From the Mind of Meegs

Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I always thought that one of the primary pro-torture (or pro-“enhanced interrogation tactics”) arguments was its efficacy. We’re lead to believe that waterboarding and other such techniques are so terrible that even the hardest of hardened terrorists will spill all his secrets like a teenage girl on twitter. I mean, isn’t that what we claimed was our whole reason for doing it? To get the information needed to prevent further terrorist actions?

So doesn’t the revelation that waterboarding was apparently used 266 times, combined, on two high-ranking assholes kind of put a dent in that theory? I mean, if you have to do something 266 times, it’s probably not very effective. And at what point does the light bulb go on and you think, Gee...maybe this isn’t working so well. Would that happen after 66 times? 166? Why stop at 266? Maybe the 267th time would have been the one that did the trick!

We’ve been led to believe that these tactics were only used under controlled circumstances, only briefly, and only to achieve specific results. In other words, even the Bush administration was not corrupt enough to believe that we Americans would take kindly to a “whatever it takes” methodology. Even in our worst moments, we don’t really have the stomach for the idea that people will be tortured over and over and over again until the desired result is reached—or not reached, as the case may be. And yet, it seems that’s exactly what happened. Sometime before the 266th time, it should have occurred to someone that doing this over and over and over again wasn’t doing anything, except stealing away, bit by bit, the dignity of both the torturer and torturee.

There’s only one thing more awesome (and by “more awesome” I mean “more tragic”) than selling your soul and getting something in return. And that’s selling your soul over and over and over again, and still getting nothing in return.