It's funny, I went and read the article. The snippets Klien used do somehow suggest that it's a kind of "Modest Proposal" about torture, but the context was deadly serious. The point to the article was that the Public Relations problem of Guantanamo Bay actually served the government well because it acted as a distraction to the much much more horrible abuses going on in other places, such as in famed Abu Graihbe, as well as in the so called Black Prisons, where "Terror Suspects" were rendered in Europe, that American journalist Dana Priest won a Pulitzer prize a couple years ago for revealing. Also Guantanamo's existence, in a way, acclimated the public to torture, or "near torture" and allowed people, respected "objective" journalists, to creepily and seriously distinguish differences between human beings who get Geneva protections and those who don't. Richard Rorty's thoughts about Humbert were brought in because he, the journalist, suggested that Rorty's interpretation was apposite to the government's agenda: Rorty thought Humbert's way of talking about Lolita often made the audience complicit with his abuse, and got readers splitting hairs about how much abuse was really real abuse of the child or wasn't so bad, or somehow didn't count as abuse since Lolita was such a brat--kind of like the idea that the worst of the worst can't actually be 'tortured". It reminded me of that interview I read with Dimitri Nabokov where he was asked what he believed his father would have thought of the "enhanced interrogations" of "detainees". I was, needless to say, quite surprised by the views expressed. I think it was in the first issue of the Nabokov Online Journal.