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Well, this is just great.

Currently, if you go to the home page of GoDaddy.com (the most popular domain name registrar, that also holds some of my domain names), you'll see a bit of text up at the top of the page that says,

Close Gitmo? No way!! Think our interrogation methods are tough? Prisoners in the Middle East talk quick. Here's why.

It links to this entry on the weblog of GoDaddy's founder, Bob Parsons. The entry starts with "May we never forget the day." It continues with an salacious discussion of torture techniques, and ends with him promising to post a video of the 9/11 jumpers leaping to their deaths if he gets enough requests.

This sucks. I actually tried to make excuses for Bob Parsons at first - he's a military vet with libertarian tendencies and he's got a lot of viewpoints that I don't share, but he seemed to be thoughtful in his own way, at first. This is just ridiculous, though.

Using 9/11 as justification for Gitmo is cowardly. Cowardly. Here's why. Using even the slightest bit of reason, it's easy to see that there are all sorts of ways to better protect the USA without engaging in the kind of abuses we see at Gitmo. Those people who refuse to see that are deliberately closing their minds, and it's because they are scared to see the alternatives. They hide behind bluster and false machismo. It's corrupt, base, and all too easy to dehumanize someone, turn them into an insect, and make them defecate on themselves. It's harder to act with the principles that hold ourselves to a higher standard than our enemies and set an example to the rest of the world. It's possible to hold ourselves to principled standards and also do what needs to be done, and those who refuse to consider that are selling their souls to take the easy way out. That's cowardice. Cross that with an appreciation of torture porn and snuff films, and you've got a true degenerate.

People are talking about this on Daily Kos, metafilter, and soon, I imagine, slashdot. I'm looking around for a new consensus choice of registrars myself. It'd be great to find one with progressive sensibilities, but I'd settle for one that respects consumer and privacy rights, and doesn't feature unconscionable political views on the front page of their corporate website.

Update: Son of a gun! Parsons retracts:

Since this blog article was posted I have been accused repeatedly of supporting the use of torture to get information from prisoners. This is simply not true. I do not, under any circumstance, support the use of torture. I do not consider the use of interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation or the playing of rap music to be torture. That said, I now believe that even these mild methods are not necessary.

I have heard from a number of individuals who claimed to be professional interrogators. These readers have pointed out that the use of annoying or unpleasent techniques during interrogation simply do not work very well. After looking at the references they provided, and giving the matter some thought, I tend to agree and think that the there's a good argument for changing the way in which prisoners at Gitmo are interrogated. Thus things like sleep deprivation, playing loud rap music and other techniques that involve making the detainee physically uncomfortable would be completely done away with and replaced with psychological techniques that are more humane and as such yield better results. I have since modified the article that was originally posted here to reflect what I just learned.

Now, the thing about him not supporting torture is bullshit, given that his original entry said things like, "Key prisoners at Gitmo still have not talked -- because our interrogation methods are so weak." But still, we have a backdown. Awesome.