BAGHDAD–a group of former Iraqi and Afghan detainees angrily criticized the Senate report on CIA torture, saying it had made “our good times with CIA friends” look bad.

“The Senate clearly doesn’t understand what torture is,” said Jalal al-Yusuf, an elementary-school teacher who spent six months in Abu Ghraib prison after being confused with an insurgent with a similar name. “They look at a man with electrodes attached to his genitals and immediately think that something inappropriate is going on.”

Samar Hussein, a fruit seller who was spotted with a mobile phone in Sadr City in 2004 and spent three years locked up at a black site, was equally angry. “So I like to get naked and be hit with rubber hoses,” he said. “That’s a private thing between me and my good friend Jim Just Jim from Texas.”

“It was all just for fun, and our interrogators were clear that we could make it stop any time by using our safe word,” said Dr. Ihab Abed, who was picked up by police for looking unhappy during the short-lived Iraqi festival Dick Cheney Day. “My safe word was ‘Saddamplanned9/11’, for example.”

Fellow detainees Tarek Ayoub, Abdul Khader, and several others were unavailable for comment, because they were dead. A friend of Ayoub’s said “Sure, he died from asphyxiation under enhanced interrogation, but he could have died from asphyxiation sitting in a cafe, if the waiter had jumped on him and held a wet bag on his head. No one’s to blame.”

Leading Republicans and former members of the Bush administration also rejected the label of “torture,” noting that they hadn’t noticed anything amiss from their offices ten thousand miles away.



Highly skilled interrogators build rapport with detainees through a fun team-building exercise.