Funny How Getting Waterboarded Can Change Your Perspective On Whether Or Not Its Torture

*Update: I found a YouTube clip that has more footage and the whole scene played out at once.




Now before we go any further I want to point out that what Erich "Mancow" Muller went through wasn't exactly the way waterboarding is done to our military nor what was done to the detainees. Usually the towel is placed over the mouth and nose (check OLC memos if you don't believe me) which makes it worse. Still this right wing radio talker could only last a grand total of 7 seconds. I wonder what he would have said if it was done to him almost 200 times in a month like we did to KSM.

Here is an excerpt from the accompanying article.

Listeners had the chance to decide whether Mancow himself or his co-host, Chicago radio personality Pat Cassidy, would undergo the interrogation method during the broadcast. The voters ultimately decided Mancow would be the one donning the soaked towel and shackles, and at about 8:40 a.m., he entered a small storage room next to his studio that was compared to a "dungeon" by Cassidy.

"The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay South answered, adding, "He's going to wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this."

With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.

Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "

And this is precisely why the most bellicose wingnuts who say waterboarding isn't torture ie the Sean Hannity's and Liz Cheney's of the world, will never actually allow themselves to be waterboarded.

(h/t Glenzilla)

And Now For The Main Event!

Goodmorning America brings us the match up we have been hoping for. Liz Cheney vs Lawrence O'Donnell. Unfortunately because this was a "polite" setting O'Donnell couldn't unload the clip like I am sure he wanted to so it didn't quite live up to the hype. However make no mistake, this was absolutely an PWNING.



Did you notice that Liz Cheney had no comeback to any of Lawrence O'Donnell's questions? Did you also notice that she totally made up some shit about we only prosecuted people for waterboarding because they did "some additional things" other than waterboarding? I loved how O'Donnell hit back when Liz said 14% of detainees who were released from GITMO "returned to the fight" (which we know isn't true) by pointing out that it was her dad who let them out in the first place. Now if only we could get that same match up somewhere like "Hardball" or "Morning Joe"

The Love Them Some Liz

Steve Benen asked the folks at MediaMatters to tally up just how many times Liz Cheney had been on Tee Vee lately. You would probably not be surprised to know that it was 12 times over nine and a half days. Thats 12 times for her to defend her daddy's torture program without having any direct knowledge of what happened. What a fucking joke our media is.

A Translation

Today on Morning Joe they showed the clip of Jesse Ventura PWNING Elisabeth Hasselbeck on the View yesterday. To save you the trouble of watching what the chickenhawk Joe Scarborough said about Jesse Ventura's appearance, I will just give you the shorter version.

"I just can't understand why all of these people who have actually BEEN waterboarded keep calling it torture"

You stay classy Joe!

More Is Less

As I watched this TYT clip with Cenk Uygur discussing the disgusting and despicable Liz Cheney who appeared on FauxNooz I remembered a part of the Soufan testimony from earlier today.




Now one of the contentions she made on FoxNews was that by limiting interrogators to following the Army Field Manual somehow President Obama was making us less safe by allowing terrorist to know what was coming should we capture them. But check out what Soufan had to say about this issue.

The harsh technique method doesn't use the knowledge we have of the detainee's history, mindset, vulnerabilities, or culture, and instead tries to subjugate the detainee into submission through humiliation and cruelty. The approach applies a force continuum, each time using harsher and harsher techniques until the detainee submits.

The idea behind the technique is to force the detainee to see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain. It is an exercise in trying to gain compliance rather than eliciting cooperation. A theoretical application of this technique is a situation where the detainee is stripped naked and told: "Tell us what you know."

If the detainee doesn't immediately respond by giving information, for example he asks: "what do you want to know?" the interviewer will reply: "you know," and walk out of the interrogation room. Then the next step on the force continuum is introduced, for example sleep deprivation, and the process will continue until the detainee's will is broken and he automatically gives up all information he is presumed to know.

There are many problems with this technique.

A major problem is that it is ineffective. Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, the al Qaeda training prepares them for much worse – the torture they would expect to receive if caught by dictatorships for example.

This is why, as we see from the recently released Department of Justice memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep getting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods, until they reached waterboarding and then there was nothing they could do but use that technique again and again. Abu Zubaydah had to be waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times. In a democracy there is a glass ceiling of harsh techniques the interrogator cannot breach, and a detainee can eventually call the interrogator's bluff.

The truth is as Soufan pointed out that the terrorists train for shit that would never under any circumstances be legal even in Dick Cheney's world for us to do to them. And because they know this then when we torture them we actually give them the upper hand. So unless the pro torture crowd is prepared to go the full Syrian and break out the thumbscrews and pull out fingernails doing "harsh interrogation" probably does more harm than good in terms of trying to keep us safe. It would help if somebody in the media would point this out.

Daddy's Little Girl

Why in the hell has MSNBC put Liz Cheney on Tee Vee twice now? What does she bring to the discussion other than pushing propaganda to promote her father? She wasn't in any meetings or privy to any top secret information. She doesn't know what the hell she is talking about. Yet MSNBC has allowed her to bring her whitewashing act to their network for the second time today. Its telling that they didn't have Lawrence O'Donnell on with her today. They didn't want to see her evicerated on their network evidently. Eugene Robinson did ok on pushing back on her bullshit but he isn't the right person for that particular job. MSNBC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing her to use their pulpit to shape public opinion on the issue of torture. Something she nor her sorry ass daddy know a got damn thing about since they both declined military service.





Update: Here is a link to Eugene Robinson's op ed today in the Washington Post crushing Liz's daddy.

Our Discourse On Torture

Matt Taibbi strikes again. This time he examines the rhetoric coming from the pro torture crowd. I honestly have had the same experiences tht he refers to where if you are against torture and for the rule of law, pro torturists then accuse you of treason or of not giving a shit about what happens to our soldiers when our enemy tortures and or murders them. This happens almost daily on cable news where assholes like Frank Gaffney will invariably bring up Daniel Pearl and how he was brutally killed as some kind of pushback on why we should allow detainees to be torture. It makes no logical sense as an argument and like Taibbi I have to wonder if the people who spout this kind of bullshit even believe what they are really and truly saying about the people they disagree with.

It’s the same thing with this torture business. There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that torture opponents are “not upset” about things like 9/11 or the beheading of American hostages. The idea that “no one complains when Americans are murdered” is crazy — of course we “complained,” and of course we’d all like to round up those machete-wielding monsters and shoot them into space — but these people really believe this, they really believe that torture opponents are secretly unimpressed/untroubled by Islamic terrorism, at least as compared to American “enhanced interrogation.” For them to believe that, they must really believe that such people are traitors, nursing a secret agenda (an agenda perhaps unknown even to themselves, their America-hatred being ingrained so deep) against their own country. Which is really an amazing thing for large numbers of Americans to believe about another large group of Americans, when you think about it.

The reason it’s possible is that it’s been drilled into their heads to instinctively perceive opposition to their point of view as support for their enemies. They’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real, honest-to-God enemies (al Qaeda, Kim Jong-Il) and people they simply disagree with or dislike (Boston liberals, the French, gays, the ACLU, etc).

If you give a Yankee fan shit about Joba Chamberlain’s fist pumps, his first answer is going to be to wonder why you’re not also complaining about Jonathan Papelbon’s screaming — because he assumes everyone who disagrees with a Yankee is a Red Sox fan. The same sort of thing is at work here. You bring up the subject of torture as an American citizen, concerned about what allowing torture would do to us as a society, how it would change us, and these people answer the issue by wondering why we’re not also complaining about the terrorists on 9/11 or in Fallujah. Because the thinking here is that everyone who disagrees with the torture position is in some degree or another in league with a real murderous enemy.

They don’t understand that this is not a question of taking different sides in a war; this is two groups of Americans having a disagreement about how best to deal with a foreign enemy both of these groups of Americans despise, fear and revile equally. My group, the anti-torture group, believes that what should make us superior to terrorists is respect for law and due process and civilization, and that when we give in and use these tactics, we forfeit that superiority and actually confer a kind of victory to the al Qaedas of the world, people who should never be allowed any kind of victory in any arena. We furthermore think that the war on terror doesn’t get won with force alone, that it’s a conflict that ultimately has to be won politically, by winning a propaganda battle against these assholes, and we can’t win that battle so easily if people in the Middle East see us openly embrace these tactics.

Whether or not you agree with that is up to you — we could be wrong, after all — but when you respond to these arguments by asserting that people like me didn’t “complain” when Americans were tortured and murdered, what you’re really doing is calling me a traitor. And while it may be more interesting and exciting for you to think like that, in reality it’s just nuts. Seriously. Trust us on this one. So think it over and ask yourself again if it really makes sense to say that torture opponents like me didn’t “complain” when Americans get their heads chopped off. Ask yourself if you really mean that, before you say it. And then get back to me.

Seriously