The most absurd character in the book is Milo Minderbinder, who – at least initially – runs the mess hall. A true entrepreneur, Milo steals supplies from the army and sells them on the black market. He justifies this by telling the servicemen he’s cheating that they will all benefit from his larceny. He issues “shares” in M&M Enterprises. The Ms stand for Milo and Minderbinder, but he put an ampersand between them to “demonstrate” that the company will benefit all. “What’s good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country,” he tells the airmen who complain that he’s ripping them off and endangering their lives by selling the safety equipment from their planes. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

By the end of the book, Milo has misappropriated an entire squadron of planes and is bombing his own airbase, having signed a contract with the Germans to do so. It’s absurd, right? Mr. Heller, like many novelists, uses exaggeration to allow readers to see our own society in a new light.

If only. I looked at the news Tuesday afternoon to see ABC reporting that the Justice Department now admits American military personnel tortured prisoners at Guantanamo Bay on behalf of the Chinese government. Milo immediately came to mind. “We’re doing this on a contract with the Germans!” I heard him say.

Joseph Heller’s irony is now our reality. The people we tortured at Guantanamo for the Chinese are Uighurs. Uighurs are an ethnic minority from western China who practice Islam. U.S. military personnel kept the Uighur prisoners awake, unfed and subjected to low temperatures for hours prior to the arrival of Chinese interrogators. The idea was to “soften them up” and make them more likely to tell the Chinese what they wanted to know (or at least what they wanted to hear).

It’s come to this. In the hectic days after Sept. 11th, John Yoo and other Bush administration functionaries cranked out memos justifying torture on the grounds that America was under threat of imminent, devastating terrorist attack. Two and half years later, we were treated to scores of photos from Abu Ghraib of soldiers torturing prisoners as they “softened them up” for military and CIA interrogators. A few enlisted were held accountable, even though authorization for such tactics went all the way to the Oval Office, via then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Now we learn America is the outsource for Chinese torture and no even seems to blink.

The other voice in my head, sounding quite at home next to Milo Minderbinder’s, belongs to George W. Bush. “They hate us for our freedom,” he said repeatedly in the months after September 11th. What kind of freedom, Mr. Bush? Religious freedom? The Uighurs of western China just want to be left alone, like the Tibetans, another ethnic minority whose homeland has been occupied by the Chinese, who disapprove of their Buddhist religion.

I thought the “global war on terror” was supposed to bring the values of western democracy to the world. Seven years on, our own civil liberties have withered away, Iraq and Afghanistan are ruined nations, the terrorists are stronger than ever and our government acts more like them every day.

China holds over a trillion dollars in U.S. currency, thanks to our enormous trade deficit, so when they come asking for a wee bit of torture, it’s awfully hard to say no. America, which in very recent memory was a beacon of liberty for the world, is now torturing people who seek religious freedom at the behest of the Communist government of China. We turn our heads away as Tibetans protest the half-century of Chinese occupation and repression because, hey, we want our Olympics. The tee vee rights and the marketing tie-ins are worth billions.

Welcome to the 21st century and to hell with the notion that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What’s good for G&W&B Enterprises is good for the country.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Don’t celebrate yet. The Bush/Cheney appetite for crime will likely increase, if anything, in the months ahead. This morning’s Washington Post gives good examples.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee whether or not he thinks waterboarding is torture, although he admitted he’d think it was torture if it happened to him. Meanwhile, the other Mike, CIA Director General Michael Hayden admits his agency has done it. Three times. If the Bush administration admits waterboarding three times, no one will blame you for guessing that it happens a whole lot more than that.

The White House spokesperson corps – that bastion of credibility – confirmed the instances of torture. Spokesoid Tony Fratto said the administration is going public because of “misinformation” about waterboarding and because the White House wants to be clear about “what the benefits were” from this particular form of torture.

I guess they would know the specifics of various forms of torture. The people who run our nation, we should be proud to say, are torture connoisseurs.

Waterboarding has been used at least as far back as the Spanish Inquisition. That’s time-tested, quality torture. In fact – and isn’t this ironic? – it was in 1492 that Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain turned the Inquisition loose to torture (with some waterboarding, we presume) Muslims and Jews into converting to Catholicism. To celebrate this, Isabella and Ferdinand gave Christopher Columbus the money he needed to sail off to America; so really, waterboarding Muslims is linked to the early foundations of American society.

Little known fact: Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth, so he could use the water for waterboarding. It seems some of the older Jews and Muslims were dying – weak hearts and whatnot – before they could be successfully tortured into accepting the One True Faith. His was truly a selfless quest.

But that’s the past. This is an election year and elections are about the future.

Rudy Giuliani, who is no longer a candidate for president, may have been done in not by his inept campaign (although it truly was inept), but because Rudy, let’s face it, is a low-class torturer.

Sure, while he was in the race, he boasted that his administration would torture more than Mr. Bush’s. He’d brag at debates about all the torture of his fellow Italian-Americans he’d overseen when he was a US attorney. Tony Fratto – or anyone else in the White House – could have told him, “Rudy, it’s not quantity, it’s quality that makes the torture.”

In Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD, they’d rape you with a plunger and kick your teeth in. That’s low class. Maybe they’d shoot you 41 times while you were pulling your wallet out. That’s counter-productive. Maybe undercover cops would ask to buy drugs from you (cause you’re, y’know, a black guy) and when you tell them you don’t sell drugs, they’d shoot you dead, then Rudy would hold a press conference to bad-mouth you while your family was mourning. But now I’m digressing. Maybe Rudy’s cops would wade into crowds of peaceful demonstrators, swinging their clubs and screaming, “It’s Giuliani time!” That’s just gauche. Like I said, low-class. Voters were right to reject him.

John McCain, who leads the GOP race, is a survivor of torture. It’s unclear if there was waterboarding. He is anti-torture. Five and a half years in a POW camp will do that to you. For his anti-torture stance and other perceived sins, the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters promise to vote for the Democratic candidate instead.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have promised that, if elected, no torturing will occur on their watch.

Mitt Romney, in the extraordinarily unlikely event he beats Mr. McCain, has promised to double the size of the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. He’ll be thrilled to learn the Bush administration has a secret prison there. The Washington Post interviewed an army psychologist Col. Larry James, stationed down there. He said he knew nothing about the secret prisoners. He said, “I learned a long, long time ago, if I’m going to be successful in the intel community, I’m meticulously – in a very, very dedicated way – going to stay in my lane. So if I don’t have a specific need to know about something, I don’t want to know about it. I don’t ask about it.”

Eleven fun months to go.

Update: A few hours after this was posted, Mitt Romney dropped from the Republican race. Apparently, like Rudy Giuliani, he thought quantity torture equals quality torture and he paid for his mistake.

© Mark Floegel, 2008