Not to minimize the horror of waterboarding, but the other approved techniques are as vile, and mentally and physically crippling as the waterboard.  Look no further than Senator John McCain for evidence that the use of stress positions will have long term crippling effects on detainees.

Jeff Tietz at True/Slant has a chilling piece on one teenage detainee’s experiences at Guantanamo.  For 15 year old Canadian citizen, Omar Khardr, avoiding waterboarding was no less horrifying.

The government accuses Khadr of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade during the battle, but in 2008 the Pentagon accidentally revealed that it had no evidence of this; it had evidence only that Khadr was present at the time. Khadr was far too young to have any useful knowledge of al Qaeda activities. Still…he was treated as a dangerous, savvy enemy combatant.

A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. “Get up,” the guard said. “You have a reservation.” Reservation was the commonly used term at Gitmo for torture session.

…the MPs uncuffed Omar’s arms, pulled them behind his back, and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this from of “stress positioning” can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of the chains between his hands and feet, and pushed him over onto his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and onto the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while, and then poured pine oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they had sucessfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.

As I read Mr. Tietz’s article I wondered how it is that waterboarding has taken center stage in terms of the torture debate.  Certainly the treatment of this 15 year old Canadian kid, even without waterboarding, would be considered torture by any reasonable person.

So, why all the discussion about waterboarding only?  Perhaps it’s that the U.S. has prosecuted both foreign and U.S. military forces for waterboarding, or that folks like Christopher Hitchens, Playboy magazine reporters, and radio commentator Erich “Mancow” Muller have, with the intent of proving waterboarding as no big deal, famously found waterboarding to be torture indeed.

But there may be another reason as well.  Vice President Cheney, in his speech on national security the other day, derided those who have coined euphemisms to describe interrogation techniques.  Put aside, if you can, Mr. Cheney’s obvious hypocrisy of, on the one hand, criticizing the use of euphemisms while, on the other hand, coining terms like “enhanced” interrogation, but waterboarding has been euphemism central for torture advocates.

It’s just a little “splash of water in the face”, after all.  Kinda like swimming, right?  All one has to do has hold their breath.  No big deal.  But Christopher Hitchens, the Playboy reporter and Mancow can provide video evidence it’s nothing at all like swimming or just a splash of water in the face.  But the extent to which advocates can minimize waterboarding will, to a great extent, determine how much or how little public outrage there will be against it.

So, I suspect torture advocates are happy to concentrate on the false debate of whether waterboarding is, indeed, torture.  Heck, it’s easy to come up with swimming metaphors to describe waterboarding.

Imagine trying to come up with euphemisms to describe using a 15 year old detainee, with his wrists bound to his ankles behind his back, as a human mop to soak up his own piss.

Or just think how difficult it would be to invent a nice little euphemism for slicing detainees genitals with a scalpel.

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I posted data from a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study a couple weeks ago that illustrated, in tabular form, the disparity between middle and upper class earnings over the last thirty years.  The data, broken into five income classifications, notes the middle quintile’s after tax earnings increasing 29% from 1979 to 2006.  The uppermost quintile, those individuals comprising the top 1% wage earners, saw their earnings in that time frame increase 256%.

This weekend I came across another CBPP study that used the data above and compared it to the preceding thirty years wage growth.

Pretty stunning, huh?  The post World War II years are known as the era when the United States became the economic powerhouse in world, led largely by a dramatic standard of living improvement among the middle class and a resulting purchasing power that fueled the dramatic economic expansion.

It makes one wonder how things would be different had a more fair tax policy been employed since the Reagan Administration and carried to the extreme by the Bush presidency.

Let’s pray Americans never get suckered again by supply side economics and regressive taxation policy.

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But, in fact, it’s easy to get a gun.  One could be a serial murderer on a mass killing spree.  Tired of the old gun and want a new one?  No problem.  Or one could be a psychotic who thinks the shoppers at the Safeway down the street are plotting to kill you and decide to get them before they get you.  Want something special for the occasion?  No worries.  Go to the local gun show and get as many guns as you want, no questions asked.  Hell, if you want it today just shop the classifieds.  Easy as pie.  None of that silly background checking to contend with.  For Christ’s sake, you want…no, you need the goddamn thing NOW.

The issue isn’t the folks who purchase guns legally.  Though they do buy guns in staggering numbers (according to FBI statistics, there were 12.7 million background checks
on prospective gun buyers last year), the issue is the number of guns sold without the background checks that would prevent a bunch of innocent people being slaughtered year after year.

Eliot Spitzer and Peter Pope wrote a short piece at Slate arguing that, given that the federal government isn’t likely to enact any new gun legislation, a more pragmatic way to promote safe gun sales is to move up the supply chain and exercise some good old free market pressure.

Given that the government procures huge volumes of guns every year for sheriffs, highway patrol, police officers, FBI agents, intelligence agents, DEA and IRS agents, immigration and park services personnel, soldiers, airman, marines, and sailors, Spitzer and Pope suggest that government procurement be tied to the manufacturers commitment to safe gun sales.

What is striking is that the government buys guns from manufacturers who also sell them to criminals—either knowingly or by willfully overlooking the behavior of the retail outlets that the gun companies use as their distribution system.

This prompts a simple question: Why do we buy guns from companies that permit their products to be sold to bad guys?

If we can use a capital infusion to a bank as an opportunity to control executive compensation and to limit use of private planes, why can’t the government use its weight as the largest purchaser of guns from major manufacturers to reward companies that work to keep their products out of criminals’ hands? Put another way, if it is too difficult to outlaw bad conduct through statutes, why not pay for good conduct? Why not require vendors to change their behavior if they want our tax dollars?

Look, by all rights there are folks out there that have illegally obtained guns and have plans to use them in violent crime.  Those individuals are, for all intents and purposes, our enemies.  In the same way we would expect the power of the feds to come crashing down on a company illegally selling weapons to North Korea, for instance, we should expect the feds to pressure gun manufacturers from providing those individuals…our enemies… their weapons of choice.

It seems eminently sensible to me.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but Sen. Inhofe’s points make absolutely no sense.  First, he claims there’s “people already starting to rebel against (the Obama agenda)”.  Huh?  Let’s see here…..if consistent 60-65% approval ratings, a Republican Party at it’s lowest ever popularity and voter identification and, for the first time in five years, more folks claiming the country is heading in the right direction are signs of a big rebellion then I guess we should give the point to Inhofe.  Yikes.

Then there’s the Senator’s explanation on Specter’s move as more evidence of the Republican resurgence.  Inhofe explains that Specter’s Republican challenger would likely beat him to win the GOP nomination and, according to Inhofe, Specter’s campaign manager advised Specter the only way he would win the Senate seat is to become a Democrat.  So, just switching to the Democratic Party gets you elected and that’s a sign of a big Republican resurgence?

Remember the character Jon Lovitz used to play on Saturday Night LIve – Tommy Flanagan from Pathological Liars Anonymous?  “Yeah….that’s the ticket”.