Barack Obama has kept himself busy during his first 100 days in office by revealing, little by little, some of the inner workings of the Bush Administration that George and his pals tried so hard to keep secret. The Obama Administration continues to systematically peel away the layers of the rotten onion that was George Bush’s Presidency, uncovering some of the stink that lay beneath the primped-up outer skin.

The most recent revelations have come in the form of memos written by the Justice Department during the Bush Administration. They detail the forms and frequency of “interrogation methods” that were applied to post-9/11 “enemy combatants” to get the “detainees” to provide “actionable information”. Which is all politically correct government jargon and Pentagon-speak - translated, it means those memos spell out exactly how the United States scooped up suspected bad guys, threw them in a prison camp, and tortured the crap out of them until they sang like canaries.

And the primary tactic used to meet those objectives appears to have been the one commonly known as “waterboarding”. That’s not surfing lingo for some radical wave riding technique, it’s a surprisingly low-tech process involving an inclined bench, a smelly rag, some polluted water, and a generous helping of righteous fervor. And during these little adventures in intelligence gathering, the waterboardee reportedly has the sensation of drowning. What fun.

According to these memos, the really bad guys we had in chains- like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the crappo de tutti crappies - got the royal waterboarding treatment. Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in total and Mohammed was served up on the slanty board 183 times - in just one month. Now, how many of these treatments does it take before the waterboardee realizes that he’s not going to drown, and begins to just put up with it somehow, unpleasant as it may be? And since most of the alleged terrorists being waterboarded were Middle Easterners, Arabs  - desert people, that is - how much actual fear of drowning they might have is open to debate. I mean, if you’re born and raised in the Amazon rain forest you don’t usually end up with inordinate fears about freezing to death on an ice floe in the arctic, do you?

But beyond all that, a little math is in order. Doing anything 183 times in one month means doing t roughly six times per day, every day. That’s a lot - most people probably don’t yawn that often. If you eat regularly, you only have 90 meals a month on average. So during the month of March 2003, our intelligence goons felt it necessary to torture - er, waterboard - Khalid at least twice as often as they fed him. Twice as often. And still, it apparently took them 183 tries to get him to tell them something they wanted to hear.

Seems like even a real slow learner would probably figure out after fifty or sixty tries that this intelligence gathering tactic wasn’t working too well. At that point, all they were doing is wasting water and making themselves look bad. And doing it 183 times in one month just makes the detainers look inept and the detainees look resolute. Unless, of course, it was all super secret and nobody would ever find out…