Torturin' Tony, or Scalia the Barbarian

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This past week, the Bush administration stated that it finally planned to put six men connected to the 9/11 attacks on trial. And, as Gomer Pyle used to say: surprise, surprise, surprise!

They don't intend to use evidence obtained by so-called "aggressive interrogation" -- as it's known in the civilized world, "torture." (You remember the civilized world. We used to be a part of it till George W. Bush and his cronies decided that the best way to defeat barbarism was to become barbarians.)

Seems that after the subjects were subjected to "waterboarding" and other "coercive techniques" by the CIA, a group of FBI interrogators known as the "Clean Team" came in. They used the techniques they'd been using for years on suspects, techniques aimed at gaining the subject's trust. Obviously, the FBI hates America and loves terrists.

Amazingly, the FBI team got the same answers the CIA got when they drowned the detainees, then brought them back to life. Of course, after you've tortured someone, it's kind of hard to decide exactly what to believe coming from them, since they know they could be put back in the barrel again at any moment.

Just ask Malcolm Nance, who has the unenviable job of waterboarding candidates for the U.S. Navy SEALS. Why? To teach them how to resist -- say it with me -- TORTURE.

Nance describes the story of a waterboarding victim he met who experienced the technique firsthand at the hands of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge: "He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. They rarely stopped. In torture, he confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a Buddhist monk, a Catholic bishop and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was actually just a schoolteacher whose crime was that he once spoke French."

And for those who'd scoff and say that waterboarding isn't torture, Nance has this to say: "Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them to accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies."

Obviously, Mr. Nance hates America and loves terrists.

Recently, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told BBC radio that, as far as he was concerned, torture could be A-OK, in some circumstances. He trotted out that old chestnut, the "ticking nuke" scenario.

You know the one I mean, the one that torture-loving Republicans bring up whenever the idea gets debated: A nuclear bomb is ready to go off in a major American city. You have the one guy who knows where it is and how to disarm it in a room. Do you torture him to get the information?

Sure, says Torturin' Tony.

"It seems to me," he said, "you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn't stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face."

It's August 1945. Hiroshima has just been bombed. The Japanese know that another bomb's coming. They haul every American POW out of their cells and waterboard them to find out when and where. War crime? I can't help but think every Japanese officer, noncom, and buck private involved would have at least served a lengthy prison sentence, if they weren't hanged outright.

You see, that's the thing about torture. When you say it's OK for us to do it in the name of saving ourselves, that gives our enemies an excuse to do it to our people, and effectively makes us hypocrites in the eyes of the civilized world if we try to prosecute torture as a war crime. (I know, I know -- who needs the civilized world, anyway?)

I'll tell you what, though. Since I'm a reasonable guy, I'll make you a deal. In the one situation where a nuclear bomb is about to go off in a major American city and you've got one guy in a room who knows where it is, then, and only then, do you get to "stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face." Everything else is right out.

Deal?

I have to tell you, everyone I've proposed this to had either refused to answer or flat turned it down. Because the ticking bomb scenario is so farfetched it's not likely to ever happen outside of a bad TV show.

Fortunately, it seems as if the days when our president condones torture by redefining the word are ending. Even the leading candidate for the Republican Party, a man who knows a bit about torture, has condemned it, which of course means he hates America and loves terrists.

I look forward to the day when the answer to the question "when can we torture the accused?" is a resounding "never."

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage. He says the closest he gets to torturing people is his guitar playing.

Quote of the Day

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?

Philip G. Hamerton, "The Intellectual Life"

At Last It Can Be Told

Over at the site Writer's Break, Jennifer Minar-Jaynes (a fine writer of dark Southern crime-fic her ownself) interviews yours truly
about the skills one needs to possess in order to be a successful novelist, the path to gettng an agent, and other matters.

Many thanks to Jennifer, who's struggled mightily with technical issues to get this thing off the ground.

THIS Can't Be a Good Sign

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARAH WEINMAN!

For some time, now, the Divine Miss Sarah's blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, has been the first place to go to find out what's moving and shaking in the crime fiction community. We all owe her a great debt of gratitude for her hard work.

But I think she'd settle for a drink.

Happy Birthday, Sarah! Many, many happy returns.

I Pity the Fools

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You know who I feel really sorry for this primary season? Extreme right-wingers, or as I like to call them, "wingnuts."

(Hey, after years of my political persuasion being called "libtards" and "Demonrats," I figured y'all need a snappy name of your own.)

It really can't be easy for you guys. After pretty much running the Republican party for so long, y'all just can't seem to catch a break.

First off, your early front-runner was Rudy Giuliani. "Mr. 9-11" had a solid record on some of the positions wingnuts have embraced in the Dubbya years. Things like torture and contempt for due process of law. But Giuliani's rather dodgy private life, as well as his pro-choice and pro-gay-rights stands, tarnished his supposed conservative credentials.

Plus, he was from New York, a city that conservatives loved for about a week and a half after 9/11, after which they went back to hating it with a passion.

Then it looked like the guy who was going all the way was Mitt Romney. But Romney's conservatism was always suspect, largely because he apparently embraced his current positions on abortion and gay marriage roughly the same day he started running for president.

Thompson looked like the Great Conservative Hope for one brief shining moment, but sputtered out. Huckabee looked to be staging a comeback, but still lags behind the wingnut boogeyman: Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Their hatred of McCain is summed up best by fundamentalist extremist Dr. James Dobson. McCain, Dobson wrote, "did not support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage, voted for embryonic stem-cell research to kill nascent human beings, opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty, has little regard for freedom of speech, organized the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings, and has a legendary temper and often uses foul and obscene language.

"I am convinced Sen. McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are. He has sounded at times more like a member of the other party. ... I certainly can't vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life."

Others despise McCain because of his stance on immigration. Glenn Beck of CNN even started calling McCain "Juan McCain" because of his so-called "pro-amnesty" positions on that issue. Still others hated him for his insistence that Americans should not engage in "cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" of detainees.

See, there are two issues that are nearly a religion to the Far Right: immigration and torture. They hate the first, and they ADORE the second. McCain won't toe the line on either, and that totally enrages the wannabe tough guys that get all sweaty while they fantasize about Jack Bauer of "24" cutting the fingers off Scary Brown People.

But fear not, wingnuts. There is hope. There is a candidate still in the race who is more conservative than John McCain. That candidate is: Hillary Clinton.

No, really, I'm serious. I have it from no less an authority than Ann Coulter, the very poster girl of wingnuttery.

In a recent appearance with Sean Hannity, Coulter said, with a straight face: "If McCain's our candidate, then Hillary's gonna be our girl. Sean, because she's more conservative than he is, I think she'll be stronger in the war on terrorism. I will campaign for her if it's McCain."

McCain, she says, "led the fight against well, you say interrogations, I say torture, at Guantanamo. She hasn't done that, she hasn't taken a position in front."

But wait, Hannity said, McCain supported the war in Iraq.

"So did Hillary," Coulter shot back. And, she added, when Dubbya said in his State of the Union address that the Iraq "surge" was working, "Hillary leapt up, she applauded the surge and she applauded that the surge was working."

And, much as it may shock people to see me agree with Ann Coulter, she's absolutely right. This is the sort of thing I've been saying about Clinton for some time now.

So there you have it, folks. The real "conservative" in the race is the woman the Far Right loves to hate. If there was any doubt in anyone's mind that the word "conservatism" no longer has any meaning, that should put it to rest.

Of course, if you could watch seven years of George W. Bush exponentially increasing the power of government and spending money like a sailor in port and still say with a straight face that he's a "conservative" president -- you may be a wingnut.