Hey, sir,
I can’t tell you my name because I’m UC for the CIA, just like the Plame dame. I’m not even writing this letter. I’m dictating it to a machine that garbles all the sounds so nobody can recognize my voice, then puts them back together and sends them to a computer, and the computer . . .
Well, you get the idea.
But you already know one thing about me. I’m from the South. You know that because I said “Hey” and not “Hi,’ the way they do in the North.
But the reason I’m writing you is because I want to thank you for trying to help us with the torture business. No easy job, I know, with Mother Teresa McCain making such a stink, throwing his POW weight around, and all that holier-than-thou crap. Makes me sick just to think about it. Whose side is he on, anyway?
So anyway, thanks a lot for your help. And if you think a goddam piece of paper is going to make a whole helluva lot of difference, you’ve got another think coming.
But there was one other thing I wanted to tell you.
Here at the CIA we do a lot of gaming--and I don’t mean five card stud. I mean, if we’ve got a problem we make a game out of it, and play it out. So in the Iraq-game we have three sides, Sunni, Shia, and Kurds. But there are two or three different kind of Sunnis so we have people who play those different kinds, and behave as if . . . well shit, I can’t remember it all, but you get the idea.
So a couple of weeks ago, right around Christmas, we played the “ticking bomb” game. You know, a terrorist has planted a “dirty bomb” in New York City, and it’s due to go off in an hour. We’ve captured the terrorist, and we know he knows where it is. (Don’t ask me how we captured the dude, or how we know he knows where it is. We were just following the story Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Weekly Standard.) So do we torture this guy until he tells us what we want to know? You bet.
So we set up the game. I’m one of the torturers. We’ve got a bomb squad ready to go. And for the terrorist we get this really good looking broad we’ve worked with before. She speaks French so we name her Maham-ette. We pretend-string her up by her thumbs or whatever, and she plays along with it for a while and says “Nevair!” a lot, but finally she says, “OK guys, this isn’t fun anymore, in fact it’s beginning to hurt,” so we pretend-cut her down, and we yell, “OK, Maham-ette, where’s the Bomb?” And she’s like, “It’s in locker 666 on the second floor of Ali-ben Gold’s Gym in Jackson Heights.” The bomb squad takes off like the Bears’ linebackers blitzing Favre, but just as they get to the door the broad screams, “Stop! Wait! Come back here. Dumb me, I forgot to tell you something.” We all stop, and wait for her to start talking again.
“You assholes,” she says. “We terrorists were smart enough to build the bomb, and smart enough to disassemble the sucker, and air-freight it over a period of two years, from Hamburg and Kuala Lumpur and Allah knows where to Kennedy and Dulles and Miami, and then smart enough to reassemble it in Jersey City, and smart enough to drive it through the tunnel and stow it in the locker in the gym. But we’re not smart enough to give it a fail-safe trigger? The puppy is spring-loaded. You open the door to locker 666, or even bang it around a little, and that is the end of New York City as we have known it.” She paused, then she said, “My advice to you is, get in your squad cars, turn on the sirens and the flashing blue lights, and head for Chicago.” She looked at the hairs on her wrist. “You’ve got forty-three minutes.”
And then Patty--that was her real name, Patty--Patty looked around the room at us, and then she looked down at the floor, and then she, I don’t know, she started to cry. . . .
Well sir, I didn’t mean to make such a long story of this, but I thought you ought to know what we are thinking about over here in Virginia.
Patriotically yours,
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