After Waterboarding – What?

Waterboarding is a war crime, but I never really thought of it as torture. It does not quite compare in my mind with having your fingernails pulled out slowly by some guy with a pair of pliers the way they do in Iraq. Or having your eyes gouged with bicycle spokes the way they do in India. If I had my choice of the pliers or the bicycle spokes or having somebody squirt water in my face, well, I’d take the water any day, but that’s just me. Guantanamo is hot. I get thirsty whenever I am hot anyway. Naturally my friend Hooter had some thoughts on the subject. Hooter is so right wing he makes William F. Buckley look like a cheerleader for the communist party.

Hooter was unsympathetic. “They made us listen to George W. Bush’s speeches for eight years,” Hooter said. “Why should terrorists be treated any better than the American people?”

“You consider listening to George W. Bush to be torture?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, of course. Every time Bush came on TV I started choking worse than a character in a Chuck Palahniuk novel.

“It’s worse than torture,” Hooter said. “Whenever he came on TV I screamed ‘Ye gods and little fishes, can’t someone get that idiot to shut up?’” And this from a right wing extremist, keep in mind.

I had to admit thirty seconds into any of Dubya's speeches I was willing to tell everything I ever knew to any stranger who would listen. But yet Dubya blathered on. He was not content to stop with mere torture. He wanted blood.

“And the worst part,” my friend continued, “is that terrorists do not have to fill out their tax returns every April 15.”

I shook my head in sympathy. “I see your point,” I said. “I don’t mind paying, but filling out the forms violates the Geneva Convention if anything does. I’d rather be waterboarded any day.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “I felt so tortured after I finished mine I wore a hood to I take my tax return to the post office.”

“A government issue hood, no doubt,” I said.

“Courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps.”

“Terrible,” I said. “Just terrible.” Then I remembered. “The attorney general is saying he may turn the worst terrorists at Guantanamo loose in American cities. No other country would have them. And the terrorists are saying they don’t want to come. They want to stay at Guantanamo.”

“I don’t blame them,” Hooter said. “The terrorists might not survive. Especially in L.A. some of the neighborhoods are pretty tough. Nothing like the cushy lives they left in the Middle East. You can’t buy a decent bag of Egyptian dates anywhere.”

“Then there’s the unemployment situation.” I had to add that one. “Terrorists are not eligible for unemployment benefits.”

“Terrorists don’t want to turn to crime just to eat or pay the rent,” Hooter said. “They’re going to hate living in this country. How can we do that to people who want to blow us all up?”

“It’s not the America I grew up in,” I said.

“That’s why they tortured them, then,” my friend said.

“That’s right. They’re toughening them up. They’re getting them ready for a new life in the United States.”