I hadn’t actually heard about this until Uncle Jimbo tweeted me about it to solicit my opinion, but Silvestre Reyes (he of the immortal confusion between Sunni and Shi’ite) put into the coming year’s intelligence authorization bill a set of specific criminal penalties for anyone in the intelligence community or working for it who tortures someone. What do I think of this? Fuck yeah is what I think of this. The gist:

the proposed Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Interrogations Prohibition Act proscribes “forcing the individual to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner” — a la Abu Ghraib — “beatings, electrical shock, burns, or inflicting physical pain; waterboarding; using military working dogs; inducing hypothermia” — it happened at Guantanamo to Mohammed al-Qatani — sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, denial of medical care, “using force or the threat of force”; “mock executions;” religious desecration in an intelligence context; “sensory deprivation”; “prolonged isolation”; “placing hoods or sacks over the heads of the individual;” “exploiting the phobias of the individual” and more. Basically, it clarifies that the entire parade of outside-the-Army-Field-Manual-on-Interrogation horrors during the Bush administration are criminal acts. We’ll see if this ever actually makes it to President Obama’s desk.

Jimbo thinks it goes too far to make it a crime to hood someone. If you turn up the volume on your computer, you can hear me playing a very tiny violin. Just don’t hood someone. The point of reestablishing criminal liability for all of this isn’t merely to stop the specific use of any techniques, it’s to reestablish the prohibition on things that smell like abuse. Not a single piece of intelligence will be lost by the re-criminalization of these techniques, as “Matthew Alexander” and David Petraeus can tell you. Any interrogator who seeks to torture is a shitty interrogator anyway; that’s different from one who was instructed to torture.

It’s funny how Byron York and Andy McCarthy are incensed at how Reyes is doing this while people are distracted with health care. Ah, their tears, so salty and delicious. How underhanded of Reyes, to use an advantage! If it makes them feel any better, the Democratic Congress are total pussies cowards who will surely abandon this rather sensible maneuver at the first burst of sustained criticism.

Update: One more thing. For those who are hung up on Miranda, check out Sec. 504 of the House intelligence bill:

(Sec. 504) Prohibits the use of funds to provide the warnings of constitutional rights described in Miranda v. Arizona to a person outside the United States who is not a U.S. person and is:
(1) suspected of terrorism, associated with terrorists, or believed to have knowledge of terrorists; or
(2) a detainee in the custody of U.S. Armed Forces. Subtitle B: Technical Amendments

There you go, dudes. Something for you.

Update, 10:13 p.m.: What’d I tell you? What’d the fuck I tell you? Like Hov & Kellz put it, the power of the P-U-S-S-Y. Pardon my fucking language.