If you really want to torture someone…

Here’s a short list of things I care more about than the fate of some bearded doofuses who want to kill me and my fellow citizens.

The economy.

The economy.

Did I mention the economy?

Apparently, Congress didn’t get my memo, having spent much of the last few weeks worrying about the fate of a few jerks being held in Cuba, whether they were tortured for information and who knew what about it and whether it was done in the green room or the conservatory by Col. Mustard.

All this could have just been avoided, and Congress could have gotten back to the work of either helping to fix or completely destroy the economy, if it had just been agreed that we’re not going to waterboard anyone anymore or make them wait for videos to buffer on dial-up Internet and just left it at that instead of calling for investigations and probes and other annoying nonsense.

It’s not that I object to inflicting extreme discomfort on folks who plan to blow up American cities, even ones that smell bad like Wilmington, Del. Personally, I just don’t think torture works. It’s sort of like when your significant other keeps opening his or her mouth and making noise come out of it that your brain vaguely processes as a question or a request to do something. Eventually, you tell them what they want to hear, whether it’s true or not or whether you intend to do it or not, just to make the hurting noise stop. That and it just makes us look like hypocrites when we put on our Kal-El capes and get on to other countries for being naughty.

Besides, most of the forms of torture sound sort of like stuff folks did to me when I was in high school. And I turned out perfectly fine.

If you really want to torture someone, have them do the following:

- Marry Kate Gosselin.

- Pay Jon Gosselin’s child support.

- Try to go out to eat on Mother’s Day.

- Cover a city planning commission meeting.

- Have a conversation with an idealist.

- Go to a wedding.

Hook them up with girlfriends that like reality television. After a “The Hills” marathon or having to watch that show about all those dwarfs that don’t even live in trees or make cookies, I guarantee our detainees will renounce Allah, shave their beards, convert to Unitarianism and tell us where the Afghans are growing all the really good poppies at.

Another question that’s going around is what to do with these detainees once we get done detaining them. Oddly enough, many of the home nations of these suspected Boy Scouts don’t want militant fundamentalists back. Didn’t these guys ever have to watch a diversity video? Geez.

Suggestions for what to do with the detainees have ranged from tattooing “Sweetmeat” on their foreheads and turning them loose in Leavenworth to allowing them to bunk at the girl’s dormitory at UCLA.

I have a rather elegant solution to the problem. I say we put them on an American-flagged, unarmed vessel and turn them loose off the coast of Somalia.

Don’t hold your breath for that ransom money, matey.

Jim Cook can be reached at or wherever there’s a towel, a bucket of water and some folks ready to party.