You name the topic.
Torture. Health care. Immigration. The EPA. Climate.
OK, we’ll talk torture.
The usual suspects in the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP) have come out in defense of the CIA and its first-ever attempts with enhanced interrogation techniques created within a suspect legal framework designed to extract information from detainees.
Apparently the other agencies that used to handle such affairs begged out, and the job was left to the CIA to act as both jailor and interrogator of terrorists, something it had never done before.
Not that the CIA were rookies at espionage and skullduggery, but it appears as though this was an assignment they hadn’t encountered before.  
So torture it was for the CIA.
The old red herring argument was even employed in recent days by Supreme Court justice Anton Scalia when he suggested that the line between torture and protection of society certainly wouldn’t be hazy if the bad guys were hiding an atom bomb in LA and you had to break a few limbs or worse to get information that could protect our people.
I just love it when a justice on the highest court in the land employs a wild-eyed hypothetical argument to help the mindless define what is torture and what isn’t.
Was the CIA acting like a good intelligence organization when it hired a couple of psychologists to devise a method of “learned helplessness” and earn $81 million in government contracts in the process?
We all know from watching the Three Stooges that torture doesn’t work other than as a comedy routine.  
There are better ways to get people to talk or comply. It happens every day across the land. Corporate America is pretty good at getting people to do what they want, as we buy all sorts of stuff that we don’t need or want, but by golly they sure convince a lot of us that we need more stuff, more junk that isn’t necessary for survival.
You want people to see things your way?
The National Union of Friendly Americans (NUFA) Handbook of Ethical Coercion has identified numerous ways to get ne’er-do-wells (and consumers) to talk without so much as raising a finger.
NUFA doesn’t condone all the methods found within the handbook, since a number of them lead to life-threatening conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. Those sections within the handbook that describe cruel or unusual punishment have been included only to point out that civilized societies like ours aren’t always as civil as they portray themselves to be, even when dealing with our own citizens.  
Again, NUFA doesn’t condone the bad stuff.
NUFA has only authorized a few simple but effective techniques to break their will, including:
Tickle them until they talk. Give them a puppy. Assign them a personal bartender. Play Christmas music until they break. Give them a trampoline. Teach them how to skate. Take care of aging parents. Change the baby’s diapers. Shovel the neighbor’s sidewalk. Live in a tree house. Teach them how to knit. Sudoku and crossword puzzles. Bourbon. Ask your grandma about the family stories. Write poetry. Keep a journal. Give them a mantra. Comfortable shoes.
Those NUFA-approved things only take up a page or two of the handbook.    
The rest of the handbook is more nefarious and under the radar. You want to get somebody to talk or buy, Mr. CIA? Hey, hire the experts in the free marketplace. Forget the psychologists. If you want “learned helplessness,” you’d better hire the experts who make the people dance every day.
The marketers of the economocracy say:  
Feed them fast food until they scream Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yes, get them hooked on bad, irresistible processed foods like most of us already are, and you’ll see them sing like canaries when you threaten to take it away and replace it with whole grains and vegetable pie. Dangle the Doritos in front of them. They’ll talk and gladly put on pounds that will make them roly-poly and unable to resist the siren call of empty calories.  
Give them handheld devices and a password to the internet, and soon they’ll be hopelessly addicted and lost in the cloud. You try to take away that iPhone once they spend most of their waking hours staring at a small screen with their necks cramped at a 90-degree angle, chasing useless information hither and yon, and those bad guys (and consumers) will follow and answer questions as if they were hypnotized.
These are but a few of the ways the CIA should have dealt with suspected terrorists (and consumers), proven methods perfected over time right here in the good old USA.
It’s all there in the NUFA Handbook of Ethical Coercion, Chapter 2, pages 3-657.
It’s a great gift for Christmas.  
 
Forrest Johnson has been writing for over 20 years and was editor of the Lake County Chronicle in Two Harbors.