They make police cadets get tased and pepper-sprayed, right?

[jmowreader]

According to my brother-in-law, who's been in the law enforcement business all his adult life, every time a department gets a new less-than-lethal weapon, they require all the officers to take a blast from it so they know its awesome energy. Since he became a sworn officer he's been maced, pepper-sprayed, tased, shot with every kind of rubber bullet there is, attacked by a dog and whacked upside the head with a PR-24. This is part of the process of qualifying with that weapon.

The relevance to the Bush administration here is that, while they've been ordering the use of medieval torture in their interrogations, none of the people working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has ever BEEN waterboarded.

Therefore, our do-nothing Democratic Congress needs to write a law, right away, that requires everyone working at the White House, including Shrub, to qualify on waterboarding by being pulled out of bed at three in the morning, stripped naked, handcuffed, blindfolded, ratchet-strapped to the floor of a C-17, flown to a country with lax standards of police conduct, and waterboarded no less than ten times over a period of five days.

It probably wouldn't happen, but it would be fun to think about.

[angrycarpenter]

1. I think that they would all talk before it got to that point

Deep down they are cowards and they would all talk rather than go though anything like that. Hell you could get a confession out of them by tickle torture.

[jmowreader]

2. You're not quite understanding, and that's okay

"No, Mandrake. I mean, did you talk?"

'No, Jack. I don't think they wanted me to talk. It was just their way of having a bit of fun.'

--Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I don't want Bush to qualify on waterboarding so he'll talk--he has nothing to tell me that I want to hear. I want him to qualify on waterboarding so he can feel the "thrill" of being extraordinarily renditioned to Egypt and tortured for days on end. Maybe then he'll quit.

And maybe the special NASA scientists will disclose that they really lied about the moon rocks in museums coming from the moon--they got the "moon rocks" from the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho, and the moon really is made from green cheese as we'd been led to believe all along. The odds of either happening are nearly identical.