Current Events Watch

Let him go. He seems a little crazy, I’ll admit, but Charles Manson is innocent. It was me! That entire Tate-LaBianca fiasco? My idea. Sorry, Charlie, for the last 30-plus years of incarceration, and for the bad press. I was only six in 1969, but very devious and maniacal for my age. Even though I was 1,629 miles away (helped to avoid suspicion), I managed to pull it off. And you were a great scapegoat, being such a psycho and all. But I confess! The whole thing was my idea.

So I’m finally coming clean … water is very cleansing! Particularly effective when strapped to a board and doused with enough H2O that death by drowning seems inevitable. If they do that to me again, I swear, I’ll confess to every past transgression, and even make up some more stuff if need be. I’ll say whatever they want to hear to make them stop with the waterworks already!

While I’m at it, I’d just as well admit now to stealing that necklace at the mall to give Mom for Christmas, 1978. I don’t want to end up back on the board again, I’m still waterlogged and can hardly catch my breath. Oh, yeah, and I may have played a small part in that Black Dahlia murder thing, too, although that would have been in my previous life. I’m not sure about that one, but why not put every possibility on the table, to cover my ass. That waterboard thing, not to mention those slaps up side the head, was torture!

Well, apparently it’s not really torture. Not according to George W. Bush, responding today to the New York Times article revealing the “secret” Justice Department’s legal opinion from 2005, that authorized the use of painful methods, such as “head slaps, freezing temperatures and simulated drownings known as waterboarding, in combination”, to elicit confessions for whatever atrocities might be suspected. This just months after the December 2004 Justice Department’s opinion that publicly declared torture “abhorrent”.

President Bush defended his administration’s methods of detaining and questioning suspects on Friday, though, saying they are both successful and lawful, and that “this government does not torture people.” Either he doesn’t know what’s going on within his own administration and the agencies that be (which wouldn’t surprise me, actually), or King George is once again assuming that spewing repetitive rhetoric and propoganda will be enough to convince his ignorant subjects that all is well. Prince Cheney certainly backs him up:

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaeda suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called “water-boarding,� which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney claims that the Bush administration doesn’t regard waterboarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. “It’s a no-brainer for me,� Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Then there’s this gem:

Vice President Dick Cheney, being interviewed by a Fargo, North Dakota, talk radio show host, agreed with the host’s characterization of waterboarding as a “dunk in the water”

Typical Dick.

One especially cruel form of torture is waterboarding, which simulates drowning, the obvious objective being to force the person being tortured to give his torturers information to avoid death by drowning. The US has a long history of rejecting waterboarding as inhumane and degrading. Of course, that was before the Bush/Cheney regime.

-In 1901, an American soldier was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for waterboarding a suspected Filipino insurgent.

-After World War II, we treated as war criminals Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners.

-We court-martialed an American soldier who had aided in the waterboarding of a prisoner in the Vietnam War.

-The Field Manual of the U.S. Army bans waterboarding.

But that was then, and this is now. We’ve changed our minds. Now, anything goes. “Just admit to (fill-in-the-blank), dammit, and we’ll stop.”

It’s really no wonder that after his CIA waterboarding experience that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to everything from masterminding a grand total of 31 terrorist attacks, the shining moment being, of course, September 11, 2001, to planning to send several former US Presidents to prematurely meet their Maker! The dead presidents plans were foiled, of course, by international anti-terrorist agencies. (Our own agencies apparently had no clue. Thank God, others around the world were keeping tabs on the welfare of our former presidents … the world loves us!) And not only did KSM mastermind 9/11, he was also behind the Richard Reid shoe bomb thing, and he personally beheaded WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl. Pretty much anything that made the news. Quite an impressive resume.

Khalid was no doubt a bad guy, and probably involved in typical day to day, routine Al-Quaeda, kill-the-Americans plotting, but I doubt very seriously if he is such a mastermind as to have orchestrated such a vast array of terrorist activity. Four years of being held captive and tortured, though … well, he probably decided to ‘fess up to just about anything and everything. Waterboarding makes you talk. He probably would have admitted to the Manson spree as well, had he been questioned about that. Thank goodness it didn’t come up! I was struggling for something horrendous to confess to, and was growing tired of the “dunks in the water.”

torture, waterboarding, water-boarding, waterboard, al quaeda, guantanamo, iraq war, detainees, terrorism, interrogation, charles manson, george bush, dick cheney