Led to the Slaughter: Torture U. at Yale?
Here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the BraveTM you’re not gonna find much disagreement over the need for obedience, fear, and cowardice when it comes to the Islamofascist Terrorist Threat. We generally believe what our leaders tell us, and are happy to follow the herd. Ignorance, after all, is strength. Consider the following:
“The American public loves drones,” chirped reporter Chris Cilliza at the Washington Post recently, citing figures that 8 out of 10 of those polled approved of Obama’s use of unmanned drones against Islamic militants — “with a whopping 59 percent strongly approving of the practice.” So you can forget those namby-pamby Senate confirmation hearings about “kill list” author John Brennan taking the helm at the CIA; as Cilliza intoned, “Minds are made up on the matter. And, if the public has anything to do with it, drones are here to stay.”
Unsurprisingly, the American public also hates and fears Iran; a new poll published by Gallup found that 99 percent of Americans think Iran’s [nonexistent] nuclear weapons program is an important threat, no matter that nearly every high-ranking official in the Obama administration has affirmed that Iran is not building a nuclear bomb. Just shows what drumming misinformation into the American mind for 30 years straight can do — the miracle of modern propaganda!
That’s why hardly anybody blinked the other day when it came out that Yale University, one of the nation’s most august institutions of higher learning, may be soon launching a program to instruct Special Operations forces in the finer points of interrogation. Turns out that the little “torture” problem at Abu Ghraib — remember Lynndie England and those piles of naked Iraqi men — well, it turns out the problem was the low educational levels of the white trash recruits who got nabbed. Luckily, the smart people at Yale have stepped to the plate to offer world-class expertise and instruction.
Who knows? Soon this may turn into a degree program — a major! Think of it: “Stress Positions 101,” “Intro to Waterboarding,” “Advanced Humiliation,” “Intro to Sleep Deprivation”… all of it supervised by board-certified psychiatrists under rigorous, sterile conditions. And did I mention realistic? Program director Dr. Charles Morgan, noted for previous research in monitoring the stress in heartbeats of interogees, has proposed recruiting “Moroccans, Columbians, Nepalese, Ecuadorians and others” from surrounding ethnic neighborhoods of New Haven to serve as “authentic” test subjects for Special Ops interrogation — their dark skin obviously adding immensely to the learning experience. After all, we’ve got a tradition to uphold; as a recent poll tells us, “most Americans say that torture is justifiable at times.”