Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Hooray for torture

"Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate because it would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured"

says John Kiriakou of Abu Zubayda, an inmate detained without trial in the concentration camp at Guantanamo, who was tortured by waterboarding and then allegedly confessed.

As to whether Zubayda actually confessed or not, or the CIA got the information relating to Khalid Sheik Mohammed anyway from another source they would prefer to protect, we have only the word of his torturers - because the tapes of his interrogation have been deliberately destroyed.

According to Kiriakou, grilled by Congress today, the torture 'saved lives' by bringing Khalid to justice. Interestingly, he says it was also approved 'from the White House'. Yet even this CIA hardnut's bleeding liberal heart showed pangs of remorse, he says:

"Waterboarding was an important technique, and some of these other techniques were important in collecting the information," he said. "But I personally didn't want to do it. I didn't think it was right in the long run, and I didn't want to be associated with it."

If you were being charitable, you could assume that Kiriakou is trying to make his position on torture quite plain, explaining what went on now that the tapes have been wiped from history. But maybe there's something else about his account, a determination to show he was just acting under orders, preparing the Nurnberg defence in advance, just in case some pesky tape of something might surface again one day. What could he do? He was just following orders - orders which came from the very top.

Fox News, of course, couldn't just take the word of torture victims that waterboarding was A Bad Thing. You know Fox, real analysts of news, as this excerpt from their Fox & Friends shit-shower shows:

Brian Kilmeade said that waterboarding only involved putting a washcloth on the prisoner and Steve Doocy said "you don't dunk 'em in the water - you just kind of splash some water on 'em."

To prove it wasn't so bad, they had to get one of their own hardnuts to be exposed to it himself, for a few seconds, so he could declare:

"You really learn you can crack pretty quickly. ... I mean, they took me to the brink, where I was ready to submit, tell them anything within minutes, and then, just minutes later, I was standing by the side of that pool feeling fine." Harrigan concluded that "as far as torture goes, at least in this controlled experiment, to me, this seemed like a pretty efficient mechanism to get someone to talk and then still have them alive and healthy within minutes."

So that's all right then, isn't it? Because one fucking jumped-up cunt of a reporter, who knew he wasn't going to be put in any real harm - unlike the Guanatanamo inmates - was a bit scared but felt all right afterwards, that means it's OK, doesn't it? Did he even qualify anything, at any point, ever, by saying that because he knew that he was in a controlled environment and he knew he wasn't going to be killed - unlike those in Guantanamo, who have seen fellow inmates beaten to death, blinded and mutilated and therefore have a fair idea that something might happen to them - he might not have actually experienced the psychological torture at the heart of waterboarding? Well, what do you think, this is fucking Fox we're talking about, not a news channel. Watch for yourselves.

A shittier piece of self-loving journalistic wankery you'll find it hard to find in the rest of your lifetime - a shame they didn't drown the fucker for real.

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