bon weekend. zee
from: guardian.co.uk0,3858,4948369Open ↗
103677,00.html
This won't hurt much
Terry Jones Wednesday June 16, 2004 The Guardian
For some time now, I've been trying to find out where my son
goes after choir practice. He simply refuses to tell me. He
says it's no business of mine where he goes after choir
practice and it's a free country.
Now it may be a free country, but if people start going just
anywhere they like after choir practice, goodness knows
whether we'll have a country left to be free. I mean, he
might be going to anarchist meetings or Islamic study
groups. How do I know?
The thing is, if people don't say where they're going after
choir practice, this country is at risk. So I have been
applying a certain amount of pressure on my son to tell me
where he's going. To begin with I simply put a bag over his
head and chained him to a radiator. But did that persuade
him? Does the Pope eat kosher?
My wife had the gall to suggest that I might be going a bit
too far. So I put a bag over her head and chained her to the
radiator. But I still couldn't persuade my son to tell me
where he goes after choir practice.
I tried starving him, serving him only cold meals and
shaving his facial hair off, keeping him in stress
positions, not turning his light off, playing loud music
outside his cell door - all the usual stuff that any
concerned parent will do to find out where their child is
going after choir practice. But it was all to no avail.
I hesitated to gravitate to harsher interrogation methods
because, after all, he is my son. Then Donald Rumsfeld came
to my rescue.
I read in the New York Times last week that a memo had been
prepared for the defence secretary on March 6 2003. It laid
down the strictest guidelines as to what is and what is not
torture. Because, let's face it, none of us want to
actually torture our children, in case the police get to
hear about it.
The March 6 memo, prepared for Mr Rumsfeld explained that
what may look like torture is not really torture at all. It
states that: if someone "knows that severe pain will result
from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective,
he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the
defendant did not act in good faith".
What this means in understandable English is that if a
parent, in his anxiety to know where his son goes after
choir practice, does something that will cause severe pain
to his son, it is only "torture" if the causing of that
severe pain is his objective. If his objective is something
else - such as finding out where his son goes after choir
practice - then it is not torture.
Mr Rumsfeld's memo goes on: "a defendant" (by which he means
a concerned parent) "is guilty of torture only if he acts
with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or
suffering on a person within his control".
Couldn't be clearer. If your intention is to extract
information, you cannot be accused of torture.
In fact, the report went further. It said, if a parent "has
a good-faith belief [that] his actions will not result in
prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary
for his actions to constitute torture". So all you've got to
do to avoid accusations of child abuse is to say that you
didn't think it would cause any lasting harm to the child.
Easy peasy!
I currently have a lot of my son's friends locked up in
the garage,
humiliating them in order to get them to tell me where my
son goes after choir practice.
[censored] Cheney's counsel, David S Addington, says that's just
fine. William J Haynes, the US defence department's general
counsel, agrees it's just fine. And so does the US air force
general counsel, Mary Walker.
In fact, practically everybody in the US administration
seems to think it's just fine, except for the state
department lawyer, William H Taft IV, who perversely claims
that I might be opening the door to people
me.
So I'm going to round up all the children in the
neighbourhood, chain them and set dogs on them. I might
accidentally kill one or two - but I won't have intended to
- and perhaps I'll take some photos of my wife standing on
the dead bodies, and then I'll show the photos to the other
kids, and finally, perhaps, I might get to find out where my
son goes after choir practice. After all, I'll only be doing
what the US administration has been condoning since 9/11.
· Terry Jones is a writer, film director, actor and Python