With your host, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

Channel 4 is preparing "Guantanamo Guidebook," a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation which freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba.

Channel Four, which brought the world reality TV hit "Big Brother," will film seven volunteers as they are subjected to extreme temperatures and mild physical contact while being kept awake for long periods.

The techniques are based on information from declassified U.S. government documents, and will be carried out by expert interrogators from the United States, a Channel Four spokesman said on Wednesday, declining to provide additional details.

He said the volunteers were rigorously screened prior to their participation and received intensive medical and psychological attention during and after the taping of the show.

One man was forced by doctors to withdraw after he contracted hypothermia.

The programme, due to air in mid-March, will examine the effects of the interrogation techniques over 48 hours in a London warehouse. It is part of a four-part series on torture hosted by news presenter Jon Snow.

People get it. People read the news reports in the papers or see something on news broadcasts. They get something terrible and inhumane happened in Gitmo. To put it on TV like this turns the proceedings into a faux-reality show, our modern recasting of the carnival freak show. Torture, deemed quaint by our nation's incoming top lawyer, is getting closer to being sold as entertainment, with Satan in carnival barker pinstripes pulling back the curtain and beckoning you to peer inside the sulfur-smelling tent. It isn't torture, but Fear Factor without prizes. It mocks a word that normally was reserved for the most hideous interpersonal actions one person can do to another.

Besides, to truly show what torture is you have to do the following:

--Grab people off the streets, or bust down their doors in the middle of the night
--Don't tell them were they are going
--Put them in cages, thousands of miles away from home.
--Have guards who ridicule their customs and ethnicity
--Cut them off from all contact with loved ones and legal representatives
--Ignore their pleas for mercy.
--Laugh at the detainees when they want to "opt out"
--Detain your subjects as long as you want, then let them go without apologizing

But you know, it's part of a TV program about torture, so there you go. It's educational. You know, for the kids.

There's a scene in Alan Moore's stellar graphic novel (soon to be a motion picture I'm very eager to see) "V for Vendetta" where a doctor who worked at a death camp is confronted by the title character, a former occupant of the camp. The doctor tells V, an assassin in a Joker-esque guise, that she knows what she and the rest of the leaders at the camp did was wrong, and that deep down there was some hideous flaw inside mankind that allows the species to easily slaughter one another methodically if one was given the proper orders and justification. Resigned, the doctor admits "We deserve to be culled."

I'm just thankful American TV hasn't picked up on this yet. Imagining Paris and Nicole, maybe the crew from American Idol, struting around in Gucci shoes with tiny brownshirt-clad dogs in tow, flogging and giggling with an omigawd vapidity, smirking at the camera wondering what "culled" means.