Detainment of a Requested Individual

As I mentioned yesterday, JUNE is Torture Awareness Month – the United Nations has even proclaimed the 26th of June to be Torture Awareness DAY.

There are differing views on what constitutes torture. The only reasonable definition is that mistreatment of anyone who is in your complete control is torture. Any other definition is bullshit.

Yesterday, we read Sgt. Schatzenbooger's report on what happpened when his squad detained a Requested Individual . Today, we hear how this fellow experienced his detainmeant. Tomorrow, we will hear something of what he experienced during “coercive interrogation”.

As Dr. Thor Churrin is supposed to have put it, he who did so much to develop the techniques of coercive interrogation, “As long as it don’t squirt, it don’t matter how much it hurt!”

I can’t say for sure that the good doctor actually said that – these stories were transmitted to me by an unemployed angel from the Third Galaxy and I’m not convinced how reliable it is.

Requested Individual, Jamal Palooka

When they came to detain me, my wife did not understand – as a matter of fact, neither did I.

I had done nothing really, a few letters, a petition signed...even after two years to think about it, I cannot recall any specific thing I might have done or said which could have caused the MERDE to tag me as a Probable Source of Information and target me as a Requested Individual.

Just how it’s done, of course I do not know. I imagine my name came up on a computer screen, marked with a red exclamation point on a spreadsheet.

Or maybe it was the old fashioned way of the casual snitch. Perhaps someone with a grudge dropped a tip. Or perhaps a friend moaned my name to make the interrogations stop –

I can very well understand if it was the latter. I may have moaned a name or two myself. But my memory is not so good since…since…my experience…so I really don’t know for sure.

They will tell you they found fingerprints on some plastic bags. I assume that they probably did. But as to how they got there or whether they really were my fingerprints, you would have to ask those who found them.

Like I said, when they came to detain me, my wife did not understand and neither did I.

The first we knew was when the door crashed inward, torn off its hinges – & in they stormed. How many? I cannot say – five, ten, a dozen?

One would have been enough & they could have knocked – we would have opened the door...

The door went down in a crash and in they stormed, helmeted and masked behind those dark-green, bug-eye goggles.

Salvos of machine gun flachettes were fired into wall and ceiling.

“Downonthefloorazzholes!” roared from the loudspeakers of their white armored suits.

My wife wasn’t quick enough, “Jamal!” she cried.

A boot in the stomach brought her to the floor.

The last I saw of her, just before they put the bag over my head, was a boot on her throat. She was gurgling, looking at me with pleading eyes – behind her I saw the door to the other room open – a salvo of flachettes caught my eight year old son in the torso and face.

Blood splattered everywhere.

They bound my hands behind my back with plastic twists, my feet also, and the bonds were connected. Using it as a handle, a soldiers drug me across the floor and out the door. With his amplified strength, he lifted me like a sack of potatoes and threw me in the back of what I suppose was a truck. The side of my face was raw with scrapes from the sidewalk, tears streamed down my face mingled with the blood on my cheek.

That is the last I remember for a long time. When I woke up, I was in what former Requested Individuals call a Mobile Torture Wagon.

They will tell you, of course, that they do not exist. In a sense, that’s true. The official name is “Mobile Interrogation Aggregate On Wheels” and those who are brought there do not exist either. And neither does God exist inside a MIAOW, or Cat House, as they are also known.

I’m one of the lucky ones – I left alive and with something left of my sanity...
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Close study of 4th level footnotes to the 21st Edition of the Absolute Truth has brought to light key data which led MERDE to tag J. Palooka as RI. On the 24th of March, five weeks before he was Collected for Detainment, Mr. Palooka visited the local library and loaned several books on gardening and herbs. As it happened, the person behind him at the counter was loaning a book on the “Loan Watch List”. Because of an unfortunate glitch in the library system, the LWL book was scanned before Mr. Palace's loan number was flushed from the system. Therefore MERDE concluded that he was accessing Suspicious and Terror Related material. The fact that he was also loaning so much apparently innocent material of course increased the Level of Suspicion and Mr. Palooka was tagged for Detainment...