President Bush loves to torture
By Thom Jennings
STAFF COLUMNIST

Recently, President Bush vetoed legislation that would ban an interrogation technique known as waterboarding. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the “enhanced interrogation method,” it involves taking a prisoner, placing a rag or plastic wrap over their face and simulating drowning by pouring water on their face. It is a technique that was thoroughly tested by the Germans and Japanese during World War II.

There is some opposition to the banning of waterboarding because it is a form of torture. The term “torture” is relative; I mean, watching 20 democratic presidential debates or Mike Huckabee playing the bass with 1,000 bar bands is an enhanced form torture, but is it that bad? Waterboarding, like watching presidential debates, leaves no discernible marks on the body, which is why the technique is relatively harmless in the eyes of many patriotic conservative Americans.

Republicans see waterboarding as an essential tool in the war against terrorism. Most of the Republican senators who voted against the ban have readily admitted that they used waterboarding as a form of punishment for their children when they were growing up.

One senator remarked, “Kids today lack the discipline we had when we were growing up. If I gave my parents any lip they would bend me over their knee, stick a rag in my mouth and pour water on my face until I learned my lesson.”

President Bush demonstrated the effectiveness of waterboarding as a means to extract confessions by allowing CIA operatives to demonstrate the technique on him. Within five minutes, Bush confessed he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when he sent troops there, and that his real motivation for starting a war with Iraq was because he was mad at Saddam Hussein for trying to assassinate his father. As if that were not proof enough, after 20 minutes of being waterboarded Bush admitted he was the lone assassin of Abraham Lincoln, Dick Cheney was Jack the Ripper and that he had been in a threesome with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the White House lawn earlier that day.

When a reporter asked Republican front-runner, John McCain, if he considered waterboarding torture he clearly stated that it depends on whether it will anger potential donors to his campaign to use such a harsh word. McCain said, “This morning when I was on MSNBC I said that waterboarding is a form of torture, but when I answered a similar question posed by a FOX reporter I said that it was not. I think it really depends what station you are watching as to whether the technique is considered torture.”

When a reporter asked President Bush if he thought that waterboarding violated the Geneva Convention he noted, “These are the same critics that want to call what is going on in Darfur genocide.” Bush also addressed the idea that America’s reputation in the Middle East and in the World has suffered because of waterboarding. “That is preposterous; our reputation in the world is so bad this controversy means nothing.”

President Bush is certain that congress will not override his veto. When asked how he could be so certain that it will not be overridden Bush reminded reporters that the Patriot Act allows the President to wiretap the Democrats phones and as a precautionary measure, he made Democratic staffers strip naked and form a pyramid in the interests of national security.

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