Much Ado...

Every news outlet I’ve tuned in to over the last 48 hours has led with some aspect of the Cheney shotgun story. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN; AOL, the New York Times, Washington Post; more appropriately, The Daily Show and The Countdown with Keith Olberman (where Keith proceeded to sabotage one of his own experts’ testimony…) Left-leaners nationwide have torn into this story like a pack of jackals on a particularly succulent morsel of carrion. Even NPR led with it every hour yesterday afternoon. This juicy, sensationalist, snowballing behemoth of a non-story, which is beginning to smell suspiciously Michael-Jacksonish...

Meanwhile, as I listened to the radio yesterday, one of the minor reports, relegated to number three or four in the newscast, was a snippet about the United Nations preparing to object to the United States’ use of torture at Guantanamo Bay. Something about the methods used to "force feed" erstwhile hunger strikers. Something that involved strapping the strikers to chairs, jamming nasal gastric tubes down their throats twice a day (with or without anaesthetic? That part wasn’t clear…) Pouring some concoction into these men, against their will. There’s some question as to whether the formula was laced with laxatives, since the procedure seems to have included keeping the subjects strapped to their chairs long enough to make sure they defecated on themselves. I’m a little sketchy on the finer points of the report; I was working when I heard it on the radio, and try as I might, I haven’t been able to track down further details anywhere since. Seems the news pipeline is clogged with the massive amounts of ink and airtime devoted to Mr. Cheney’s Series Of Unfortunate Events.

In spite of my fleeting contact with it, I did manage to commit this part of the force-feeding account to memory: The official White House response was, "The United States does not torture."

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