…to blog about it till now but Jim Blazsik writes the definite word on the subject:
But in the end, whatever Mancow’s intent or conclusion – he actually proved that waterboarding ISN’T torture. Why? Think about it. Would Mancow submit himself to this procedure if there was any chance that his body would be permanently damaged? What if he knew that after the experience he would only have one eye, 8 fingers, his back beaten by bamboo, his toes smashed by a hammer, select parts of his body electrocuted, or punched repeatedly until his nose was fixed on a different part of his face?
Would Marine Sgt. Klay South waterboard Mancow if he knew he was going to hurt the guy? When the CIA used waterboarding (with only three terrorists), a doctor was always required to be present. If it is torture, where was the doctor?
Why wasn’t he arrested for “torturing” him?
We know the answer to all the questions above.
Yes we do don’t we.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 
Blazsik as the definitive word, what a laugh.
Shorter Jim Blazsik:
Mancow’s Waterboarding isn’t torture because
-Mancow has no permanent physical damage
-There was no doctor
-No one was arrested
US Government waterboarding isn’t torture because
-The US only did it to three people (on at least 191 occasions)
-We were scared
-The president’s lawyers told him it was okay
-Thousands of lives were saved
A few points:
-Permanent physical damage: Under Jim Blazsik’s requirement that torture requires permanent physical damage – raping a prisoner would be permissible. (i.e. Blazsik is a complete idiot)
-Absence of a doctor: If you actually watch the video you’ll hear them make reference to the EMT standing by Mancow’s feet. I’m sure Blazsik will say an EMT doesn’t equal a doctor but that discussion misses the point of why the medical expert is present at all. They’re not there to advise on how to waterboard, they are there to intervene in case the subject’s life is in danger.
Torture for information requires that the subject survives to provide the information. Medical staff being present only reduces the risk of death, it does not have any relevance on whether or not a given procedure is torture.
-Thousands of lives were saved
Only if you believe the lone assertion of Dick Cheney.
And there are some problems with that.
Like:
1) Mr. Cheney has a proven track record of saying things that are demonstrably false.
(“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” – 2002)
2) He is directly contradicted by people who have seen those same memos
and, best of all
3) Mr. Cheney has walked back from his assertion that waterboarding itself saved lives to a broader statement that the “detainee program, the interrogation program…not just waterboarding” saved lives.
Blazsik’s post is just a point of view looking for a safe place to hide.
Let’s address the question on the floor. Assuming this was not a hoax. If an action is torture does a shock jock willingly submit to it?
Does the radio station that sponsors him and the insurance company that covers them allow it to take place? Do the sponsors risk being involved? All these are very strong targets for a financially rewarding lawsuit.
Consider the litigious society that we live in. People put warnings everywhere to try to avoid liability, even the hill where children have slid for centuries in my town has been physically altered to prevent sledding due to fear of lawsuits and you think a major corporation is going to take a public risk on “torture”? That is unlikely in the extreme.
I will grant you the rape point and there over generalization of the the permanent physical damage. But Blazisk’s point still stands strong.
The Cheney is a liar business is frankly not relevant to the argument on if waterboarding is torture, that doesn’t make it less nonsense, nor is the no WMD canard relavent but lets address it anyway.
Even ignoring the tons of yellowcake that we removed from Iraq after the war I would remind or in this case inform you of the testimony of Col John Chu to congress on /29/06 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on WMD FOUND in Iraq.
The attempt to deny the effectiveness of the methods that successfully prevented attacks on the country is rather laughable. The decision to not release information is telling but yesterday’s news is even more so.
Note from the article how they are (legitimately ) attacked for revealing classified info but not for the inaccuracy of it.
History I believe is going to judge President Bush and Vice President Cheney very favorably. All of this is of course irrelevant to Blazsik’s actual argument but I’m very comfortable to allow the readers of the post and our respective comments to evaluate our arguments and come to their own conclusions.
Yes. Let’s assume it’s not a hoax. But since you’re implying it is – let’s talk about that.
Your question of why a shock jock willingly submits to waterboarding/torture is wrongheaded. If you watch the video, he makes it clear: Because he thought it wasn’t torture – that it was no big deal.
Six seconds of waterboarding later, he decided it was torture and (to his credit) said so. Just like former U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney GeneralDaviel Levin did. Just like Christopher Hitchens did.
All three of these guys shared the knee-jerk reaction to waterboarding that keeps making the rounds. Blazisk is just the latest guy pushing the meme. People who actually have undergone the procedure, who actually know what they are talking about – are very clear on what suffocating a person to coerce them into providing information is: Torture.
The lawsuit point is a curious tack to take. Assuming Mancow’s employers haven’t protected themselves from his actions – it’s not really clear what kind of exposure his employers have. Who would sue them, Mancow? Who else has standing to sue based on Mancow’s suffering?
I’m guessing a pain and suffering civil suit by a person who chose to be waterboarded wouldn’t go very far in court.
By Mancow’s own admission, they didn’t ask for permission and acted as if this was a stunt so they could get it to happen without his employers putting a stop to it. Given the amount of free publicity he’s getting, I predict his boss’s anger won’t last.
There may very well be legal implications, but the absence of prosecution has no bearing on what Mancow says about torture. You can use it to imply that the waterboarding isn’t genuine – but it’s an empty allegation. I suspect even if it was an ironclad violation of US Code the Feds are not going to be rushing to round up the Marine involved.
And while we’re talking about US Code – Blazisk’s point about permanent physical damage does NOT stand strong. US Code prohibits actions where the person
“specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;”
And what does that mean?
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
…
(C) the threat of imminent death;
So under US law, I don’t have to cause lasting physical damage in order to be classified as torture – I just have to make the subject believe they are under threat of imminent death.
You may not think that being denied air by your enemies falls under that definition – but I disagree.
I brought up Cheney is a big, fat liar angle because Blazisk did. He’s saying torture is okay because it saved thousands of lives. He’s repeating Cheney’s talking points almost verbatim. Even asking for the declassification of the same memos – and then implying that their not being released suggests his point of view is vindicated.
Which is, frankly crap. Cheney’s walking it back and this latest House flap is just more posturing. Read that Hill story again. Rep. Hoekstra says “I think the people who were at the hearing, in my opinion, clearly indicated that the enhanced interrogation techniques worked.”
-except Hoekstra wasn’t even at the hearing. He’s claims he spoke to people who were and that they told him so.
The other quote, from a Rep. who actually was at the hearing is much more guarded with his comments. He says they “addressed enhanced interrogation” in the hearing and later says “I came away with a very clear impression that we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots.” He doesn’t put those statements together although I’m sure he’d be only to happy to if he could.
You’re conceding that there is legitimate criticism of the Republican reps for releasing classified information – but you’re chastising the Dems for not attacking them on the inaccuracy of their statements?
Think about that.
If the Dems went on the record and said “Rep Kline is full of it. What we really talked about in the classified briefing was…” they’d be violating the law. This is how classified information can be used to manipulate the press. Rep. Hoekstra’s not in a position to know, so he cannot be accused of breaking the law when he asserts that something was or was not said at the briefing. The Rep. who could get into trouble offers a very closely parsed statement that (no doubt) has been crafted to avoid lawbreaking. Put these two statements together (as the Hill has helpfully done) and a person might come away with the impression that Hoekstra’s statement is based on the briefing (which it isn’t – unless Hoekstra’s admitting his colleagues broke the law), and that Rep. Kline said what Hoekstra said (which he did not).
Rep. Kline is only saying that:
-We talked about torture
and
-Plots were disrupted
Which meshes nicely with what Cheney is now retreating to – lives were saved as a result of our detention program – an assertion that is very different from “Waterboarding saves lives.”
Even if you granted the most favorable view on what House reps and Mr. Cheney are saying – you’d have to conceded that Blazisk is out on a limb when he says “thousands of lives were saved because of waterboarding three terrorists.” There is nothing in the public record that backs that up.
You may choose to believe that classified memos back up his assertion, but Cheney’s history of distortions and most recent walkback suggest otherwise.
This is the guy that leaked a story to Judith Miller about WMD and then referred to it in press interviews as corroborating his point of view. The idea that he would be above publicly pretending unreachable documents back him up doesn’t hold a lot of water.
WMD? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Those three articles you link to are your own undoing. They all come from the exact same AP story. You seem to think saying the same thing three times makes it so. Louis Carrol nonwithstanding, saying it thrice does not make it so.
The AP story loudly crows about 550 tons of yellowcake uranium being removed, before admitting that “yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material— it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast.” Even if you think a dirty bomb classifies as WMD (a minority view), this stuff wasn’t even potent enough to make a dirty bomb. It’s raw yellowcake. Meaning, somebody dug it out of the ground and not much else.
Better still, as the article points out – this yellowcake was dated from 1991 or earlier. Meaning, it’s been sitting in storage for a dozen years – odds are it’s leftover from the Osirik plant the Israelis blew up in ’81.
It’s twelve year old yellowcake uranium in storage. It is not WMD by any stretch of the term.
As the customers of A.Q. Kahn found out, there is a universe of difference between having uranium and being able to enrich it. Then there’s another universe between having enriched uranium and being able to build a nuclear device. I’ll grant that Saddam probably had dreams that this 550 tons of uranium would become a bomb one day, but that was about as dangerous as the little boy who finds a lump of iron ore and plans on forging an automatic pistol to shoot someone.
The testimony of Col John Chu is even funnier. Col. Chu is talking about 500 chemical “munitions” which is a lofty term for artillery shells. The article goes on to say these munitions dated from the 1980s and were so degraded that they could not be used as orginally intended.
Artillery shells. Ones that were twenty years old and could not be used to disperse chemical agents.
So, if I read the subtext there correctly – you’re suggesting that the United States went to war to protect itself from Iraq’s 550 tons of stored yellowcake and 500 degraded chemical rounds?
Somehow I don’t remember the war being sold that way – I recall repeated statements of “mushroom clouds” and imminent threats. “We know where the weapons are” quoth Sec. Rumsfeld. Rubbish – and your articles do nothing to rebut the conclusion the world formed shortly after Saddam’s statue hit the ground. There weren’t any WMD.
Tens of thousands of casualties, hundreds of billions of dollars and that’s what we were protecting ourselves from?
It’s perfectly fine to think that history will vindicate the Bush and Cheney policies of preventative war, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, imprisonment without conviction [or trial, or charges], and torture.
-but then, with public opinion so clearly opposed to all of those policy decisions, appealing to the judgment of an imaginary future is probably an appealing alternative.
I am actually not assuming that however as there was plenty of chatter along those lines (gawker vs Mancow). Since the article and my agreement of it depend on Mancow’s waterboarding being real it is only proper of me to mention the possibility that it was staged.
Personally as mine is a small blog such a long rebuttal would more properly be on a post on your own maybe crosslinked in comments but as you’ve written it here I’ll have a small response.
If you are seriously stating that a lawsuit would be rejected because people put themselves at risk of their own accord you haven’t been paying attention to society or the courts for the last three decades.
I have not maintained that waterboarding is not rough and nasty. If it was not rough and nasty then we wouldn’t bother training our own people to resist it. It is my opinion that it is not torture and if what Mancow went through was actual waterboarding then that would be evidence of same.
Chris Hitchens thinks otherwise and I very much respect him for going through it, but my argument here is based on liability. In Mr. Hitchens case there was no possibility of corporate liability so in terms of my argument it is not relevant. I will happily concede that Mr. Hitchens opinion would have more weight than mine in terms of the experience, In that same vein, in terms of the legalities the vice president and the Justice Department’s opinion would have more weight than yours.
I would point out that everything that follows is not germane to the actual waterboarding argument but is to answer topics raised during the discussion.
I decry the release of classified information because it is the release of classified information, I didn’t like it when the left used it as a tool to attack the previous administration nor do I approve of it here, but that doesn’t change what was said , particularly when you consider that Carl Levin said the previous week. To quote the much more popular blog than either of ours hotair:
By your standard the pentagon papers should have been totally ignored since they involved the release of classified material.
I would not be so fast in quoting public opinion, particularly since you have the PR worm turning on Gitmo but it’s not public opinion that will matter in the end it is results. If president Obama is as successful defending the the US post 9/11 as the Bush administration was then I will consider his term of office successful.
You build an interesting WMD strawman, particular with a selective memory of the causes of the war. I would refer you to reports here, here, here, here, here, here and here and the excellent book Disinformation by Richard Minter on the subject.
It is my personal opinion that this was a direct cause of Israel’s 2007 attack on Syria .
Either way I’ve spent way more time on this topic than I intended (as indicated by the actual post). If I had been interested enough to begin with I would have written something longer to begin with rather than quoting Blazsik. I am more than content to note spend more of a Saturday arguing this point and to let our respective arguments stand the scrutiny of the readers.
If you were to set aside Mancow, you still have to deal with the assessment of Levin and Hitchens that the procedure is torture.
You haven’t of course – you’ve merely implied that Mancow’s waterboarding might have been the grounds for litigation.
I’ll say it again: the absence of prosecution (or litigation) has no bearing on whether or not Mancow’s statements are genuine.
They could litigate a hoax, or they could refuse to litigate a genuine event.
My belief that Mancow would have little luck suing over being waterboarded is not to say he couldn’t sue – only that I think he’d lose.
The US Code lays out punishment for people who “under color of law” cause “severe mental pain or suffering…resulting from… the threat of imminent death.”
I haven’t heard a counterpoint as to why denying a prisoner air does not fall under that statute.
“The presidents lawyers told him it was okay” just doesn’t seem like the basis for ignoring the law. If the president wanted this power, he might have asked for it in the light of day – instead of asserting the right to ignore the law in secret.
Your belief that classified information should stay classified is laudable – but your point about the Pentagon Papers has nothing to do with my position.
You’d criticized the Democrats for not contradicting the statements of House Republicans – I merely pointed out that Democrats couldn’t make those criticisms without breaking the law.
You’re beating them up for keeping classified information secret – and criticizing them for not speaking up at the same time.
Ridiculous.
The Pentagon Papers: Nothing I said should suggest that a classified piece of information that somehow makes it into the public should be dismissed. What I said was, politicians are very good at manipulating the media using classified information.
Put another way: I’ll believe a leaked classified document over a politician’s statement any day of the week. Hoekstra and Kline are suggesting that secret memos back them up – but they don’t have the documents.
They want the documents, but it’s perfectly clear that those documents are tied up in FOIA litigation. If they’d clear up the dispute, I’d be happy to see them declassified. But listening the Mr. Cheney retreat from his defense of waterboarding speaks volumes about what he thinks will come out when those memos hit the light of day.
I only raised Cheney’s BS on WMDs because it shows that this man has a history of laying down a confident statement that has no basis in reality. The man doesn’t have the credibility to be taken at face value.
The WMD stuff: You wanna go down that hole, you pick a funny way of going after it.
Right out of the bag you went for yellowcake uranium and twenty year old chemical shells.
I pointed out that the very articles you cited demonstrated that neither was any kind of threat to the US. Haven’t heard any rebuttal on that point yet.
Now you’ve thrown down a tangle other tangents
-“they’re killing Iraqi Scientists!”
Please, the inference is that killing the scientists wil keep us from finding Iraq’s nuke program. Read Richard Rhodes book on the atomic bomb. A nuclear program is not something you hide in a garage. If Iraq had a nuclear program around the time of the second Iraq war – we’d have found it.
-“Melanie Phillips knows a guy who is “certain” he found the places where the WMDs were stored.
Oh fer-cryin’ out loud. If her guy had actually found something, Ms. Phillips would have something to crow about. He’s got a bunch of theories and no WMDs in hand. An empty room and a guy’s hunch mean nothing.
-“The WMD were moved to Syria!” or “They were moved to the Bekaa valley!”
This had better not be the best you can do. I have no doubt if these sites were seized and explored in detail- there would be new locations (the UK’s Independent ran with a story that Saddam had put his WMDs on ships and was keeping them at sea… what nonsense.)
Look, the Bush administration’s own guys admitted they came up empty. They had all the motivation in the world to find these things, and we’ve yet to have that press conference where the generals point to a warehouse full of nuclear bombs – or a lab chock full of Anthrax – or any of the other numerous horrors that Iraq was supposed to have.
The die hard belief in an as-yet-undiscovered cache of Iraqi WMDs is defended by fringe accounts that sound all too much like the scenarios usually reserved for presidential assassinations and alien visitations.
The strained logic of the claims tells you all you need to know. If WMDs were in hand, identified as of Iraqi origin, and in custody of the US or its allies – there would be no end of media coverage. Left/right bias BS all you want – it would be a massive story.
As for Richard Miniter, well – he apparently doesn’t know the difference between low-enriched uranium and highly-enriched uranium. If he did, he wouldn’t be breathlessly plugging LEU as “the kind used to make fuel for atomic bombs.”
Yes, you can make LEU into highly-enriched-uranium – but you need a massive enrichment program that requires centerfuges and other infrastructure that isn’t the kind you can hide.
We didn’t find that infrastructure. Meaning: Saddam had no active nuclear program.
You can thrill to the descriptions of aged chem rounds used in the Iran-Iraq war – but if you really think those help the cause for our 2003 war – you’ll need to explain that to more people than me.
As stated I’ve spent much more time on this that I intended and plan to devote no more time to it. I’ve addressed Hitchens opinion already and regardless of your current rebuttal believe what I’ve already written on the other subjects stands up just fine.
I’ve allowed your additional rebuttal as a courtesy but I don’t plan to address it. I don’t mind giving you the last substantive word. Between the several points and counter points the readers have more than enough info to come to their own conclusions.
If the mood and muse strike me to rebutt the subject in a future post be assured I will link back to your arguments here.
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