We Don't Torture, So Shut Up And Let Us Torture Already, or: I Can't Gitmo Satisfaction

There seems to be a great deal of confusion going on at the White House these days.

Why, just yesterday, Resident Bush declared “We do not torture” to help calm the concerns of an international community increasingly skeptical about the interrogation practices of the United States, while back here at home, Vice Resident Dick Cheney continued to lobby under cover of darkness for the right of the C.I.A. to do whatever they bloody well please when it comes to inflicting pain on prisoners in the snug of European soviet-era torture facilities.

They just don’t seem to be on the same page, is all I’m saying.

I think they need to open their e-mails a little more often or something. Obviously some memos are going unread.

So I thought it might behoove me to do a little research and try and find out which one of the two world leaders was standing on the firmer ground, which one has the power of precedent on his side, so to speak.

Well, believe it or not, it’s the much-maligned Mr. Cheney who actually holds the better hand here. Turns out that if you examine the history of our nation, it’s Mr. Cheney who is actually following in the footsteps of some of our greatest leaders and patriots.

For instance, take a look at this quote from Abraham Lincoln Cheney:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to bind naked detainees up and place them in the freezing cold until they die of hypothermia, smash their feet with hammers, make them sit on exhaust pipes, and break their legs with metal bats. We will not bind their wounds, nor inform their widows or orphans.”

Or drink in this inspirational thought from the revered John Kennedy Cheney:

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask how you can habitually beat detainees before interrogation, pour burning chemicals on their faces, and shackle them in such a way that they physically collapse and die.”

Now those two quotes would be enough for me, personally, to hop on board the Cheney train. I mean, it’s obvious he didn’t come up with this torture stuff on his own. He’s actually following in the tradition of those who have come before us. It doesn’t get any more patriotic than the following quote from the beloved Nathan Hale Cheney:

“I only regret that I have but one prisoner to kick in the stomach while he is in a kneeling position, to urinate on and kick in the head, to beat on the lower back and groin until they urinate blood, whose back and legs can be jumped on with military boots, and that I can chain to the floor hand and foot in a fetal position.”

But in the end, it is our poets and artists who have the last word on America. They are the ones, after all, who really pass on the American legacy to generations yet unborn, the ones who are the keepers of the American Spirit.

So it’s fitting to close with this memorable meditation from one of America’s best loved poets, Carl Sandburg Cheney:

“I see America, not in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God, but in the vision of a prisoner lying on the floor with a banana inserted into his anus and another who has been sodomized with a nightstick.”