Conservative radio hosts gets waterboarded, and lasts six seconds before saying its torture
Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided he'd get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn't torture.
It didn't turn out that way. "Mancow," in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul. Apparently, the experience went pretty badly -- "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," according to NBC Chicago.
"The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay South told his audience before he was waterboarded on air. "He's going to wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this."
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Mancow was set on a 7-foot long table with his legs elevated and his feet tied.
"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.' "
The upshot? "It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke," Mancow told listeners. "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."
"Absolutely. I mean that's drowning," he added later. "It is the feeling of drowning."
"If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it," he said.
The 42-year-old radio host is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he was maligned for saying that then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was "vile," "bloodthirsty," "evil" and "should be kicked out of America."
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His Attorney General has not filed charges against anyone in the Bush administration. That makes his statements that torture is disallowed ring hollow. Also, his willingness to permit continued incarceration of prisoners with "tainted" evidence against them indicates a continued willingness to preside from above the law.
But Cheney's defensive comments, breathless, gruff, menacing, and unapologetic demonstrate just how deep the Bush administration's evil went.