{"id":21661,"date":"2025-05-26T15:22:33","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T19:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21661"},"modified":"2025-05-26T15:34:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T19:34:32","slug":"we-never-got-to-torture-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/26\/we-never-got-to-torture-congress\/","title":{"rendered":"We Never Got to Torture Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

We Never Got to Torture Congress<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, May 26, 2025 \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Folks who believe the current political atmosphere is uniquely hateful have forgotten the boundless vitriol prevailing a few decades ago. During the George W. Bush administration, Republicans relied on push-button rage to suppress all criticism of the war on terror. After I appeared on a 2006 Fox News panel and criticized the Bush administration\u2019s secret illegal financial<\/a> surveillance regime, I was peppered with hostile emails including this gem: \u201cEvery know-nothing lying jackass like you should be rounded up<\/a> and gassed with the Iraqi poison gas that does not exist according to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never enjoyed poison gas so I eschewed following that suggestion. Unfortunately, most media outlets remained reticent about publishing frontal attacks on President Bush\u2019s most outrageous policies. So, with a hat tip to Monty Python and Jonathan Swift, I sought to satirize my seditious thoughts into print.<\/p>\n

On August 27, 2006, the Los Angeles Times<\/em> ran my \u201cModest Proposal: Coerce Congress to Tell the Truth<\/a>.\u201d That piece was accepted and deftly edited by assistant op-ed editor Matt Welch<\/a>, who is now the Editor at Large for Reason Magazine<\/em><\/a>. Following is a tweaked version of that piece:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>What about Congress?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Do Americans deserve the truth about their members of Congress? If so, citizens should be entitled to use the most advanced fact-finding methods approved by the US government.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many people are unaware of the revolutions sweeping American jurisprudence. In June, the Supreme Court condemned the Bush administration\u2019s torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and declared that the president is \u201cbound to comply with the Rule of Law.\u201d The Bush White House was outraged and is browbeating Congress to enact legislation overturning that court ruling and unleashing its interrogators.<\/p>\n

Last month, Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury notified Congress that the administration seeks to use \u201ccoerced confessions\u201d in military tribunals at the Cuba base. Bradbury stressed that \u201cthere are gradations of coercion much lower than torture.\u201d Those \u201cgradations\u201d veered away from a 400-year trendline against using brute force to determine facts in judicial proceedings.<\/p>\n

Congress will likely pass Bush\u2019s Enemy Combatant Military Commissions Act, approving heavy-handed measures to get the truth from people suspected of bad things. Under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, American citizens should be permitted to use the same methods to pry the truth out of their congressmen, many of whom are also suspected of bad things.<\/p>\n

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has approved a dozen extreme interrogation methods previously banned by the Pentagon, including hooding, forced nudity, and exploiting fear of dogs. When photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq leaked out in 2004, Sen. James Inhofe proclaimed that he was more \u201coutraged by the outrage\u201d than by the pictures of detainees forced to pile into a naked pyramid and a US Army private female dragging a naked Iraqi guy wearing a dog collar.<\/p>\n

Inhofe should be blindfolded, put in a straitjacket, and left in a room full of crazed chihuahuas until he explains why the US military should not be constrained to follow the Anti-Torture Act of 1996.<\/p>\n

The most iconic Abu Ghraib photo showed an Iraqi man covered in a shroud, standing on a box, with wires attached to his body as if he were awaiting electrocution. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist spearheaded the coverup of the CIA\u2019s use of secret prisons that pummeled detainees. Frist could be similarly wired and attired and compelled to balance atop a rickety box until he explains why he believes the Geneva Convention prohibition on making detainees \u201cdisappear\u201d is null and void.<\/p>\n

Exposure to extreme cold is another favorite tactic for US interrogators, despite occasional detainee deaths from hypothermia. Sen. Joe Lieberman has been the biggest Democratic apologist for Abu Ghraib in the Senate. He could be strapped to a block of ice until he explains how scandals over Bush\u2019s torture regime helps the US win hearts and minds in the Muslim world.<\/p>\n

But if you really want the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then you can\u2019t go wrong by replicating the Spanish Inquisition.<\/strong> Waterboarding involves strapping a person to a board and pouring water down their throat and over their nostrils to make them feel like they are drowning. CIA Director Porter Goss assured Congress that waterboarding is a \u201cprofessional interrogation method,\u201d not torture. CIA agents proved their professionalism by waterboarding one detainee more than 80 times\u2014and didn\u2019t kill him once.<\/p>\n

Citizens should be permitted to bring splintery planks, leather straps, and water tanks to interrogate any member of Congress who denies the Iraq war is becoming a debacle. Any public interrogations of elected representatives should strictly follow the same rules that Bush proposes for military tribunals. Anyone could make anonymous accusations against a member of Congress, and no representative would be allowed to see or cross-examine their detractors. Secret evidence would be allowed but only if it incriminated the accused. Medical doctors would be on hand for any interrogation, ready to formally certify that any resulting fatalities were accidental.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some people may object that giving Gitmo-style equal treatment to members of Congress could tarnish the dignity of democracy. But that is rather quaint, considering all the outrageous tactics that Congress has already rubber-stamped for Bush\u2019s war on terror. Besides, no one is forcing politicians to approve the use of coerced confessions for everyone else in the world. They still have time to avoid reaping what they sow.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

No Shame on Capitol Hill<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

My mockery failed to shame Congress into decency. In the following weeks, legislators rushed to approve Bush\u2019s barbaric interrogation wish-list. The Boston Globe<\/em> reported that \u201cbecause of the Bush administration\u2019s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they\u2019re talking about.\u201d Fewer than 50 members of Congress knew what actual interrogation methods were being debated. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)\u2014Trump\u2019s first attorney general\u2014boasted, \u201cI don\u2019t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.\u201d Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick declared, \u201cWe\u2019ve reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>On September 30, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA), retroactively legalizing torture that<\/a> occurred prior to December 30, 2005. The act also blocked torture victims from suing the US government. In the weeks before the midterm elections, the Republican Party vilified any Democratic member of Congress who failed to vote for the MCA as a terrorist lover. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) claimed that Democrats who opposed the MCA had \u201cvoted in favor of new rights for terrorists.\u201d Hastert\u2019s cachet suffered after a federal judge condemned him as a \u201cserial child molester<\/a>\u201d and sent him to prison for bank fraud.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the MCA was signed, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that there was no such thing as habeas corpus rights for American citizens. Gonzales previously declared that President Bush enjoyed a \u201ccommander-in-chief override\u201d regarding laws prohibiting torture.<\/p>\n

The following year, the New York Times<\/em> published classified documents revealing that the Bush torture program explicitly imitated Soviet interrogation methods from the Cold War, including manacling detainees in painful poses for long periods and pummeling them into submission. Gen. Barry McCaffrey complained<\/a>, \u201cWe tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.\u201d But shortly after Barack Obama became president, he effectively issued a blanket pardon for all US government torturers and torture policymakers (this means you, Dick Cheney).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a 600-page summary of its report on the CIA torture regime. CIA abuses included death resulting from hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and thrashing them to stay awake for seven days and nights straight. In some cases, interrogators didn\u2019t know the language of the person they were questioning so they compensated by beating the hell out of them. Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners. Many detainees were innocent but that didn\u2019t save their skin.<\/p>\n

Ironically, after all the shocking disclosures about the Bush-era torture regime, some people still consider my 2006 Los Angeles Times<\/em> satire to be in bad taste.<\/strong> Instead, plenty of folks likely agree with the conclusion of the Iraqi poison gas email dude: \u201cThe\u00a0reason this country is so screwed up is because of arrogant liberal\u00a0bastards like you who think they are just so much smarter than anyone\u00a0else\u2026. Your whole pathetic agenda<\/a> is to attack the president.\u00a0I think it is time for you to commit yourself you need serious help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for domestic tranquility, I remain uncommitted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We Never Got to Torture Congress by James Bovard, May 26, 2025 Folks who believe the current political atmosphere is uniquely hateful have forgotten the boundless vitriol prevailing a few decades ago. During the George W. Bush administration, Republicans relied on push-button rage to suppress all criticism of the war on terror. After I appeared […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1683,10,347,15,4579,302,36,983,2529,520,4447,874,12,1172],"class_list":["post-21661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abu-ghraib","tag-bush","tag-cia","tag-congress","tag-dennis-hastert","tag-habeas-corpus","tag-iraq","tag-jeff-sessions","tag-matt-welch","tag-military-commissions-act","tag-rumsfeld","tag-satire","tag-torture","tag-waterboarding"],"yoast_head":"\nWe Never Got to Torture Congress - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Before Congress enacted legislation in 2006 retroactively legalizing torture, I wrote a Los Angeles Times satire urging applying the same ...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/26\/we-never-got-to-torture-congress\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We Never Got to Torture Congress - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21661"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21666,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21661\/revisions\/21666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}