THIS MODERN WORLD

Just in case the revelation that American torturers took their cues from that model of moral clarity that was the Chinese Communist regime hasn’t fully convinced you that the practice is unquestionably, incontrovertibly evil, Christopher Hitchens’ column in the August 2008 Vanity Fair, “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” ought to drive the point home. That is, if the accompanying video, available online at Vanity Fair’s website, doesn’t do it first.

In the video, Christopher Hitchens is brought, hooded and bound, into an austere looking storage room, and placed on a board, slightly elevated at its foot. He is instructed by the similarly masked interrogators on how to call a halt to the procedure, either through a safe word – “red” – or by releasing the “dead man’s handle” – a metal object placed in each hand. A towel is placed over his face and one of the interrogators begins pouring water on Hitchens’ face from an ordinary-looking milk carton. The interrogators demonstrate no more aggression that one might when watering a houseplant. In fact, the process looks so unremarkable that you begin to wonder if they aren’t simply “warming Hitchens up” for something worse.

Seventeen seconds pass, and then Hitchens drops the dead man’s handle. When the hood is removed, it is jarring to see how panic-stricken Hitchens looks.

The rest.

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of children is unconstitutional. Barack Obama immediately said he disagreed with the decision.

Barry Crimmins explains his perspective here:

Does it really matter? The decision has been made and won’t soon be reversed and so Obama’s views don’t particularly matter. Even if the Supremes had ruled the other way, the worst case scenario would only involve the execution of some vicious rapists of children, right? No one else would be affected. No one, that is, except for the raped children and they’d be all for the state-sponsored elimination of these human jackals, wouldn’t they?

I can’t speak on this issue as a raped child. I can only speak as an adult who was raped as a child and I oppose capital punishment for those who rape children. I was much younger than 12 when I was assaulted so in theory, my rapist could have been sent to the death chamber by Sen. Obama’s rules…

Pronouncements of lynch mobsters notwithstanding, I wouldn’t have wanted my rapist put out of his own misery and into mine. I started life without blood on my hands and I aim to keep it that way. Had the man who raped me on numerous occasions not died in prison while serving his third term for sexually abusing very young boys, I might have gone to see him. My personal revenge would have been to show him that I did not become what I resisted, that I hadn’t grown into a cruel and heartless man.

The rest.

Thank you, Barry Crimmins. (And thank you, internet, for allowing people to communicate with each other about things that matter.)

A complete puff piece, maybe because the refs have been so thoroughly worked by the likes of Limbaugh that to do anything else would be to betray that famous “liberal bias” that you read so much about, but rarely actually see.

Still, gotta love this:

At dinner the night before, Bill O’Reilly’s name came up, and Limbaugh expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

This may be the one thing on which Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann are in complete agreement.

… adding, how can you write a feature piece about Limbaugh without even mentioning the possible connection between his drug abuse and his loss of hearing? I mean, the radio host goes deaf, plausibly due to his own weaknesses — the sort of weaknesses he has built an empire out of excoriating in others — and it’s politely overlooked…?

That’s what I mean by puff piece. Whole article is full of omissions like that.

As Pogo used to say, we have met the enemy:

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The rest.

When you live in New York, you have a different relationship with trash on the street than in most other places. Since no one has any storage space, you literally never know what’s going to be sitting out on the sidewalk. My friend Tony Ortega recently stumbled across Harvey Weinstein’s recycling, and recounts the tale here.