Because We Won't Have Him to Kick Around Much Longer, Part 7 (Alibi Edition):
You been watching these exit interviews with Bush and Cheney? These fuckers are scared. Something's got them worried and they're acting like low-rent hit men captured by the FBI, coming up with alibis and excuses faster than ex-guards at Auschwitz. The Rude Pundit can't figure out exactly what it is, but there's something spooking these two so that when anyone asks them about torture or Gitmo, they do a justification dance that's like Express Yourself Day at the spastic children's home.

Look at them go: here's Cheney, as ever, breathing and grunting like he's fucking a trussed up adolescent Thai boy who'll be killed after the Vice President blows his load on the boy's back, talking to the drippy pile of dogshit that is Bill Bennett about our Cuban day spa: "The other key thing that people forget is that we've got a couple hundred very bad actors down there. We've been through, several times, a scrub of the population in Guantanamo. And a good many more have been returned than we still hold, have been returned to their home countries. Now, out of that group, some number has, in fact, gone back onto the battlefield against us." That number, by the way, is 18, according to the Pentagon, with 43 "suspected" of returning to terrorism. And let us ponder, and why not, how many of those were transformed into "terrorists" by their experience with American justice.

Dick continued, "So we've not been, I think, especially harsh in terms of the judgments we've made. We have let some people go, and we erred a bit on the side obviously of -- in letting the wrong people go on a few occasions. But now what's left, that is the hardcore." Now all we have is the 250 hardcore. Before? Bunch of pussies. But now? Hard fuckin' core. Except for the 50 detainees who, you know, are cleared but have no country to take them. And then there's always the ones who've been tortured into madness. But, no, they're all hardcore.

By the way, for contextual fun, here's Cheney in a June 2005 interview regarding Gitmo: "Now, the key here to remember is that the 520 we've got down there, these are -- hardcore terrorists is the only way to describe them." Except for the 270 we released between then and now. But hardcore, motherfuckers, hardcore.

With President Bush, it's all about the torture. 'Cause, you know, now that a Bush-appointed judge has declared that a Gitmo detainee can't be put on trial even by the bullshit military tribunals, because information was tortured out of him, well, then it oughta be time for George and Laura to gas up the jet and tell Dubai they're comin' to stay. On last night's Larry King Undead, Bush offered the defense of scoundrels on his orders on torture: "I got legal opinions that said whatever we're going to do is legal." Don't tell him he broke the law: his lawyers said he didn't. It's like a another badly written episode of Law and Order.

A quick aside here: what the fuck is it with panties and bras in our torture of detainees? While far worse was done to him, why the fuck did we do this: "Qahtani 'was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation' and 'was told that his mother and sister were whores.' With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room 'and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,' the report shows"? What it sounds like is that the interrogators at Gitmo were fucking bored and thought, "Let's make Haji wear thong ear muffs and dance while we furiously masturbate."

Another quick aside: Mohammed al-Qahtani apparently was a really dangerous dude. It might have been nice to charge him with some kind of crime, like conspiracy or something that would have, you know, put him in jail instead of this disgraceful purgatory.

For so very long, torture had stayed out of the mainstream media. Once John McCain and Barack Obama declared they would both close Guantanamo, the issue was off the table for the duration of the campaign. Now that the Obama administration is coming in and members of the House and the Senate are threatening to investigate the Bush White House's actions, now that Obama had to put up or shut up on Gitmo, all of a sudden the media is treating the issue like it matters, like somewhere, hidden in a deep, dark place is this curled up, frightened little American soul and we're trying to figure out how to coax it out of the corner, wondering if we have earned the right to hold out our hands and say, "Come on out. It'll be okay."