Needlenose

Via Raw Story, another media figure has had to learn the hard way that water torture — excuse me, waterboarding — really is torture, after all:

Chicago radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided he’d get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn’t torture. It didn’t turn out that way. “Mancow,” in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul.

… “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow told listeners. [...]

… “If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it,” he said.

Mancow joins Christopher Hitchens and at least two other journalists in learning what Steve Benen points out should be obvious to anyone (“If this wasn’t torture, we wouldn’t have done it. The whole point is to do something so horrific that the detainee would feel compelled to give up information.”).  But even if this is the least efficient way in the world to teach people morals, maybe in these times we have to settle for what we can get.

Matt Yglesias nominates Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard to be next in line for personal education, but I think most of the rest of us would agree the most worthy “volunteer” is Sean Hannity of Faux News.

However, I’ll hasten to add that I understand those who argue that these grotesque experiments should stop. First of all, waterboarding is wrong.  It’s torture, and that’s nothing to joke about.  Even worse, the more people think of it as something that’s “cool” to try, the greater the odds that some teenager somewhere will do it carelessly and die.

Even so, there’s a point to calling the bluff of the posturing phonies who advocate torture publicly.  As anyone familiar with framing understands, the purpose of their argument is to shore up the right-wing pose of being morally self-assured tough guys who are willing to do what it takes to defend America.

The truth, which isn’t brought up nearly often enough in the cable back-and-forth, is exactly the opposite:  At a time when America was tested, these cowards folded, throwing in the hand on the precise values they should have been protecting.

So I’m not above rude tactics in pointing out their weakness, their irresponsibility, and their hypocrisy.   If Sean Hannity and others won’t back up their talk about waterboarding, I’m fine with humiliating them using the same derisive language they’ve been aiming at the left for years.

They’re cowards, and moral failures.  And they need to be told that to their faces.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Warmonger and Shrubya Lovah Christopher Hitchens decides, after 10 seconds of ‘treatment,’ that waterboarding is torture. I particularly liked the caption to this so-called ‘news’ article:

“Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens says it was difficult finding someone who would agree to waterboard a man of 60.”

He obviously didn’t try too hard – I’d be happy to waterboard him! Right after ‘boarding Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, ad nauseum. I guess the issue wasn’t finding somebody who would waterboard him though, but rather – somebody who would be willing to stop after only 10 seconds of what Limbaugh once termed ‘hazing.’

Does it strike you that Mr. Hitchens is in that twilight mode of any celebrity’s career, “struggling to stay relevant?”

I already wrote last month about the initial Abu Ghraib scandal being propelled by the inevitable release of other photographic and video evidence.

Looks like it’s about to happen again. As Christopher Hitchens (of all people) writes in Slate:

It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe (“I’m outraged more by the outrage”) have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see.

Hitchens has been a shameless apologist for the war, so if he’s throwing out warnings like this, the evidence must be both truly awful and just about to hit the airwaves.

I’d advise not reading his full article, though, unless you’d like too much information about Hitchens’ idle daydreams involving Osama bin Laden and pigs. (He does make a worthwhile point, though, about torture being a worthless interrogation technique, as demonstrated by the British experience with Irish Republican Army terrorists. Just, uh, skip over the Osama part.)