How many times have we heard the ole' Chris Matthew's line "Well, what if there was a suspect who knew about an A-bomb on the way to DC? What would you do?"
Tweety, what we'd do is drag that son-of-a-bitch into the backroom and start cutting off fingers until he talked. But just out of curiosity, how many times has it happened that we had a suspect who knew about a ticking A-bomb anywhere? Precisely zero times, right?
And we already have two mechanisms for that unlikely-never-happened-once scenario called the Presidential Pardon and Court of Law. In either case, some poor spook who gets nailed for cutting off the fingers of someone to find the ticking A-bomb would probably fare pretty well in Court and if he didn't, well that's what Pardons are for. But that's not what the whole torture thing is about, it's not about ticking bombs: it's about cutting off the fingers of people who don't know shit, to make money. And the less they know, the more money is to be made. It works like this:
Achmed is picked up because his house is near a mortar pit used against a US Convoy full of US Troops pulling down 2K a month, ferrying foreign mercenaries getting paid 5K a month to guard KBR Security Guards rated at 10K a month who do the security for CACI Bodyguards making 15K a month who guard Chalabi who is making 300K a month--all on that sweet US taxpayer dime mind you.
So Achmed, since his house is close by, might know something and is picked up by plain clothes Halliburton Security personnel making 10K a month and taken to an undisclosed holding site were private interrogators making 15K a month shoot him full of sodium P and put some lights in his face. But Achmed just passes out with a dreamy ultra-short acting barbiturate smile on his face because he hasn't had a decent night's sleep since the bombs started falling two and half years ago. So the interrogators load Achmed up on a Lear Jet that costs 15K a month to maintain and fly him to Eastern Europe at the cost of 12K in jet fuel alone piloted by a private contractor making 10K a month.
And Achmed wakes up with a catheter shoved up his dick, a bag of IV fluid flowing into his vein, and some electrodes attached to his balls, in some God-forsaken dungeon with a former Serbian Captain, one who felt let-down that he didn't get to kill more Muslim civilians because the pussy UN stepped in and who is making 10K a month in his new position-standing over him with a variable potentiometer hooked into a bank of car batteries in his greasy hands. And after a few tweaks on the electrodes and some pressure in the bladder, Achmed starts saying whatever the fuck he thinks Captain Genocide wants him to say.
Yes, yes, he knows about the mortar attacks, yes yes, he heard them go off and he's pretty sure the guys doing it picked that spot specifically to implicate him because he had a run-in with the local Sunni Aman a few years before over a marriage deal that went south; at which point he receives a particularly nasty series of shocks in the balls and the stopcocks on the IV bag are opened wide to trickle into his plugged up bladder.
With a few more zaps from the car battery to the testicles, and the occasional relief provided by opening the catheter, just a little now and then to provide a taste of the relief that will be his if he 'cooperates', a few names come forth in an incoherent howl of agony over the next 18 hours, and Achmed is carted off to his cell where he will be fed and housed at the cost of 10K a head. So Captain Torture calls back with the great news that they have three more names to pick up and they can repeat the whole process over again on those three. Pretty soon the Gulag is full of people who claim under torture to know whatever the hell Captain Miclosovic asks them, except the attacks back in Baghdad, well, they keep coming. The mortars keep raining down, the suicide bombs keep going off. And the information never seems to nail the actual insurgents, just people who 'know about them'.
That's more realistic than the bullshit ticking A-bomb crap, that's what tends to happen. And like the Witch Hunts, amazingly, people being tortured give up the names of more witches, or in this case insurgent sympathizers, and the whole thing snowballs until you have tens of thousands of people detained and you need a huge staff, support structure, spanky new facility, and some high-tech, expensive software from a subsidiary of Halliburton and KBR just to keep up.
Because that's what it's really all about. Just like the witch trials were all about money, so is this shit. Dick Cheney isn't rooting for torture becuase he's evil, that's just a fringe benefit. He's rooting for it because it's profitable. See all those 10K's a month and 15K's a month are surcharged and then passed on to the American taxpayer by way of the DoD or the CIA or whomever. Every gallon of jet fuel, every bag of saline, the plastic tubing in the catheter, all of it is being paid for at an unaudited rate that would make the maker of the $ 1,000 hammer we heard about during the Reagan years drool with envy. And all that money ends up in the corporate coffers of Halliburton and KBR and CACI and in numbered Swiss Accounts fronting for companies you've never heard of and never will.
Because that's ultimately what Iraq is all about to Dick Cheney. It's not about a dream of knocking out a tyrant and replacing him with a capitalist-democracy; that was Wolfowitz's and Rummy's wetdream, Dick just went along playing them for all it was worth. It's not about reshaping the Middle East or strutting across the deck of a carrier dressed up like a pilot; that was Rove's vision and Bush's fantasy and Dick just went along and played those shortsighted boys like a harp. Probably chuckling to himself at how incredibly easy they were to manipulate.
It's about money, and that's all its ever been about for Dick: Cold, hard, green stacks. It's about peeling off as much bread as humanly possible from the American taxpayer via the Federal treasury, be it by direct payment or by using those tax dollars to secure more Chinese loans, and getting as much of that sweet cash in the bank accounts and stock prices to enrich Dick Cheney and his pals as possible. And enough is never enough. He's gotta get his while he can, because this money spigot won't last forever.
Now in defense of MR Cheney and his chicken-hawk pals, for those of you who would be quick to condemn this bloody scam, I don't think you understand the figures we're talking about here. Spiro Agnew got hung up on a $ 1500 bribe, DeLay is under indictment for playing three-car monte with a couple of hundred G's, and even Abramoff, the alleged King of dirty money, only brought in a few tens of millions. Shit, those guys are peons. They all add up to a rounding error for the kind of scratch Cheney has directed his way. We're talking billions and billions, and this money is spent under the guise of National Security, which conveniently restricts any pesky accountability leaving the decisions about where the money goes as a matter to be decided by secret backroom deals and closed meetings, only crossing the desk of ... Dick Cheney. So c'mon, let's be fair about this; it's not like they're feeding thousands of Americans into a meat grinder for peanuts.
Meanwhile back in Baghdad, another suicide bomber has gone up in a cloud of blood and gore, another soldier has lost his life, another family will be getting a visit from the Base Chaplain, another Iraqi will be detained and tortured; another terrorist will be born. But all that means to Dick is that more money will change hands with huge built in profit margins. So it's all OK, in fact it's great if we can't find the terrorists and have to detain a bunch of people and tie up a bunch of resources, because that means more money is involved. Why torture just one, when you can torture three at thrice the price?
Some friends and I in the investment biz used to joke about creating the drug, arms. amd torture mutual fund, but it was just a cynical joke. Our hat's are off to MR Cheney for making the joke real. So through all the death and torture and blood and heartbreak and torn families and maimed bodies, you can now understand why Dick just smiles that smug lopsided smile of his. Because he and his investors know that they've figured out how to profit on everyone of those abhorrent events. And the only way to shut down the money machine, is to shut down the money. Until the smelly green blinders are removed, that's all this disgusting cabal can see, or will ever see.