[lbo-talk] Right-Wing Radio Host Gets Waterboarded, and Lasts Six Seconds Before Saying It's Torture

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Sat May 23 08:11:35 PDT 2009


Michael Pollak wrote:


> [This story made me shamefully gleeful. Nothing like evil, arrogant
> othering stupidity being hoist by its own petard.]
>
> http://www.alternet.org/story/140205/
>
> Posted on May 22, 2009
> From Raw Story
>
> Right-Wing Radio Host Gets Waterboarded, and Lasts Six Seconds Before
> Saying
> It's Torture

I don't get this. Why did this guy think CIA interrogators used this technique in the first place? If it didn't inflict intolerable suffering, what would be the point?

Assuming the radio host went into this stunt with the motives he claims (and wasn't, say, trying to find some dramatic, show-biz way of changing his position on torture), to me it shows a typically American style of brutalism. Do you think French right-wingers in the 50's, when they denounced leftists for criticizing torture in Algeria, tried to make the argument that it didn't really hurt?

The last time I was in France I was talking to a guy who likes movies and he was marveling over Hollywood films where (he said) at the end of the movie, the bad guy has been taken down and he's on the ground, injured but not dead. Then, at the last minute, from his prone position, he tries to take one last shot at the hero, which authorizes the hero to finally finish off the bad guy, even though it means shooting an injured man who's down. So a moral justification is always needed - but one will always be furnished.

SA



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