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The US, torture and the waterboarding issue...and then, there's Dick Cheney
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Something extraordinary happened today, and it was caught on tape. A conservative talk show host, Erich "Mancow " Muller of Chicago's Big 89, WLS-AM Mancow & Cassidy show, put his money where his mouth was (literally) and agreed to be waterboarded in order to prove that the procedure does not constitute torture. He is the first conservative to show the testicular fortitude to undergo waterboarding; this is said in light of the fact that Sean Hannity, a FOX News mouthpiece, indicated that he would undergo waterboarding for charity and still has to show up; additionally, the ever ubiquitous Dick Cheney continues to talk about the effectiveness of waterboarding in extracting 'valuable' information from detainees, and his daughter, whose only claim to fame are her genes, positively declared today on TV that waterboarding was not torture, and that the prosecution of those who engaged in the practice resulted from 'other things they had done' to prisoners.
I am not familiar with this man, as I deliberately avoid the chatter of conservatives and their ilk, as all arguments pay no attention whatsoever to facts. Cheney is testimony in chief of this paradigm. However, I caught the segment on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann this evening, and Muller had several advantages over the prisoners that were waterboarded:
1. He knew he was not in mortal danger
2. He also knew that he could have it stopped when and if he 'freaked'
3. He knew with certainty this would not happen to him again
4. Muller was able to communicate in English with his make-believe torturers, who were on his side, obviously.
We were told as you will hear in the video that the average time of endurance is 14 seconds before the victim feels impending death. After 6 seconds, Muller sits up in a violent upright move and is gasping. He admits that he doesn't want to say this, but he does: not only is this torture, it is drowning.
But Cheney and his ilk know better. Do we get to invite him for a make believe session? Or is he already dead?
So you see, the issue is not what Nancy Pelosi knew, when she knew it, if she remembered it, if the CIA lied or did not lie, what Newt Gingrich's views are on the whole matter. The issue is that Dick Cheney manipulated the law to get rules written to enable waterboarding and declare it legal. The issue is that there were several people in high places engaged in creating, or trying to create links between 9/11 and Iraq, and for lack of such evidence, Cheney was determined to torture people in the hope of eliciting this type of avowal. Why? To justify attacking Iraq. And the man is still in denial, and proud of it.
But the serious problems are not what the Republicans are babbling about these days; the problems which are surfacing are that with the closure of Guantanamo, and its black mark against the United States, is that President Obama wants to exercise 'preventive imprisonment'. That's a whole 'nother thing and it's illegal.
more on the subject:
Al Jazeera video: Former Abu Ghraib commander on torture
Dick Cheney interview: asking the fox to guard the chicken coop
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