Haute Torture: Designer Clothing For Freedom Haters

Written with ardent fervour by Logan Bluetooth

There comes a time during any dinner party – generally following the Crème Brûlée and somewhere between the fourth or fifth bottle of ’68 Latour – where there is a slight lull in the conversation. You’ve updated each other on all your latest mergers and acquisitions, newly conquered sexual partners, or perhaps you’re just too busy digesting dinner to contribute much more than a series of satisfied grunts.

That leaves you with silence. Horrible, horrible silence.

When it comes to dinner parties, silence is the cousin of death. Silence allows guests a window of opportunity to make their flimsy excuses and hightail it out of there before you have a chance to ply them with triple Cosmopolitans and cajole them into a game of Strip Trivial Pursuit.

As a seasoned dinner party host, one would presume that the lull is my worst nightmare after forks being placed the wrong way up on the table. Au contraire - I adore the lull and can barely contain my glee when it arrives.

The reason for this is that this otherwise uncomfortable respite presents one with the perfect opportunity kick start the conversation by casually bringing up any number of conversational topics normally considered taboo when in friendly company. Abortion. Religion. Politics. Capital punishment. Peter Andre.

You could build a fence topped with hundreds of those fancy Shiatsu massage chairs, but good luck getting anyone to sit on it if you lob one of the aforementioned verbal grenades into a crowd of people. They demand strident participation from even the most snivelling little twerp hell bent on making inoffensive comments and neutrality their modus operandi.

You can add one more topic to that inflammable list – torture.

Torture has popped up a fair bit lately. Certain members of a certain former administration have made certain comments regarding certain interrogation tactics. The usual media buzzwords have been tossed about: waterboarding, deprivation of liberties, gross human rights abuses, blah blah blah.

My guess is that you gloss over these articles and, just like the liberal media wants you to, you say to yourself “oh, right, torture is bad, waterboarding is inhumane, close Guantanamo, got it.”

Luckily for you, I’ve done some research on the topic and am more than happy to assist you in forming a far more coherent and informed opinion on the subject so that you’re not embarrassed by your lack of knowledge when this comes up at your next dinner party.

You don’t want to be the only one confused as to why being towed on a board behind a speed boat has ceased to be a moderately popular water sport and suddenly become a much maligned CIA interrogation technique.

I may come across as a somewhat self-serving individual, bothered by very little other than his own bank balance, and I suppose that’s right. But if there’s one thing Logan Bluetooth understands and loves, it’s results. Especially if they’re presented in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and graph.

I love results because you can’t argue with them. Statistics and results are the currency of honesty, or something. You can’t warp or twist them for your own purposes. Here’s a result for you to ponder – since 9/11 and the subsequent inception of enthusiastic querying of terror suspects, there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack on American soil. Coincidence? Luck? Hardly.

Put yourself in the shoes of a terrorist for a moment. I know they don’t wear shoes (apart from that guy with the exploding shoes), but just play along here. Put yourself in a vest of explosives or something. Anyway, you’re plotting your next attack on the axis of freedom, trying to pick a suitable country. Now - do you go for the one run by a bunch of pansies that adhere to various sissy UN treaties, or do you go for the one that makes up its own rules and reserves the right to subject terror suspects to heavy beatings, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, Celine Dion records played at full volume, vicious attack dogs, electrodes, and the occasional bit of sodomy?

You know the answer. The schoolyard bully doesn’t pick on the muscular captain of the sporting team. He beats the living suitcase out of the bespectacled nerd whose only reaction is to take the beating and cry to the principal instead of doing what he should have done a long time ago – shoot the bully in the kneecaps, pulverise his fingers and toes with the nearest rock, then put a cigarette lighter to various extremities until he cries and promises to never touch a nerd again.

Arguments against torture are baseless and perpetuated by those that have a tenuous grasp on reality. They claim that confessions gleaned from spirited questioning sessions are unreliable and generally only forthcoming because the questionee fears for their own life. Please. While some interviewees may be rendered spiritually dead (spiritually dead…I can’t believe I actually typed that without vomiting), nobody physically dies from torture, so what are they really afraid of? The truth, and the consequences of truth, that’s what.

Perhaps the most spurious charge levelled at torture is that innocent individuals can somehow find themselves on the business end of an electric cattle prod simply for sharing a funny name or bearing a likeness to person of interest, or just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Of course. How plausible. I’m sorry, this isn’t my AK-47 and Little Jihandbook of Terror, I was just holding it for another chap that was planning to strike at the heart of liberty and everything sacred that you believe in, you filthy infidel prick.

Those captured and detained for terror related offences are clearly up to no good. It’s not as though one accidentally wanders into an Al-Qaeda training camp to ask for directions to the nearest McDonalds and happens to get pinched by the feds at that very moment. One is judged by the company that one keeps, and if one insists on being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people doing the wrong things then one must accept the consequences.

Debating the merits of torture invariably brings up a question that I am rapidly becoming weary of answering – do the ends justify the means? In a word – yes. In more words – yes, you spineless, protest organising, freedom hating, dirty stinking hippy ingrate.

Jack Nicholson, or Tom Cruise, I don’t remember who it was exactly and it doesn’t really matter because this isn’t about cheap broads or kooky Scientology practices, but it was probably Jack Nicholson because Tom Cruise is a bit of a knob – anyway, one of them said “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

Terrorists only understand two languages – Middle Easternese, and Terror. There aren’t many people in the western world who are able to speak Middle Easternese, but we’ve got plenty of government agents who can speak fluent Terror. Remember this – you can’t spell interrogation without pretty much all of the letters in terror.

As a great patriot once said, national intelligence is an art, not a science. And just as Da Vinci and Michelangelo created masterpieces with their delicate brush strokes, the modern day Renoirs of the CIA have created their very own works of art in interrogation rooms, deftly weaving their own artistic tools (blindfolds, hoses, attack dogs and electrodes) to produce confessions worthy of exhibition in the Louvre. Viva la renaissance.