I Hate What You Just Said

In-between throat clearings, Fred Thompson spoke last night at the RNC. For several minutes of the speech, I thought Fred was reading from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs instead of the teleprompter. But I was wrong. The Mel Gibson-grade torture porn Fred was spouting was actually a recounting of John McCain’s experience as a POW in Vietnam.

The truly curious thing about this speech is that it doesn’t present McCain the strong, McCain the Top Gun pilot, McCain the patriotic hero; rather, it presents McCain the victim, McCain the martyr, McCain the lying in his own feces. I assume that this is all about getting the attention of the Christian right, for whom Thompson’s speech will read like a fifth gospel.

The Gospel of St. McCain begins on October 26, 1967, high above the dense jungle of North Vietnam. It was on that day that “a surface-to-air missile slammed into John’s A-4 Skyhawk jet, blowing it out of the sky.” During the escape from the plane, McCain broke “his right leg, his right knee, his left arm and right arm in three places.”

As Thompson relates, what greeted him on the ground was even worse:

An angry mob got to him when he fell to the ground. A rifle butt broke his shoulder. A bayonet pierced his ankle and his groin. They took him to the Hanoi Hilton, where he lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. He was offered medical care for his injuries if he would give up military information in return.

John McCain said, “No”.

I’m sorry, but there is something in the description of the bayoneting of McCain’s ankle and groin — and the refusal of succor — that sounds a bit too much like the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The only difference is that while Jesus got a postmortem spear in the side, McCain got a bayonet in two places — and one of them was the crotch. Which is like one-upping the suffering of the Son of God. In short, Jesus was a pussy. And probably a community organizer.

Anyway, thank God McCain didn’t die. Just think of the theological confusion this would have created. Who would I worship then?

Thompson continued:

After days of neglect, covered in grime, lying in his own waste in a filthy room, a doctor attempted to set John’s right arm without success and without anesthesia. His other broken bones and injuries were not treated. John developed a high fever and dysentery. He weighed barely a hundred pounds. Expecting him to die, his captors placed him in a cell with two other POWs who also expected him to die.

At this point, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Nothing makes a Republican misty-eyed like the story of a man who can’t get adequate health care or one who experiences arbitrary imprisonment and senseless torture. There are 47 million citizens without health care in America. But doing anything other than praying for these people will introduce inefficiencies in the market. Jesus, CEO would be very displeased. And I have it on good authority that America would never torture. I prayed hard for that.

But Fred Thompson was just clearing his throat:

John McCain fought on. He persevered. So then they put him in solitary confinement for over two years — isolation, incredible heat beating on a tin roof, a light bulb in his cell burning 24 hours a day, boarded-up cell windows blocking any breath of fresh air, the oppressive heat causing boils the size of baseballs under his arms, the outside world limited to what he could see through a crack in the door.

For five-and-a-half years this went on. John McCain’s bones may have been broken, but his spirit never was.

We hear a lot of talk about hope these days. John McCain knows about hope. That’s all he had. [. . .]

He’d smile and give ‘em a thumbs-up.

The guards cracked ribs, broke teeth off at their gums. They cinched a rope around his arms and painfully drew back his shoulders. Over four days, every two to three hours, the beatings resumed. During one especially fierce beating, he fell, again breaking his arm.

John was beaten for communicating with other prisoners. He was beaten — beaten for NOT communicating with so-called peace delegations. He was beaten for not giving information during interrogation. [. . .]

Whenever John was returned to his cell — walking if he could, dragged if he couldn’t — as he passed his other fellow POWs, he would often call out to them.

Obama can form the word “hope” with his mouth. But it’s a mouth that hasn’t been repeatedly kicked by the boot of Charlie. And that makes all the difference. McCain has suffered more than Obama. Perhaps more than Jesus. Therefore, we can be sure that God loves him and favors him to lead our nation.

I can’t wait for Mel Gibson to buy the rights to this story.

Me likey.

The New York Times and Washington Post present the following set of stomach-churning facts gleaned from investigative journalist, Jane Mayer:

“Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.”

“A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were ‘enemy combatants’ subject to indefinite incarceration.”

“[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees’ cases . . .’There will be no review,’ the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. ‘The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.’”

“[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.”

[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were ‘categorically’ torture, which is illegal under both American and international law”.

“[T]he Red Cross document ‘warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.’”

Constitutional law professor, and former NSA lawyer, Jonathan Turley, throws in his two cents:

Some completely unbelievable news from today’s New York Times. The entire harsh interrogation torture regime used at Guantanamo Bay was plagiarized from Red Scare-era documents detailing Communist Chinese interrogation techniques:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. [. . .]

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

The article further explains that the “only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: ‘Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.’”

American Torture.™  Made in China.

As the article is quick to reveal, the position of the US at the time was that the described Chinese practices were torture. Further, it was also clear at the time that such practices do not produce actionable intelligence; rather, they elicit promiscuous confession. In the end, torture does nothing but create an endless, self-justifying loop of hysteria and paranoia.

Perhaps it is time for someone to tell this president “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

This just gives me the warm and fuzzies:

A new poll of citizens’ attitudes about torture in 19 nations finds Americans among the most accepting of the practice. Although a slight majority say torture should be universally prohibited, 44 percent think torture of terrorist suspects should be allowed, and more than one in 10 think torture should generally be allowed.

Thank you, Jack Bauer.