August 29, 2009: Today's Washington Post, under the banner line "How a Detainee Became an Asset," tells us that thanks to waterboarding and other "enhanced techniques," Khalid Sheik Mohammed is now fully cooperating, giving lectures in English as well as chalk talks to his fellow detainees, and has asked for a bible to study in his cell.
The inescapable inference is that all we doubting Thomases can now be relieved, that torture does in fact yield highly valuable and useful intelligence, is a good thing to do after all, and quite possibly productive inconverting heathen into good Christians.
We can now only hope that the CIA did not dispose of the how-to-do-it manuals, or if they did, that we can persuade the authors thereof, as well as the practitioners, to return to their duties now that the utility of their perspectives and practices has been established by the leading news organ of our nation's capital.
No doubt abject apologies are now in order to those unjustly vilified as being unproductive, even mean and hurtful in the course of the higher duty to their country. But perhaps the church can help here in consideration of the conversion potential.
The Post did not specify how many lives were saved by the necessity of the "enhanced techniques" nor specifically by how many years such would shorten a war now in its eighth. Perhaps we can expect the Post to provide this intelligence in tomorrow's edition.
In closing, it must be said that we now owe the Post a debt of gratitude for cleaning up the rhetoric of this issue. We no longer need to resort to such verbal convolutions as "enhanced techniques" now that torture has been explained as productive and necessary.
Now that we know torture is good, we can now call torture torture!
