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."
The wise guys on the radio that try to diminish the severity of this kind of stuff are making a sewer of our nation.
Couldn't have said it better. This guy even had the psychological benefits of friends, an EMT, a benevolent marine poring the water, an explanation, no other physical or psychological abuse going on, no threats, the knowledge he could stop at any moment...and he STILL could not take it. It is torture. He would have said ANYthing to make it stop if he were really undergoing all of the above...anything...regardless of its truthfulness...which is why torture accomplishes absolutely nothing.
I noticed that too. Mancow is serving as a willing agent of the establishment here, however. There may be more to this than meets the eye. But I get the more immediate message: we've done some terrible things, and we've drawn some history-changing conclusions based on a process that would make anyone say anything about any subject. And we had people who were willing to work for Dick Cheney directing the quest for answers.