This is hilarious. Idiotic nutjob radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller agreed to be waterboarded live on his radio show because he wanted to prove it isn’t torture. The tough-guy lasted seven seconds.
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.’ “
Paging Sean Hannity, you’re next!!
Maybe these guys can test that bamboo shoots in the fingernails thing, too. I bet it really doesn’t hurt.
First they deny it’s torture, then maybe it is torture, but they’re terrorists and we have to do everything we can to save American lives. They justify everything. It would be more interesting if they made him say something absolutely untrue to make the waterboarding stop.
yeah, like “I’ve got talent.”
what’s even worse? waterboarding is just the beginning of the horrors unleashed under faux legal justification.
monsters.
vhannity’ll never do it…he doesn’t have the stones.anyway, how many assholes have to go thru it until they’re convinced, as christopher hitchen’s wrote in vanity fair back in aug 2008:
the dream scenario would be for one of these blowhards to be extraordinarily rendered by a group of masked strangers, bound, gagged, transported to a very inhospitable location and given the entire enhanced interrogation procedures for a couple weeks…you know, the belly slaps, wall bangings, sleep depravation, chained to the ceiling, the whole nine yards…then we’d see how they really feel about it.
never happen…but there’re more than a few that deserve it.
well they could go through the whole SERE program.
wouldn’t have the same effect. there’s an inherent sense of terror when you’re “kidnapped” and abused that isn’t possible to duplicate in controlled circumstances.
that’s part of what makes it so horrific, especially for an innocent victim, imo.
I agree. But it would be a better test than seven seconds of waterboarding.
i myself have wondered why this hasn’t yet happened.
and then the photographs could be released!
Yeah, it’s just like fraternity pranks, hazing. It’s tough, but they’re all tough guys, right?
Now if he endured it for only an additional 182 times, he’d have that true Gitmo experience.
sorry, this might be OT, but how does this dude pronounce his name? I ask, coz ‘Manko’ (long-‘o’) is Japanese slang for female genitalia.
If that is his name’s pronunciation, he probably has his Japanese-fluent audience in stitches just over his name….
Whadda pussy….. couldn’t handle his water. Hannity says he can do better 😉
He pronounces it like man cow.
Well, there’s a modicum of hope for this guy; at least he want through it if only for a few seconds. Now if we can sign up Russ, Sean, Anne, Dick, Karl, Newt, George the clown etc etc, we can start the education process for these republican stalwarts. I can dream can’t I?
I wouldn’t call Muller exactly an idiotic nutjob, at least not compared with Beck, Hannity, Cheney, Orally et al. He’s more of your dime-a-dozen “real man” “common sense” poser who pretends to be a maverick but in fact just parrots the current line of the “tough” media. A petty opportunist, basically, sort of like Notjoe the Notplumber but less damaging. I’m surprised he’s known of on the East Coast — or did you just hear him on the Net?
Anyway, as already said above, even if he had lasted some length of time that would do credit to his testosterone level, the test would be absolutely meaningless. Victims of the US don’t have teddy bears to tell the torturers to stop, and have no reason to believe they will stop short of death. What Muller went through is the equivalent of camping in a national park for a week to prove that homeless people are just whiners who should just learn to tough it out.
One of these days one of these posers will “pass” their fake little test and give the pro-torture crowd the excuse they need to continue their lies. Stunts like this should be banned unless they’re conducted in a place like Iran or Burma or Colombia or Texas by unknown torturers and no teddy bears or friendly doctors or lawyers or cops standing by. Even the training practice the military uses doesn’t even begin to cut it.
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Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured. Our own missteps have created a cadre of highly experienced lecturers for Al Qaeda’s own virtual sere school for terrorists.
A video of Hitchens's waterboarding experienceI have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. 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.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."There was a special about incarceration and torture on Sundance a few years ago. Several of the men who supported torture changed their minds quickly.
One man was even treated medically because his heart couldn’t stand the strain of his treatment.
Where is Dick today?
Absolutely it’s torture.
I admire Mancow for actually having the guts to be waterboarded. Time for Hannity, Kilmeade, O’Reilly and the others to have the balls to put their money where there mouths are. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
I admire him much more for admitting, after experiencing it, that it is torture.
never saw water boarding before..so the new Mancowism “its absolutely torture” Actually, I think this will help a little that water boarding is torture.