Waterboarding: Back in the News

I watched the piece. Which is how I know how ridiculous you are being.

She went through a litany of things she was able to piece together about the dark period in this country this guy helped usher in. And we don't even know 100 percent of what he did, because he destroyed the evidence and has contradicted everyone who has a different account than he does, and sits with protection of most of it being hidden from the public.

If you find the "Ensure" thing so ridiculous, are you willing to volunteer to put your life in that sadistic moron's hands? Because the Ensure thing was an addendum, in the context of her asking about waterboarding, sleep deprivation for days on end, being kept naked, in stress positions, being shoved in a box with an insect, having an electric drill held to your head, told your female relatives were going to be raped, and what else am I forgetting? ... and on top of it not being fed while you are being subjected to that for months (which is where the Ensure thing came up -- they starved the prisoners and threw them a bottle of Ensure every so often). Put in context, it's fucking hysterical, eh? They were treated like hospital patients!

This guy thought he was defending the practice of torture. Or at least he had the chance to, if he could. Instead he was the worst possible spokesman for torture possible. Genghis Khan could have put in a more winning performance. I don't know if it infuriated me more that this guy, of questionable competence and intelligence, was given that much power to trample on our values, or that he actually did the stupid things that he did.

Stahl did a great job. She knew he couldn't defend torture and it must have been immediately clear that he was full of himself, so she sat back and just presented what she knows (which isn't everything, unfortunately, because this guy not only had carte blanche to do whatever horrible things he wanted, he also destroyed the videotaped evidence) and let the idiot hang himself. He basically told us that he employed techniques without much thought put into any of it. He called everyone who has contradicted his accounts of the effectiveness of what he did, including the FBI, which was privy to a lot of what actually happened, liars. And he essentially said that he put more time and effort into covering his ass by getting lawyers and elected officials to sign their name to it than he actually put into thinking about the morality or even the effectiveness of what he did.

Ensure. Yes, that was what that interview was about.