The Final Solution: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

photograph: aarchiba

"Donald Trump Faces Obstacles to Resuming Waterboarding" (NYT, 11/28/16) ran The Times headline. But at least there’s a plan. While Obamacare is being dismantled, new tortures will rise like the Phoenix from its ashes. Imagine a federally funded MD/Phd program where medical students can intern at secret CIA sites. Imagine the seesaws in playgrounds becoming the sites of interrogations. All you need is a bucket. And what about that torture that was popular in Tunisia, where they truss the subject up on a spit. All those dollars wasted on health insurance will be freed up for future torture institutes where graduate students can bone up on techniques that have been used from medieval times to the present. Testicle crushers, iron maidens, guillotines, racks, even crucifixion may find its place in the hunt for terrorist subjects. In a CNN piece, “Donald Trump Defends Torture: ‘Nothing should be taken off the table,” (CNN, 2/16/16), an op-ed piece that Trump wrote for USA Today was quoted thusly:  “Though the effectiveness of many of these methods may be in dispute, nothing should be taken off the table when American lives are at stake. The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind.”  Trump famously said that Mexicans were going to pay for the wall. By a similar logic perhaps he will get terrorist organizations like ISIS to pay for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques that will finally force their followers to spill the beans.