On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 10:11 AM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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