I’m monitoring Company agents
interrogating this Qaeda suspect.
Amazing his head’s unbruised from the stint
of slaps with a rolled phone book. You’d expect
that assault and the ripped-out fingernails
to be called torture. But Justice says no.
Or stripping him naked, feet in ice pails—
his unheated cell able to store snow—
blindfolded, pushed backward on a flat board,
flooding his gagged mouth and nose with water.
Makes him feel he’s suffocating. A hoard
of heavy metal CDs will batter
his eardrums for five straight hours. We’ll bare,
not what he knows, but what we want to hear.
Roger Armbrust
October 6, 2007
