Bummed... James Bummed... INTERNATIONAL TOP-SECRET

[dutchdemocrat]

"With friends like these, who needs enemas?"

Well, it looks like a Lounge headline... but - it's not.

The Glamour of Bushgoonery

Empire Burlesque - Chris Floyd

With his usual eagle eye for depravity, Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution has abstracted the most representative fact from the recent Washington Post story about the Bush gang's "erroneous renditions" (a.k.a. kidnapping innocent people and torturing them). Jon notes the lurid S&M quality of the operations, mentioned only in passing in the Post story and left unremarked by the commentariat -- which probably says volumes about the unspoken assumptions that underlie the American Establishment these days.

The Part They DON'T Tell You About James Bond (ATR)

Except: is all very bad, of course, but I don't think enough attention has been paid to the smaller details. For instance:

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons.

The easy joke here would be the resemblance our foreign policy apparently bears to a peculiar, intricate sexual fantasy:

My greatest fantasy? Um, I'm wearing a costume, an all-black costume with a mask. Then I blindfold you and cut off all your clothes. Did I mention all this time I'm a secret agent? And that I've brought an adult diaper with me? Then, I, uh...

The less easy but more intriguing joke is that apparently there really is someone at the CIA whose job it is to administer INTERNATIONAL TOP-SECRET ENEMAS. Despite the undeniable horror of what we're up to, I can't deny I enjoy this. I enjoy the idea that out there right now there is a person who's the James Bond of Enemas.