Changing the Debate about 'Enhanced Interrogation'

Conservative Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens underwent waterboarding and concluded it constitutes torture. Independent former Governor Jesse Ventura underwent waterboarding on says it is torture. Third time's the charm. So a conservative radio host underwent waterboarding and guess what?

Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture | NBC Chicago

'I want to find out if it's torture,' Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.

This time we get video of the event! Hooray! Televised torture in the United States.

In the first video we see Mancow undergoing the 'enhanced interrogation technique'. I have to admit that watching it be done, it doesn't look so horrible. Lots of people have water dumped on them or get dunked in water. It looks fairly benign.

They talk to him after the fact. He tells of how as a child his brother pushed him into a pool and he drowned, having to be revived be EMTs. So the guy knows what drowning is. He says waterboarding IS drowning, and it is torture.

That should be that. Anyone who has been waterboarded will tell you that it is torture. The three examples given above were all waterboarded in the nicest possible way. Each of them had safety mechanisms in place that could end the procedure if they couldn't handle it, a luxury you can bet the inmates at Gitmo would have liked. Mancow could stop the torture anytime he wanted by simply letting go of a plastic toy he held in his hand. He knew there was a way to stop it and still called it torture. Some would argue that the detainees also had a way to stop the torture.

"Just tell us what you know and it will end."

"I don't know anything."

"Do it again."

"I meant to say that Bill Clinton and a vast left wing conspiracy have been funding al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden has been staying in their guest house."

Since waterboarding is the flagship of the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the United States government, and waterboarding is torture, we now can say conclusively that the United States tortured detainees. Enhanced interrogation is just a nicer way of saying it. Just like 'enhanced rectal cavity expansion technique' is a nicer way of saying 'ass raped with a baseball bat'.

Our nation tortured people. Folks can dance around that word all they want but we now know well beyond a reasonable doubt that the United States tortured people. People want to believe that all of those inmates were somehow guilty of some unnamed crime and deserved it. Without any sort of trial, without the benefit of presumed innocence that this nation's founding fathers thought was so important that they included it in one of our most important founding documents, with no way of knowing if they were actually terrorists or just citizen soldiers defending the country of their birth, the United States took it upon themselves to torture these people to find out the 'truth'. Knowing that this occurred, the only question left is if people are okay with that.

And some people are. Those people are about as un-American as they come. They hate America and are jealous of its freedoms. Those people are the children of immigrants and they hate immigrants. They are the children of people who escaped religious persecution and they can't tolerate other people's religions. They are the children of people who wanted the right to voice their opinions and they want dissenting voices to shut the hell up. They are hypocritical steaming piles of shit wrapped up in American flag t-shirts and hiding behind 'United We Stand' bumper stickers. They have wiped their assholes with the Constitution and called it an act of patriotism. And their representatives, the politicians, especially the ones who knew we were doing this long before the public did, are even worse.