it along. And don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Sign your kids up today.

Or you can just click on this link to download the brochure. Hurry. Water won’t be around forever.

That’s all I have to say about torture for right now.