A Few Random Observations Regarding the Newest Torture Report:
1. It didn't work. That's what needs to be hammered home again and again. No matter how much Dick Cheney wants to insist it did, it didn't fucking work. How does the Rude Pundit know this? Two reasons:

A. If there was a single, demonstrable instance of a correlation between threatening to power drill the nutsack of Abu al-Fuckingbadguywithamoustache and the prevention of a terrorist attack, that shit would be a new book in the right-wing Bible. It'd be the trump card for every conservative bag of fuck on every news show, in every Bush administration self-justification memoir; it'd be tattooed on John Woo's sneering lip and on Alberto Gonzales's dick. Instead, all we get is the assertion that torture worked by the people whose asses' freedom depends on it.

i. It ought to be noted that even if torture "worked," it's still illegal.

B. Even the CIA reports that Cheney wanted declassified show jackshit about the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

2. If you threaten to kill a man's kids or to rape his mother in front of him and you believe that he believes you'll do it, you have ceased to represent any ideas that are better or stronger or more moral than the man you are threatening. In other words, is this how things work in a shining city on a hill?

3. Considering your country has bombed the living fuck out of villages in a man's country, killing children, there's no reason for him to doubt that you'd kill his kids and rape his mother. Which means he'll tell you anything to prevent that from happening, especially if what he's telling you is what you want to hear.

4. Truly, really, and, c'mon, can we finally, at last, all just call this "torture"? When is pressing a prisoner's carotid artery until they almost passed out and then doing it again not torture? What about scrubbing someone with an abrasive brush? Is it only torture if it rises to the level of WWSD (What Would Saddam Do)?

5. What the fuck's in the huge redacted sections? Compared to what we know, what are those other shoes and when will they drop? (We know some of it from Jane Mayer and Ron Suskind, but there's always more, there's always more.)

6. The Rude Pundit really has to stop watching the smugfest that is Morning Joe. Today, he heard Joe "A Dead Staffer Is an Office Accessory" Scarborough and the rest of the Joe Tools talking endlessly about the political ramifications of Attorney General Eric Holder pursuing prosecutions against the CIA operatives involved. They were worried about the morale at the CIA. They were confused as to why Holder wouldn't hold off until after the health care reform debate was ended. They couldn't understand why Obama wouldn't step in to slow down or stop the investigation. They were surprised that Holder would use the same report dismissed by Michael Mukasey's Justice Department. It was unreal, like being at a party where the entertainment is some ball-gagged dude getting his anus licked by a German shepherd and you say to another guest, "Oh, hey, that reminds me, I brought a 7 layer dip and nacho chips. How did you like it?"

In other words, there was no mention at all that, in our American name, someone took out a power drill and threatened to use it on a restrained prisoner. Sorry, motherfuckers on the right, but however evil that prisoner was, what was done was evil, too. Evil may have gradations, but it's still fucking evil. And, because it needs to be said as often as possible, the kick in the ass is it didn't make us any safer at all. The kick in the nuts is that no one has been punished or charged with any crime for doing it. Also not mentioned: prosecuting people with actual authority, like the aforementioned Vice President.

But to the Morning Joe pissants, that's not nearly as important as whether or not they should have rolled this out in August or waited until January.

7. Galileo recanted his scientific work when he was shown the implements of torture by the Catholic inquisitors. One imagines there was something like a drill there, too.

8. The Rude Pundit knows that many of those interrogated enhancedly are probably awful fuckers who would gut him the second they had a chance. So?