While getting heckled by Charles Grodin last week, torture apologist Sean Hannity offered to be waterboarded for charity; Keith Olbermann called Hannity's bluff and pledged to donate $1000 per second if Hannity actually has the stones to do it:
"For every second you last, a thousand dollars -- live or on tape, provided other networks' cameras are there. A thousand dollars a second, Sean, because this is no game. This is serious stuff. Put your money where your mouth is, and your nose. Oh, and I'll double it when you admit you feared for your life, when you admit the horrible truth -- waterboarding, the symbol of the last administration, is torture."
Christopher Hitchens wrote last year about the experience of being waterboarded, and concluded "Believe Me, It's Torture."
You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning--or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure.[...]
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
I give Hitchens full credit for his investigatory zeal and journalistic credibility; the possibility of Hannity exhibiting either seems quite remote.
Nothing’s changed; they just need to learn that the “rule of law” applies to them. Given their penchant for lying about everything that they can’t hide, they can’t be trusted unless it’s on the witness stand while under oath—and probably not even then.
Thanks for the comment—and the compliment.
I just heard Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri give the spiel that waterboarding is legit because we do it to our own people for training purposes and that it provided useful information that supposedly helped avert a 9/11 style attack on LA. His first point does not negate the fact that it is still torture. The second statement about the information obtained is highly suspect given the source. We're just supposed to take their word for it?
We have justifiably prosecuted this activity as a form of torture in the past. What's changed?
Great blog.