"Vegetarian" Torture on the Table

WASHINGTON - After weeks of trying to decide exactly what distinguishes "torture" from the more socially acceptable practice of near drowning, government leaders are considering the sliding scale of morality employed by vegetarians.

Just as not all vegetarians follow the same rules, neither would all interrogators. Some vegetarians eat no meat at all, while others eat fish or chicken. Accordingly, some "interrogarians" would question non-brutally, while others would treat themselves once in a while to forcing a subject not to sleep or slamming him into a wall 226 times.

The new face of interrogation?

This approach is expected to help the debate over whether information obtained using torture kept the country safe for the past eight years. "People used to hate torturers," said a spokesman. "Now we're hoping they'll just be annoyed, the way you roll your eyes whenever you have to pick a restaurant with a vegan."

Instituting a sliding, fuzzy scale would also ease the tension over whether to punish officials who practiced torture in the past (i.e., two years ago). "Vegetarians don't condemn another vegetarian just because he once went to Wendy's for a double Baconator," said the spokesman. "We think it's the same, sort of."

Members of both parties said it was necessary for the U.S. to have a torture policy that eschews harsh techniques, while still allowing them here and there. "Look, as a nation we've got a lot of violence in our diet already," said the spokesman. "It's not like we're going waterboard. I mean, overboard."

Comments

[PascoBill]

Boy, this allows for a lot of degrees of description for torturers, if we use the vegetarian model.

Staying with that analogy, vegetarians can be macrobiotic, vegan, fruititarian (vegetarians that don't eat vegetables), lacto-vegetarian (milk and cheese), ovo-lacto (throw in an egg or two - non-fertilized, of course - chicken stem cells?). Then we have the meat-eating vegetarians - those who only eat fish (now a shark can call itself a vegetarian), "California vegetarians" who don't eat beef (also includes lions and tigers as vegetarians - no cows on the Serengeti). And the time-based vegetarians, who might only eat meat on Sunday. Or is it the other way around?

This would leave a lot of room for describing (non)torturers, probably even including the Spanish Inquisitioners (who probably didn't use Chinese water torture, at least not on Sunday).