So Barack Obama, as Scott noted earlier this morning, has time to read Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Ditch.” I find this surprising: isn’t the Presidency supposed to be a hard job? As we noted here, Obama’s aides say that he was “surprised at the sheer volume” of work the President has to do. Apparently not so surprised but what he has time to read nonsense by an internet shill who, lacking facts to support his argument, makes them up.
If Obama is going to spend part of his day learning about torture on the internet, he should start with Ann Coulter:
The techniques used against the most stalwart al-Qaida members, such as Abu Zubaydah, included one terrifying procedure referred to as “the attention grasp.” As described in horrifying detail in the Justice Department memo, the “attention grasp” consisted of:
“(G)rasping the individual with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion. In the same motion as the grasp, the individual is drawn toward the interrogator.”
The end.
There are rumors that Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney wanted to take away the interrogators’ Altoids before they administered “the grasp,” but Department of Justice lawyers deemed this too cruel. …
People pay to have a lot rougher stuff done to them at Six Flags Great Adventure. Indeed, with plastic walls and soft neck collars, “walling” may be the world’s first method of “torture” in which all the implements were made by Fisher-Price. …
I will spare you the gruesome details of the CIA’s other comical interrogation techniques and leap directly to the penultimate “torture” in their arsenal: the caterpillar.
In this unspeakable brutality, a harmless caterpillar is placed in the terrorist’s cell. Justice Department lawyers expressly denied the interrogators’ request to trick the terrorist into believing the caterpillar was a “stinging insect.”
Human rights groups have variously described being trapped in a cell with a live caterpillar as “brutal,” “soul-wrenching” and, of course, “adorable.”
In her encounter with the intellectually challenged Joy Behar–another former “comedian,” as I understand it, who as far as one can tell has never said anything funny–Ann responded to Behar’s question whether she would like to be waterboarded:
You can learn a lot on the internet, but you have to know where to go.
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