OLBERMANN: Sean, my offer still stands, 1,000 dollars a second. This is not a stunt nor game. Prove to those families you are a man of your word. In fact, prove you are a man.
For that kind of money, I could hang in there for a while……or barring that, how do I contribute?
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Who cares?!? Hannity and Olberman are equivalent polarized morons. The fact is, if you watched TDS last week, it was presented that only 3 high-ranking AlQueda officials got waterboarded. Granted I think its torture, buts its done and won’t be done again. lets move along and not give any more of our time to such blowhards as hannity and olberman
#37 Mr Fusion
Why I can appreciate your still being pissed at the last administration they are no longer in power.
Although I can’t say it wouldn’t be a bad idea to only those who had gone through it to order it to be done to someone else……..
#13 and #40 Alfred1 says he bets Hannity will take up Olbermann’s offer.
I’ll take that bet. I have, right here in my hand, one shiny not-so-new Bicentennial United States quarter dollar that says he won’t by the end of this month (May 2009).
it works while not being torture. …according to Bush-era Republicans and nobody else on the planet.
Repeating spin over and over doesn’t make it true.
If he’s being waterboarded there needs to be some information he doesn’t want to pass on.
How about his bank account and password details? If he holds out for an hour he can keep his money.
Even if he gets waterboarded, I’m not impressed.
Waterboarding is just part of the interrogation through torture process. If Hannity wants to prove ANYTHING, he needs to do something like this:
a) Be told that in order for the process to stop, he must admit to something really gruesome, something like that he likes performing oral sex on little boys and then killing them.
b) Be stripped naked, with a sack over his head, and placed in a cold room for 24 hours with no food and water.
c) Not be allowed to sleep for at least 48 hours before being waterboarded.
d) Every once in a while, someone comes over, and while he is still blindfolded, he is repeatedly ‘face slapped’.
e) Be made to stand for a minimum of 12 hours, with his hands tied behind his back, his wrists held by a rope tied to the ceiling.
f) Finally be waterboarded repeatedly, a minimum of 10 times.
None of the above things are considered torture.
If he does not confess at the end of that process, then torture has not taken place. Olbermann then pays up.
#45. I like it.
This needs to become a movement, taking donations via PayPal! All of the talking heads who have claimed that waterboarding isn’t torture need to be offered the “get WBed for charity” offer. I’ll donate $100.
Let’s not sugar coat things here. The purpose of the military is to kill and destroy. Politicians spin things in all sorts of ways. And when the mere threat of us killing or destroying is present, then we are “peace keepers”. Whatever your motives, don’t cripple the military because of your partisan bickering. Cripple the way in which Congress can declare a war and /or ammend the War Powers Act.
Good grief. If not waterboarding then what can our military use? Sleep deprivation? Nah, you guys will rule that out as torture as well (implying it’s somehow equivalent to decapitation or physical mutilation).
Does anyone have a method which will break the will of a POW or make them afraid of dying?
Oh I know! Let’s all just ask POWs nicely. And if they refuse to tell us, then oh well.
There is HUGE difference between scaring the begeezus out of someone and actually physically mutilating them or decapitating them.
Rather than turn this in to a partisan griping match, why don’t you libs propose a more effective alternative?
hey as long as the charity is me, I’ll go in for $850 a second. What a bargain!!
#41, Mr. Diesel,
I understand your wish to move on, but there is a messy piece of our history that need to be fixed. In our name, Bush authorized torture of prisoners. A majority of people in this country, and indeed the world, believe this is wrong.
I do not advocate the use of torture to punish the former Administration. That would be just as wrong as what they did. The irony though is that their justification that this is not torture is as good an excuse to use it on them to elicit information as anything.
But, still, my comment was tongue in cheek and I doubt anyone would be water boarded publicly, even in jest.
#48 Guyver
By using the term POW you are of the mind set that this is a war I’d disagree these are criminals more like gang thugs difference being they use a twisted interpretation a religion to recruit and indoctrinate.
Still in your use of the term POW lies your answer for us to keep the moral high ground (and that’s what Truth Justice and the American Way are all about, damn Bush/Cheney did more damage to this country than any airplane) we would be best served by treating these detainees with in the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention/Third_Geneva_Convention]. Anything less only hurts the US in the long run.
If WE don’t stand up for our own ideals and principles when the going gets tough, what are we fighting for?
Yes I know these thugs didn’t sign on to the Geneva Conventions agreements and represent no particular state and wear no uniform but still for the more important goal of our status as a nation that stands up for what is right this would be our best path.
#48 Actually, asking POWs nicely is exactly what has worked in the past. There was even an article recently about American soldiers who interrogated Germans secretly during WWII, and they didn’t use any torture.
#39 and #41, right on! We’re going to show America that torture will not be tolerated! And the way we’re going to show it is… by letting the torturers go free! Yeah, that’ll show’em!
#48 Guyver –
You are missing the point… the point being that Hannity would probably confess to ANYTHING after just a couple of days of that treatment. Truth and torture do not go together.
Should torture be available as a tool. Yes… but only in the most extreme case. It should be truly an exceptional tool, not just a part of the imprisonment process, as it became during the Cheney administration.
Some ignorant person mentioned above that waterboarding has only been used on three people… ignoring the fact that a couple dozen people have been outright killed by torture during interrogation. And there is no evidence that any actionable intelligence has come from any of those deaths or torture…. the two memos that Cheney wants discussed are basically ‘cover your ass’ memos written after the poop hit the fan and the investigations into the actions of the Cheney administration had already started; they were not created to show that the process was working, but as an attempt to justify actions after the fact.
51: POW is a technical term used within the military. You can use the term “enemy combatants” if it makes you feel better. That being said if you want to get knit picky, Vietnam was never technically a war but no one seems to care when POW gets mentioned there either.
52: Like it or not, the military has a need to extract information from POWs (or enemy combatants if you prefer).
Don’t kid yourself into believing that asking nicely will get any positive results. Are you THAT naive?
Even if whatever you’re citing is remotely true about Germans & WWII, do you honestly believe that’s the norm or the exception? More than likely, many people who “cooperated” probably did so because not cooperating either resulted in death (which we don’t do nowadays when interrogating) or we are granting political amnesty because the person in custody has very valuable information that would advance U.S. knowledge (i.e. rockets / biological warfare).
Since we’re not going to execute anyone or grant amnesty, what exactly would be the reason for a POW to cooperate?
53, The point I’m making is waterboarding is a NECESSARY tool for the military in extracting information from POWs. People chosen for waterboarding are not done so indiscriminately. So trying to say you can’t get truth from the process is an argument out of ignorance when the people being waterboarded have been singled out to have valuable information to confirm or embellish on currently known information.
Leave water boarding up to the military experts and not the politicians or mass media. If waterboarding was not effective, it would have been abandoned a long time ago by the military. It’s been around for as long as it has because it is very effective in producing results. Does it make some liberal go to bed at night and break out in cold sweats as they have nightmares about it? Probably so. Either way, I’m all ears to know what the better solution to waterboarding is.
People are making a big deal out of this waterboarding mostly because of who was in office. This has been going on for a while now and to do away with it without an effective replacement is utterly silly and naive.
I love words and their definitions. Some many gradations of meaning are possible.
Reading Alfie at #40 put me in mind of this as did the contribution of “context” by Reality Check at #45.
Before waterboarding became an issue, I always thought of torture as causing great physical pain often resulting in permanent body damage. I don’t think anybody says waterboarding does that, so why is it torture? I’m thinking, with no basis to do so, that “torture” got confused with “behavior in violation of the Geneva Convention for War Prisoners.”
The notion here is that by and large, draftees fighting in a declared war for their countries are not “bad” people. Just ordinary Joe’s doing their legal duties and as such they should be treated humanely when they are no longer fighting. Anything not humane was easily called “torture.”
Bush’s lawyers could easily have been bought and paid for. It would be based on the quality of their briefs, the history of the practice, the review of arguments making waterboarding torture and why they didn’t apply. STill a close call==depending on what you think torture is and when it should or shouldn’t apply.
Two difficult concepts rarely formally considered: Definition and Context.
EDITOR
BTW, its been long enough not to have the right side bar back up and running.
Somebody should be given a dirty look if not more.
[Please elaborate, I don’t follow – ed.]
#54 There’s been a lot written about torture and other interrogation methods lately. Most people who do interrogation professionally don’t like torture.
What ever happened to the vaunted conservative belief of getting the government off our backs? One terrorist attack, and the “conservatives” run crying to Big Brother — spy on us, torture us, do whatever you want to us, but save us from that big bad terrorist boogieman! Boo hoo!
What a bunch of wimps.
#55 The point I’m making is waterboarding is a NECESSARY tool for the military in extracting information from POWs.
I call bullsh*t on this one. Give us proof that military interrogators have called waterboarding a NECESSARY tool. And since when? We have prosecuted people who have done it in the past.
Did anyone read (or did I see it on TV?) the story about the guy who spent time with Saddam H before he was executed? Saddam spilled the beans almost completely. All the guy did was ‘make friends’ while Saddam’s captors played games with his sleep schedule.
#54
Guyver said,
51: POW is a technical term used within the military. You can use the term “enemy combatants” if it makes you feel better. That being said if you want to get knit picky, Vietnam was never technically a war but no one seems to care when POW gets mentioned there either.
I’d be one of who doesn’t care if POW gets mentioned referring to Vietnam(a conflict I was against then, said so then and history has proven me right) I’d still say our best guidelines for Vietnam then and with these… enemy combatant detainees/POWs lets check with Orwell for a name… what ever you call them, they are our prisoners and out of the fight, is to follow the Geneva Conventions. any thing less only weakens us.
What would you rather be subjected to: a couple minutes of torturous waterboarding, or the rest of your lifetime with a war disability? What a joke that anyone would even think to bring up the suffering a war amp goes through. Because it’s just not political enough.
But then I’m of the mind that US soldiers should all be dressed in bright red coats because it simply is the old-fashioned concept of what is fair, honourable and civilized. Like those against waterboarding.
RBG
HEY! “my father served in WWII I can say what ever I want”
Anybody here who’s jumped in to defend Sean Hannity is a bigger pussy than Hannity himself.
Get a grip. He said what he said, he’s be happy to be water-boarded for charity.
He needs to put his fat ass where his mouth is and just do it.
#54, Guyver,
POW is a technical term used within the military. You can use the term “enemy combatants” if it makes you feel better.
Not quite. Prisoner of War is used to refer to any combatant captured on the battlefield. That means they are covered under the Geneva Conventions.
If they are not POWs then they are CRIMINAL prisoners. Under American law they have the right to a criminal trial. American law enforcement has been convicted for torture because they elicited confessions of their prisoners through water boarding.
So either way you cut it, water boarding is torture and illegal.
Bobbo,
The pursuit of meanings of words can be a delightful hobby. That is why I use a dictionary so often.
torture
Verb
[-turing, -tured]
1. to cause (someone) extreme physical pain, esp. to extract information, etc.: suspects were regularly tortured and murdered by the secret police
2. to cause (someone) mental anguish
Noun
1. physical or mental anguish
2. the practice of torturing a person
3. something which causes great mental distress: she was going through the torture of a collapsing marriage
Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2004, 2006
It has been well established that causing extreme mental anguish or distress is torture.