By Jack Bauer

WASHINGTON DC - Nearly 5,000 members of the American Federated Torturers Association (AFTA) held a “Bring the Tazers Back Home” rally in front of the Capitol Building yesterday to protest the burgeoning trend of US corporations and government agencies outsourcing torture contracts to cheap foreign laborers, primarily in India, China, and Rwanda.

After seeing tremendous growth in the aftermath of 9/11, the American torture sector has seen steady decline in recent years as outsourcing has skyrocketed. Former blue-chip stocks of companies such as TortuTech and American Thumbscrews Ltd. have lost over half their value since the end of fiscal 2003, and the American Torture Task force estimates that by the end of 2007, more than 50 percent of America's torturers will be unemployed.

American torturers point to the affect that outsourcing torture will have on the American economy, as up to 1 million of America's native torturing sons and daughters stand to lose their jobs. “American torturers are honest, hardworking, upstanding citizens,” said AFTA president and former Ultimate Fighting Champion Biff Bafferty. “Some of them work up to 42 hours a week! What right do we have to deprive them of their livelihoods, or tell them all those years of training were worthless? How will they feed their families or pay down their homes?”

Bafferty also cited a general decline in torture quality as highly trained American torturers are replaced by untrained, uncertified foreign thugs. “American torturers are the best of the best,” he explained. “They go through years of training to ensure the highest levels of information per unit of pain. But now we have people with Harvard Ph.D.'s in Information Extraction who are practically on the bread line. Do Americans really believe that some villager in Thailand with a baseball bat and some rusty nails will get better results?”

However Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who runs one of the worlds largest net purchasers of torturing services, disagrees. “American tortures are out of touch and have failed to innovate,” he argues. “They feel secure behind the safety of their fat union contracts, and often use Cold War Era techniques that were outdated even back in the 1970s when we first got into the torture sector. Why would we hire an expensive, lazy American torturer when we could hire an experienced Rwandan or a superbly trained Indian torturer who will work 140 hours a week for $5 dollars a day, speaks perfect English, and can torture customers over the phone?”

Indeed, the new “TeleTorture” phenomenon is seen as one of the gravest threats to good old-fashioned face-to-face American torture. Indian torture technicians, who are often recent graduates of the highly-rated Advanced Program in Torture and Pain Management at the massive Indian Institutes of Torture (IIT), are increasingly hired on to conduct torture over the phone, ripping sacred religious texts or insulting the subject's manhood in Mumbai while the subject is forced to listen. If the subject is uncooperative, they can even transmit electroshock countermeasures to precise locations on the subject's body by bouncing them of a satellite recently launched by the Chinese Space Agency, using a microwave transmitter, GPS transponders, and a voodoo doll. Even when victims are put on hold, the torture intensifies as classic tunes by Yanni are piped through.

But corporations are not the only ones looking to foreign torturers to cut costs. Even the US government has joined the outsourcing parade. It's reached the point where last month less than half the inmates at Gitmo who underwent information management measures were handled by American torturers.

Meanwhile, a joint announcement by Russia, India, China, and Lappland last week of a new tariff barriers against US torturing prompted House Speaker Denny Hastert (R - IL), a longtime Congressional supporter of American torturers, to decry “the growing Torture Gap” in a speech to a rare joint session of Congress and call for harsh countermeasures to stanch the outflow of torture contracts to the third world and protect American torture.

But the new bill proposed by Hastert seems unlikely to pass, due to strong opposition from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, both of whom warned against starting a trade war at such a delicate time.

The climate has changed after 9/11, and no where has it changed more than in the area of torture,” Bush said as part of a whistle-stop campaign speech on behalf of Florida congressman Tom Foley. “America needs more and more torture every day, and the fact is, American torturers just can't keep up. I'm the President, so I'm the one who decides how much torture we need, and also what it means in the first place. But that does not mean I am unsympathetic to the recent troubles of America's hard-working torturers. That is why I have asked Congress to quickly pass my 'No Torturer Left Behind' bill to train America's torturers in new torture methods - America can, must, and will have the finest torturers in the world.”  HSP