Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

One of many guilty pleasures which I have not yet gotten around to confessing here is watching -- and actually enjoying -- certain network television programs faithfully, if not exactly religiously. One such program is CBS's Thursday-night show, "Without a Trace," in which a team of FBI agents assigned to the NYC office investigate missing-persons cases.

On last night's show, the missing person was an intelligent, mostly soft-spoken 15-year-old high school student named Ryan. To get back at some bullies who've been tormenting him, Ryan claims to have planted a bomb in the school building, evidently to frighten them. A couple of them basically kidnap Ryan and proceed to torture him in one of their basements: duct-taping him to a chair, throwing cold water on him, and prodding him with electrical wires. Eventually he breaks down and tells them there is no bomb; the leader of the bullies insists that he's lying, and continues with the torture. Eric at last concedes that yes, the bomb is in the school's boiler room.

And, of course, it turns out that there is no bomb at all (at that point, anyhow).

So at the end of the episode I looked over at Mrs. FLJerseyBoy and said, "That was a not-too-subtle political message, wasn't it?" The message, naturally, was that the results of a torture-based "interrogation" are never anything but dubious.

Which is why -- one reason among several -- this (Senate passage of a $445 billion defense spending bill) makes me crazy. In particular, what makes me crazy is the response of The Weasel & Co. to a couple of overwhelmingly approved amendments to the basic bill:

Earlier in the week, the Senate overwhelmingly backed an amendment by Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who was tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam, to establish the Army field manual as the standard for interrogations and bar cruel and degrading treatment of anyone in U.S. military custody.

Senators also unanimously passed an amendment to clarify the legal status of enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay military prison and increase congressional oversight of their detention and release.

[...]

The White House, which threatened to veto the must-pass spending bill over the detainee measures, said it will work in the House-Senate conference for a final bill with language more to its liking. It argues the measures would tie its hands in fighting terrorists.

Maybe if these egregious nitwits had actually spent all this time and money fighting terrorists for real, they wouldn't now be so concerned with ceremonial but 100% useless flourishes like the authorized use of torture.