A Dozen Random Thoughts Upon Reading the Released Torture Memos:
The Rude Pundit scribbled these while reading all four of the newly declassified torture technique memos:
1. This is all such cuntish ass covering. Almost comically legalistic, they repeat the phrase "you have informed us," so that there's a circle jerk of putting the blame elsewhere. Yes, the Justice Department approved shit, but it was based on what they were told, which, from the CIA's perspective, was that everything was hunky-fuckin'-dory and it all worked without harming anyone.

2. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel approved techniques only in strangely specific detail, like face slapping with a certain placement of fingers. Did anyone ever turn someone in for slapping a detainee in the wrong way? It's all useless and barbaric.

3. Just because you change the definition for yourself, it doesn't meant the definition's been changed.

4. In what realm does slamming someone against a wall 20 or 30 times not constitute an intent to cause extreme pain? Just because you say you're only doing it to shock and alarm someone doesn't make it so. The same could be said about slamming some guy's nuts in a book.

5. In what realm does putting someone in, more or less, a closed coffin for 18 hours a day not constitute an intent to cause severe mental pain? And who's keeping the time so that the detainee is only in there for 8 hours at a stretch?

6. From page 40 of one May 10, 2005 memo: "[W]e conclude that the authorized use of sleep deprivation by adequately trained interrogators...could not reasonably be considered specifically intended to cause severe mental pain or suffering."

7. From page 112 of Volume 1 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: "Sleeplessness was a great form of torture: it left no visible marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an inspection-something unheard of anyway-were to strike on the morrow."

8. The repetitious nature of the memos, reiterating the same things are a-okay, means that people in the CIA and elsewhere were shitting themselves over possible prosecution and wanted to be reassured that their asses were covered if they, for instance, "accidentally" caused severe mental or physical pain while doing a "combination" of techniques (the subject of the 20-page May 10, 2005 memo). Of course Barack Obama had to tell the CIA that their agents would not be prosecuted. He'd've faced a revolt, even though the people doing this knew it was wrong. Otherwise, they wouldn't have kept looking for that ass cover. Now, can we use those vicious bastards to turn on Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and the other Bush administration pukes and not let the Spanish do the goddamned job we should be doing ourselves?

9. No, fuckers on the right, this ain't as bad Saddam Hussein or Torquemada, but it's just a few degrees from what Reagan used to condemn the Soviet Union for (while, you know, supporting far worse in Central America). But what else it ain't is us, America. Or at least an ideal of what we're supposed to represent. Page 36 of the May 30, 2005 memo lists all the horrible things done to prisoners in other countries, like Pakistan and Egypt as a way of mitigating the CIA's techniques. Yeah, slitting the throat of your victim after you've raped them is worse than stopping after the rape. But, you know, you still did the rape.

10. Everything happens in steps and degrees in this life. You tell someone it's okay to strip someone naked, slap them around, deprive them of sleep, throw cold water on them, and waterboard them, at what point do you get to how much electricity can be applied without "severe" pain?

11. Steven Bradbury's sign-off of "Please let us know if we may be of further assistance" ought to be tattooed on his ass in prison.

12. Chant this: Someone needs to pay, someone needs to pay, someone needs to pay.