According to logic, if tasers are instruments of torture (which the UN argues they are), and if you can use an ordinary camera to make a taser, then cameras should also be considered instruments of torture, and regulated, right?

What? You don't believe me because my old link no longer works? There's a new link to the same video here, or you can just watch this YouTube video and learn how to outwit the UN!

Why no one brought up the taser torture issue at last night's Republican debate, I don't know.

I'm surprised that UN hasn't decided that police nightsticks are instruments of torture. And sjamboks. (traditionally considered South African, but used in Namibia or Zimbabwe) And fists!

Why, even the lowly lit cigarette is well known as an instrument of torture.

And what about guns? If the theory is that torture is the infliction of pain, then why isn't shooting someone considered torture?

The answer is that anything can be used to torture someone. In Daniel P. Mannix's History of Torture, a police detective from the days of the "Third Degree" is quoted as saying he could make anyone talk by using only a telephone book and a pair of pliers. Moreover, he claimed that he knew how to use them in such a way that it would leave no marks.

[OK, I didn't want to spell it out, but since most people won't buy and read Mannix's account, the telephone book is used to beat the victim's head on the temples without leaving marks, and the pliers work best with unneutered males....]

Mannix also quotes Peron's police chief Cipriano Lombilla, an expert at torturing people electrically without leaving marks. Here's a typical (if poorly translated) account by one of Lombilla's victims -- Nieves Boschi de Blanco:

In half of the declaration the Amoresano employee came to cover the eyes to me using cotton and a long bandage. Lead by a running length to another room they forced to lay down to me to me on a stretcher. They began then to use the electrical wire, the first on the clothes and soon directly on the body, raising to me dress and undergarments until the height of the neck. The application was made systematically by space of ten minutes in the ears, sines, belly, ingle, genital organs and legs, using as a towel dampened like average conductor. As result of the torture I underwent the first fading, restored of which they reinitiated the procedure during other five minutes. Before a new loss of the sense the bandage took off being able to verify then that the voices and mentioned laughter before heard corresponded to the Lombilla, Ferreiro and other three, whose last names I do not know. The torture was preceded and accompanied by obscene offenses by word and in fact (in an opportunity the Amoresano employee expressed: ' I am going to you to make release the baby before its time').

Here's a brief history of the Argentine picana:

The Argentine picana electrica had humble origins.[2] In 1902, Boekelman had published papers on the electric stunning of animals for slaughter and its effects on the quality of the meat. By 1929, Weinberger and Muller developed a stun device for pig slaughterhouses at the University of Munich. In Argentina, the picana electrica replaced the barbed picana. In 1932, it entered into police work in Buenos Aires and little has changed in its usage since that time. Victims are strapped to a wooden table and wetted down to aid the current. The prod operator applies the wand to sensitive parts of the body (head, temples, mouth, genitalia, breasts) while the machine operator works the bobbin, raising and reducing voltage. The victim often bites on rubber or lead to make sure that the tongue is not bit off during the shocks. Usually, a doctor is present to make sure that the victim has no heart problems and can survive the interrogation. Other accounts indicate a doctor keeps tabs on the pulse of the victim during the interrogation.

The electrical picana operates on direct current but it can be plugged into the wall socket of the victim's home with the aid of a transformer. It is transported in a suitcase and usually powered by an automobile battery. The sleeve is insulated and the bronze or copper tip applied to the body. The voltage of the first picanas varied between 12000 and 16000 volts with a thousandth of an ampere. This voltage is modest by comparison to modern tasers, but it is the low amperage that allows the repeated use of shock without killing the victim.

I have read various gruesome accounts about Lombilla's use of the picana (he bragged that he could make even the most stubborn cases talk by sliding a wire down the esophagus and then shocking the pit of the stomach opening), but Time magazine has another account involving two brothers who were "friends of Evita":

When Dictator Juan Peron was in power, the Cardosos were notorious for winning "confessions" from the regime's prisoners. Their prize persuader was the picana electrica, an "electric needle" that delivered a 12,000-volt jolt. Applied to the lips, soles of the feet or genitals, the picana made the victim convulse with shrieking pain, while leaving no marks. "With the picana" Juan Cardoso once boasted, "you can extract in one session confessions that would have taken four days of sissified questioning."

For four years the brothers plied their trade. In 1952 Eva Peron gave Juan Cardoso a gold cup as "best detective of the year." Then when Peron was finally ousted in 1955, the boys hopped on a motorcycle, raced to the Paraguayan embassy and requested political asylum. The new Argentine government angrily demanded their return as common criminals. But the Paraguayans insisted that the Cardosos were political refugees.

Or just use the pliers.

The important thing to remember is that it's all Bush's fault.