So it looks like you guys are determined to keep up the whole torture thing. Even though experts agree that you are unlikely to get any useful information out of somebody you’re torturing, you guys just love the torture.
And it appears that no matter how bad you screw things up, you get to stay in office! I mean, half of you should be under indictment for criminal negligence, and the other half of you are under indictment! But there you sit, unimpeached. I guess we’re just going to have to learn to live together.
So I’ve been thinking about the kinds of torture that I’d be okay with. Obviously, the public wasn’t happy with the ”guy pile” or the ”statue of liberty with electrodes” or the ”sexually assaulting a man with a glow stick until it breaks inside him” (though I noticed that the press didn’t play that one up). But somehow, even though you guys have been torturing some people who turned out to be innocent, the American public seems pretty okay about the whole thing. But with the war going sour, you’re going to have to find some tactics that won’t piss off the public so much.
Here’s one that you can totally get away with: you know how some days you wake up and you’re almost out of toothpaste? And you know that you’ll just never remember to tell Harriet to pick some up for you. And all day, whenever you’re not in a position to do anything about it, you think about the toothpaste situation? Well get this: what if we did that with just about everything?
See, we get the detainees (”too guilty to let go, too innocent to prosecute”) down in GTMO into a different kind of routine. We give them little efficiency apartments and little mindless jobs. Then after they’ve been at them for a few weeks and the talk has turned from ”Why won’t they stop pissing on my Koran?” to ”Man, that Khaled in middle management is riding my ass – not like the Americans with the glow sticks, mind you, but still…” we start doing things to them like not giving them any more than a smidgeon of toothpaste. Or we give them a shampoo that they have plenty of, but it totally makes their hair frizzy, but let them know that their regular brand will be in stock any day now.
Then, when their general annoyance level starts reach a plateau, we turn up the heat: traffic. Give them a little taste of the beltway, but make sure it’s in a beat up Yugo. Maybe go all out and bring their families over and let them deal with their teenage daughter who is so boy-crazy and their wives with the shop-o-holism. Then we start the price hikes.
You know, raise the prices on their apartments until they’re spending half of their salaries on putting a roof of their heads. Then drop the health care plan. Let them chew on that for a while. Convince them to upgrade the Yugo to something big enough to get little Abbas to soccer practice with the rest of the team, then raise the gas prices for no good reason. While they’re stuck in traffic getting 9 miles to the gallon, have a little report on the radio about how heating oil and natural gas prices are set to sky-rocket this winter. You know, just to twist the knife.
At this point, they’re ready to crack. They’ll sell their kids to get the credit cards paid. They’ll sell the wife just to avoid paying for the mammograms that their new HMO won’t cover. Hell, they’ll be so crazed that they’ll vote for the idiots that put them into this position in the first place!
Waitaminute… Have you been reading my mind?