We have ways of making you talk

GOOD news for the friends of human misery: Torture is back in the limelight. We’re debating whether or not it’s a good thing.

If you’re one of those weepy liberal types, you’re probably thinking that there should never be a debate on the moral rectitude of something so reprehensible as jerking fingernails from an enemy’s hands or applying electric shocks to his genitals. It’s just plain wrong, I hear you cry.

That’s because you don’t understand the intricacies of democracy.

At the moment, you see, there are no definitive guidelines in America for what is and what isn’t torture. For some, being forced to watch Jerry Springer might constitute cruel and inhumane punishment, but for viewers with marginal IQs it’s a joyful experience. It’s all a matter of need and preference.

I realize that both the Geneva Convention and the U.N. charter pretty much define torture as having to do with pain, but the matter still seems to baffle many among our leaders in the nation’s capital.

One can pretty much track our attitude on torture back to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who suggested that guidelines laid down by the Geneva Convention didn’t apply to those we assume to be members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The men in custody are not technically POWs since what we’re doing is more a liberation than a war, despite their similarities. The prisoners are only uncooperative liberatees, so to speak, and don’t qualify for coverage under the rules of formal killing.

As Vice President Dick Cheney once remarked, sometimes you just have to work “the dark side” to convince the reluctant to be more candid with our interrogators.

It seems to me that the best way to clarify the debate would be to specify what constitutes torture in the new America and what should therefore be avoided when working the Cheney shadows.

To begin with, those efforts popular in the Spanish Inquisition, such as burning at the stake, are out. In a legal sense, that’s killing, not torturing. We are above all a civilized society and if we want to just kill, there are quicker and less painful ways to accomplish it, as we are currently demonstrating abroad.

More acceptable in the area of coercion is the old standby, the rack. Rooted in the First Dark Ages, stretching a recalcitrant detainee frees him of any hesitations in answering questions and simultaneously makes him taller.

Who doesn’t want to be taller? Longer legs are among the deepest of desires in a Hollywoodian culture.

About electric shocks to the genitals, it is well known in government circles that career politicians, particularly older ones, find jolts of electricity personally stimulating by upping their amps, in a way. I have never experienced the thrill of a quick zap, but that’s only because I’m afraid of electrocuting my wife.

Also angering what has been described as the boo-hoo do-gooders is the use of dogs to terrorize the terrorists in a nice twist of quid pro quo. There’s probably nothing wrong with having a drooling, teeth-baring, red-eyed pit bull in your face as long as it’s on a leash of at least 50-weight threads. Once in a while, it has been noted that a particularly eager dog has sprung loose and chewed away a facial feature of the prisoner in question, but that’s so rare that it doesn’t even require study. Dogs will be dogs.

The hanging of prisoners by their thumbs is barbaric and should be discontinued. An acceptable substitute is suspension by toes, which would allow detainees full use of their hands in order to sign their confessions. Suggestions that certain other body parts be employed for this method are out of the question.

If, however, the above ideas are altered by a loud enough cry of outrage from around the world that it begins to affect the political future of those in power, severe forms of persuasion probably should be rejected in favor of more acceptable means of convincing the subjects that they ought to tell us what we want to know.

That would include the boring old beating with a rubber hose, immersion in tubs of ice until they turn into frozen Al Qaeda-cicles (a little torture humor there; the lighter side of the dark side, so to speak), stripping them naked and subjecting them to lengthy explanations by President Bush on how the Democrats started the war, and modifying the fingernail-pulling by yanking out their beards instead, hair by hair.

When I was a kid and truly believed in the morality of America, I never dreamed that torture would be included in our arsenal of persuasion. But that predated a loser’s rage by a president who has failed to either justify the war or find the demon Bin Laden whose head he has promised on a platter.

When you’re frustrated and angry, and truth hangs like a sword of Damocles over your head, you strike out at those readily at hand. Detainees are convenient victims, and torture an easy method of coercion as the debate over its morality, in a nation addled by its leaders, lumbers on.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.