Coney Island, the quaintly rotting amusement park frequented by millions of New Yorkers every summer, is accomplished at the art of shocking people. It was among its sideshows that the world’s tiniest lady once sat, and a stall still operating today invites visitors to shoot an airgun at a real human target.
Now the park has acquired a new attraction: a sideshow dedicated to dark arts better associated with Guantánamo than with an entertainment complex. The stall is called ”Waterboard Thrill Ride” and, as the name suggests, it invokes the torture technique applied by the CIA to a small number of suspected terrorists.
”It don’t Gitmo better!” proclaims the sign outside the stall. And for $1, the sideshow kicks into life.
A figure dressed in black pours water over the face of another figure dressed in a Guantánamo-style orange jumpsuit and strapped to a bench. The jumpsuit figure convulses for 15 seconds before the display goes dark again.
Some might think that the stall is a witty commentary on the nearby Cyclone, the Coney Island rollercoaster that is so rickety it bears close resemblance to torture. In fact, an artist called Steve Powers devised it as a critique of United States breaches of human rights. The ride is intended as a spoof on the Bush administration’s attempt to argue that waterboarding — pouring water over a prisoner’s face to simulate the feeling of drowning — is not torture.
The figures in the show are animated robots. But on Friday the scene will be enacted by Powers himself, together with human rights lawyers, who will be waterboarded by an interrogation specialist. — guardian.co.uk