Torture Torture

It's been another big week for torture memos. Turns out we actually waterboarded KSM and that other guy (Abu Zubaida) hundreds of times and Condi knew about it.

But I wonder if all this talk of torture is distracting us from our bigger detainee abuses.  Such as the innocent men we've imprisoned, some of them for years, with no way of proving their innocence.  Although the Times and the Post, and the blogs and the blawgs are lit up with torture talk, I think that most people could give a shit that we waterboarded this guy.

He's a confirmed terrorist.  And people have an assumption that we've only detained real terrorists.  Although The Chinese dissidents, Afghan satirists, the unlucky taxi driver, and the guy who just had the wrong name, among various others who were sold to us to out of revenge or greed have certainly proved that wrong.  We've detained a lot of innocent men and it's pretty disgraceful.  

I finally watched Taxi to the Dark Side a couple of days ago and learned that we've tortured these innocent guys as well.  So, really, who cares whether we waterboarded Abu Zubaida when we forced innocent men to wear panties and masturbate onto snarling dobermans while butch Marine women in cheerleader outfits did little dances about how we were going to murder their families, and then sent the guys back to their cells to be shackled in stress positions until they almost died?

I can speak about this as an authority because I was waterboarded (for about ten seconds at a Spongebob-covered art installation at Coney Island).

After the Dept. of Defense fucked around for years trying to avoid giving Gitmo detainees any real way of proving their innocence, the Supreme Court finally had to step in and acknowledge a constitutional right to habeas corpus review.  They should give habeas to the detainees at Bagram as well.  We've had long enough to come up with a decent process for sorting through the men we capture and have simply refused to.  The fact that we may have tortured them after holding them for years without sufficient reason is just the icing on the cake.