Radosh.net

Word.

Torture depends on the victim actually believing that his captor is adversarial in the extreme, i.e. willing to inflict serious injury or death. Only when this condition is met is the victim filled with the requisite panic.

To the average person, simply being detained by the Force of the State is all that's necessary to instill fear sufficient to envoke a confession, genuine or not. Ask any street kid who's been interrogated by David Cohen's NYPD permanent regime thugs. Ask any man with suspect facial hair drugged and interrogated by David Cohen's mengeles at Bellevue "Psychiatric Hospital."

Chickenhawk Hannity acting out a rehearsed charade with CIA/Pentagon propaganda officers while surrounded by his staff, camera crew, personal physician and EMTs is beyond an obvious joke.

Olberman is a monotonious publc scold preaching the obvious to the choir. The man couldn't even question why two Skull and Bones billionaire fraternity brothers ran "against" each other for president in 2004.

Correction: "Olbermann."

Ann Coulter? Noooo, No! Do not want. Not even in some strange, twisted, dream. However, the thought of Coulter and Michelle Bachmann, dressed in burkhas, while wrestling in a tub of warm Kosher chocolate does have some appeal. Maybe Olbermann could set that up. Just to raise money for charity of course.

Ann Coulter is what, like 50? Menopause is so hot (flash).

I'm not sure this is the case: "If you truly believe waterboarding is torture, and you are not evil, than you would not subject another human being to it, even Sean Hannity." Partially because of this: "waterboarding a volunteer definitionally is not [torture]."

"Waterboarding" is not torture. Waterboarding is a thing. Torture is a process with many components, one of which may be waterboarding and one of which cannot be volunteerism. Our _use_ of waterboarding on suspects is certainly unjustified torture but the thing in and of itself is just a thing. You are right that Hannity volunteering for waterboarding proves nothing if he is not afraid but you are not, I think, right that wanting to see him so discommoded is necessarily inconsistent with the belief that our use of waterboarding is astonishingly wrong. It just doesn't follow. I wouldn't want him waterboarded by our security forces to find out what he knows about 9-11 (counterproductive) but what he and Olbermann do to eachother in their own time is no concern of mine.

He's serious, but he's added some qualification. See: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/24/724023/-Hannity:-My-Money-Where-Your-Mouth-Is-(Update)

"If you truly believe waterboarding is torture, and you are not evil, than you would not subject another human being to it, even Sean Hannity."

I believe waterboarding is torture, and I would happily subject Dick Cheney to it. Does that make me evil?

But I'd also be fine with Hannity being waterboarded in this volunteer scenario. Would it prove anything? Not to me. But it would force Hannity -- and more importantly, Hannity's viewers -- to confront and consider, if only for a few moments, the horrific reality of what they'd been all too willing to endorse and trivialize. And for that, the world would be a marginally better and more honest place. Also it would be totally hilarious, because fuck Sean Hannity.

"Even so, there are probably some people who think it might be worth torturing Hannity just a little in order to win the debate over the unacceptability of torture. That's a difficult position to hold for someone who's trying to argue that the slightly more important result of potentially stopping a terrorist attack is not worth committing torture."

You think stopping a terrorist attack is more important than winning an argument? Try telling that to my wife!!! If I had a wife.

That aside, I don't think it's such a contradictory stance, because as you point out, there's a big difference between actual torture and this hypothetical simulation.

The CoulterRape comparison doesn't really work, because volunteering for rape makes it by definition not rape. Volunteering for torture doesn't negate the physical experience of the torture, just the context. Subtract the psychological component from rape and it's just sex.

@TG. You're partly right, of course. You used my logic -- how could you not be! But your A/B scenario (where A is you're not evil because B, voluntary wb'ing is not torture) A is only true if you accept with B, and KO doesn't seem to. Hence his request that after SH undergoes the treatment he must admit that it *was* torture.

After watching this guy get waterboarded, I have a totally unethical scenario that might get Hannity to genuinely believe and admit that wb'ing is torture. After he pulls the deadman's switch... keep pouring the water for two more seconds.

Exactly. Those two seconds (a minute would be between)when he's not in control of the situation would give him a better of clearer idea what torture is really like. I expect the lesson would still be lost on Hannity, though.

keep pouring the water for two more seconds

Alas, that wouldn't be unethical, it would be criminal assault. No means no. And on that note...

offering $1000 a second for someone to rape Ann Coulter

$1000 a second to have consensual sex with Ann Coulter doesn't make it not torture. And it isn't every day that I turn down a cool 14 grand.

Evoke + invoke = envoke apparently, in the jet lagged state in which I wrote my initial screed. Indulgences begged.

"Torture depends on the victim actually believing that his captor is adversarial in the extreme."

"Waterboarding a volunteer definitionally is not [torture]."

"'Waterboarding' is not torture. Waterboarding is a thing."

These statements are all academic at best, and inhumane at worst. Nothing, not consent, not the victim's estimation of his captors' state of mind, nor the duration of time negates that this is a technique designed to maximize human suffering. The technique exploits a primal fear that can be resisted with training, but can not be shut off, no matter what the individual's relative "toughness" or "bravery" or anything else. The pain and terror are inflicted, and any attempt to apply semantic distinctions is irrelevant.

Having said that, I have a lovely mental image of Ann Coulter being strapped down bra-less, having water dripped on her boobs until she confesses. But no one tells her what she has to confess to first. But this is just a sexual fantasy.

"These statements are all academic at best, and inhumane at worst."

How so?

TA: I am personally torn between a commitment to the inalienable moral neutrality of things (because they cannot act) and the strong feeling that beautiful and ugly (which can be instantiated in things) are themselves moral categories. The horror of waterboarding is not irrelevant but I'm not sure it is the only thing.

DR: I'm willing to concede the point on the grounds that I am not willing to speculate further on KO's brainstates. Whether or not he's being evil he's sure being foolish.

It is absurd to equate an exhibition of waterboarding with the real thing. Anyone imagining that torture can take place when perpetrator and victim are collegiate collaborators has obviously never been detained by Police State Regime thugs, nor been held by the ankles out a second story window by a big brother. Play with your homies no matter how dangerous is still play. State Force even without an immediate physical threat always holds the possiblity of serious injury or death at the hands of goons "following orders," i.e., completely dehumanizing their victims.

Let Hannity transform himself into a 15-year-black kid thrown into Ryker's for a few weeks after being falsely arrested, while his corrupt contingency fee lawyer collaborates with the Corporation Counsel on a miniscule settlement. New York City pays pennies for its assumed right to this workaday trampling of the Fourth Amendment.

(Local mundane atrocity is not as sexy as the BIG STORY happening far away, I know.)

Correction: "15-year-old" of course.

I object to the nasty remarks about Coulter. She is a human being, for crying out loud.

AND FURTHERMORE ...

... Sean Hannity reportedly is paid $40 million per annum, divided by say 250 working days would come out to $160,000 per diem.

So, a rehearsed exhibition of a torture technique, presented in collaboration with colleagues, staff and medical personnel, for which one is paid $160,000 is pretty much the same as the real thing, right?

By the way, for those who missed it, the Red Cross reported last month how doctors and psychologists were employed to monitor vital signs during torture sessions and to continually advise their CIA Death Squad Masters how much further their victim could be abused. Medieval meets high tech.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090407/wl_nm/us_usa_torture_redcross

Abe:

You're right, Ann Coulter is worthy of our respect. Her enormous dick alone should have us all on our knees. It's just this way she has of demonizing Palestinians and Muslims in general. Julius Streicher did the same thing to Jews in Nazi Germany and was hung at Nuremberg. (I call an exception to Godwin's Law, insofar as hundreds of thousands of human beings have been maimed, tortured and killed by the Pentagon and CIA while Coulter and her bloodthirsty ilk continue to dehumanize the victims. No hyperbole in my comparison, hence, Hitler, thread _not_ over.)

"So Olbermann wants to use waterboarding to get Hannity to say something he knows to be true but would not otherwise admit. In other words, Olbermann intends to prove that torture works."

This would not prove that torture works, unless you admit that the true purpose of torture is not to gather actual, reliable intelligence, but to force the victim to say whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear.

"This would not prove that torture works, unless you admit that the true purpose of torture is not to gather actual, reliable intelligence, but to force the victim to say whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear."

I might admit that, but you'd have to waterboard it out of me.

Sean Hannity can't read. From the Convention Against Torture: "the term 'torture' means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession . . . ." No sane person can deny that waterboarding inflicts severe mental suffering, at the very least.

I really wish these arguments would use the actual words of the conventions we've signed, rather than trying to create new definitions. They'd be much shorter arguments.

And I agree with your basic stance that Olbermann is not helping. The real reason we torture is because we want to hurt people we don't like. That's why we need laws to keep us from doing that, and reminders that hurting people we don't like is not an admirable trait.

Yes, by all means let's confine all comments pertaining to human suffering to a strict reading of legal documents composed and promulgated by The State that is the perpetrator of these crimes against humanity. Let us rule out any context, any anecdotes, any information at all as to actual oversight, investigation or enforcement. Please no florid prose evoking a sense of what the victims experience.

And above all, don't ask why the agency overseeing the torture, the CIA, still exists. The CIA, which JFK declared he would "splinter into a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds" before his head was blown off in broad daylight by trained assassins while the world looked on. The CIA whose documented crimes range from regime toppling, narcotic trafficking, torture torture torture, secret operations against the US public, and, oh yes, murder. The CIA, which for many years was headed by Bush Sr.

The CIA is never investigated. No CIA officer is ever indicted.

"The government doesn't investigate itself." -- George Carlin

@JD, re-read my post. It's not that I disagree with your concept; it's that I don't give a shit. The semantics of how the word, or thing, or concept of "waterboarding" intersects with the word, or thing, or concept, of "torture" are a distraction at best.

I get that you're saying that Hannity's consensual experience cannot equate to the full horror of being involuntarily interrogated; I'd agree with that. But watch the Hitchens or Mike Guy video (I'm sure you have): It's still extreme suffering. But supporting the meme that "waterboarding" is sometimes "not torture" is going to have the opposite effect of the one you intend. Your distinction is subtle, academic, and counterproductive.

@ others, My comment about Coulter was meant to defuse a discussion that had become heated (partially because of what I wrote) and reduce the tone back to absurdity. It was ill-conceived and executed, and I apologize and retract it. (Although I maintain she's one of the most despicable American public political figures of our lifetimes, even if you accept the thesis that her whole act is performance art).

T.A.:

Consent, consent, consent. Many medical treatments are painful, scary and risky, but we consent and submit because we trust the skill and intentions of the doctor. Take away the consent element -- be abducted, restrained and operated upon by persons unknown intent on inflicting pain and fear -- and you would have something else altogether. Torture.

Sean Hannity getting paid his daily $160,000 to act out a charade with his cohorts and employees cannot be torture by any stretch.

Oh, BTW, my interpretation of your post has nothing to do with not reading it (perhaps that cliche internet pendantry can be retired after we get rid of the tedious tween petulance "um" thing). When someone disagrees with me I assume it's because they disagree with me. You apparently think when someone disagrees with you it can only be because they have not heard your opinion, for if they had they would certainly hail its unassailable brilliance.

^Um, above comment mine. If you don't agree I'll know you haven't read it.

wow, i was kidding about Coulter. I had an earlier post that I can't find that would clarify matters...