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Pelosi's tortured fortnight
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AP Photo/Susan Walsh
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a rough couple of weeks, with all this "what did she know and when did she know it?" stuff; a familiar song with some of the lyrics changed.
We Republicans are trying to place the onus on Mrs. Pelosi, while the subject of what constitutes torture is mostly ignored. Does waterboarding constitute torture? If yes, then what Pelosi knew and when is an important question. If not, that question is moot.
Had these fine upstanding fellows at Guantanamo Bay grown up in the public school system in the West, they might feel a bit differently about it.
Dodgeball, where a dense, high-velocity ball is whipped at your face by the opposing team. Bones get broken, noses bleed, all in the name of physical fitness. Waterboarding is less than that.
The kids in the Science Club routinely having their heads shoved in everything from rubbish bins to filthy toilets by the jocks. This is worse than (or on a par with) waterboarding, yet charges of torture are never laid. The UN is never called. Amnesty International doesn't care.
The humiliation of having your lock glued shut or your clothes stolen while you're in gym class (or being "pantsed") - worse than most of the "cheerleader pyramid" photos out of Abu Ghraib that we spent many long months wringing our collective hands over.
Or perhaps had these "terrorists" or "insurgents" or "freedom fighters" or "fluffy bunny unicorns" or whatever we've decided is the appropriate moniker this week grown up female in the West, they would know that:
- Bikini wax - worse than waterboarding
- Cosmetic surgery - worse than waterboarding, as Mrs. Pelosi can surely attest
- Training for a marathon - worse than waterboarding
- Pregnancy/childbirth - way worse than waterboarding
In fact, many things you and I do every day have worse physical and emotional repercussions than waterboarding and other forms of "enhanced interrogation".
Our own military members going through war-zone traning are put through considerably worse "torture" techniques to prepare them for possible capture by the enemy. Waterboarding would seem a treat to these brave men, considering our enemy can barely read, let alone study the Geneva Conventions. SERE - Search, Evasion, Resistance and Escape - training involves waterboarding and much more done to our soldiers that we wouldn't put our enemies through. Beatings. Shocks. Sexual assault resistance. Remembering that ours is a volunteer military makes the fact that they go through all this mean all the more.
We must keep in perspective that our enemies do not have the level of civilization that we do. When they capture one of our sons (or worse yet, daughters), they do not have a medical team standing by to revive them if something goes wrong. Just because Christopher Hitchens, an ivy-league toff, wasn't able to withstand more than four seconds of waterboarding does not necessarily make it torture.
Furthermore, our enemy does not provide facilities in which prisoners gain an average of 15lbs during their stay.
The House GOP wants a vote on Pelosi, on whether or not she should be investigated for her apparent mistruths over the past few weeks. This is unnecessary, if we first debate what constitutes torture.
Oh, as an aside, four Muslims were arrested last night in New York City for planning acts of terror. Missiles to shoot down planes, bombing two synagogues in the Bronx, that sort of thing. At least one of the men was not born Muslim - he converted inside our own prison system.Just thought I'd mention it.
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