A Chicago conservative talk radio host, Erich “Mancow” Muller, decided he’d silence critics of waterboarding once and for all. He would undergo the procedure himself, and then he would be able to confidently convince others that it is not, in fact, torture. Sean Hannity of FOX won’t do it, though challenged by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

Muller came out of it convinced it is torture.

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow said. “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.”

“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.’ “

Here’s video of Muller getting waterboarded:

Now, where did Sean Hannity go?

Former vice-President Dick Cheney, today, dismissed critics who said the policy amounted to the torture of suspected terrorists, Cheney said the methods were “legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.” He claims President Obama has weakened the country’s ability to combat al Qaeda and other extremists by eliminating them. [CNN]

The former vice president said U.S. intelligence officers “were trying to prevent future killings” and did not commit torture. But he defended the use of “waterboarding,” which the United States has prosecuted as torture in the past, as a valuable tool used on three top al Qaeda figures.

[Read more →]

It is very hard for me to believe Dick Cheney is trying to protect the “little people.” But that is what he is saying about the “torture” debate and investigation. [Huffington Post]

"This is the first time that I can recall that we’ve had an administration come in, take power, and then suggest using the power of the government against their predecessors, from a legal standpoint," Cheney said in an interview Monday. "Criminal prosecution of lawyers in the Justice Department whose opinions they disagreed with on an important issue. Criminal prosecutions. When was the last time that happened?"

As far as I’m concerned the Bush-Cheney administration engaged in a criminal enterprise. Rendition—kidnapping people and hauling them off to secret prisons in Europe to be tortuously interrogated. No charges. No trial. Just secrecy. Certainly was an un-American policy to me.

The question is “Who in the George W. Bush White House tried to shred a memo challenging the use of torture?” [Mother Jones]

Philip Zelikow wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. But the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo," Zelikow says.

Zelikow states he suspects the office of former Vice-President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up.

The Mother Jones article asserts “Cheney’s office was reportedly the hub of the Bush administration’s torture program.

Congress is now searching for Zelikow’s memo. Zelikow is to testify before Congress next week.

Someone in the White House tried to deep-six Philip Zelikow’s anti-torture memo. Welcome to the latest Bush-era whodunit.

A very thorough analysis has been written by Desert Beacon’s Ensign’s Tortured Logic on Torture. I commend it to your reading.

Or, as the Washington Post frames it, Effectiveness of Harsh Questioning is Unclear. Framing words is just a way of slanting the view of something. I call it torture, WaPo calls it harsh questioning. The Post begins with:

During his first days in detention, senior al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed was stripped of his clothes, beaten, given a forced enema and shackled with his arms chained above his head, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. It was then, a Red Cross report says, that his American captors told him to prepare for "a hard time."

One needs to resist the temptation to torture just because he is rather ugly, maybe even mean looking. The real questions for me are (1) should the United States use torture as a policy; (2) does torture produce relevant reliable evidence; and (3) is it moral?

Over the next 25 days, beginning on March 6, 2003, Mohammed was put through a routine in which he was deprived of sleep, doused with cold water and had his head repeatedly slammed into a plywood wall, according to the report. The interrogation also included days of extensive waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

Somewhere along the line the Post says Mohammad began talking. Former vice-president Cheney says the information Mohammad resulted in the takedown of al-Qaeda plots.

Cheney, to me, is about as credible as Mohammad. “Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times during his first four weeks in a CIA secret prison.” I may well have started singing within an hour of my captivity. I don’t handle pain all that well. I’d cop a confession to first degree murder to keep my fingernails in my fingers.

At the time, there was little or no dissent, including from congressional Democrats who were briefed on the program, according to former intelligence officials. Doesn’t speak well for those Democrats.

“Two former high-ranking officials with access to secret information said the interrogations yielded details of al-Qaeda’s operations that resulted in the identification of previously unknown suspects, preventing future attacks.” So, in police talk, Mohammad rolled over onto some of his colleagues. He sang like a pigeon.

However, the fact of the matter is there has been specific information or evidence that has been presented as to the truth inherent in whatever Mohammad said. The statement by those “two former high-ranking officials” conclusion that some unknown “suspects” were divulged which prevented future attacks is simply their conclusion or opinion. Whomever Mohammad rolled over on are even termed “suspects” by those two officials.

There is a glaring lack of recitation of compelling concrete evidence of anything that would permit a jury, under American jurisprudence, to return a guilty of verdict based on evidence that proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.

That evidence may well exist, but I’ve not seen any of it presented in a public forum. Unless Mohammad’s statement is somehow corroborated by independent evidence it is difficult for me to accept it on face value presented by hearsay declarants.

One of the primary arguments against the techniques used by the Bush Administration is whether traditional interrogation techniques would have revealed the same information without the use of torture. No one knows, because apparently, no traditional techniques were tried. We’re likely never to know.

"The systematic, calculated infliction of this scale of prolonged torment is immoral, debasing the perpetrators and the captives," said Philip D. Zelikow, a political counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who reviewed secret Bush administration reports about the program in 2005. "Second, forfeiting our high ground, the practices also alienate needed allies in the common fight, even allies within our own government. Third, the gains are dubious when the alternatives are searchingly compared. And then, after all, there is still the law."

Zelikow seems to agree with my conclusion. Torture is immoral. For the United States to have used it means the United States acted immorally. How can a so-called Christian nation do that? One might compare what the Bush Administration did with the torturous crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Wonder how the religious evangelical right views all this? Does Pat Robertson condone it? Who knows?

It is unclear from unclassified reports whether the information gained was critical in foiling actual plots.

says the Post. So we don’t even know for sure whether anything valuable was actually gained from the torture of Mohammad.

Mohammed later told outside interviewers that he was "forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop" and that he "wasted a lot of their time [with] several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.," according to the Red Cross, whose officials interviewed Mohammed and other detainees after they were transferred to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006.

Maybe it is because of my own training in Constitutional Law and my 28 years in criminal law as a prosecutor and then defense attorney that I cannot condone torture. I have always hoped that Americans are more moral.

I still think that those that promulgated the torture should be criminally charged and tried in a court of law, national or internationally. I think the people of the world ought to see the evidence of guilt.

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll shows President Barack Obama’s first 100 days as President has strong approval from the American public. [MSNBC]

What surprises me is

“About half of all Americans, and 52 percent of independents, said there are circumstances in which the United States should consider employing torture against such suspects.”

I’m in the other half. I’m not in favor of returning to the dark ages.

Nicholas Kristoff, of the New York Times, isn’t exactly a screaming liberal.

Photo: Fred Conrad, New York Times.

A bit surprised to read he thinks

it essential that the United States proceed with an independent commission to investigate harsh treatment and tally its costs and benefits.

Kristoff also wrote:

flag-rank officers believe that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo constitute “the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq,” because they galvanized jihadis.

That indicates the U.S. use of torture was detrimental.

Though President Obama is reluctant, I think a thorough independent investigation should be made and, if the evidence supports it, those responsible should be criminally prosecuted. After all torturing people is a violation of law. One of the primary positive attributes of a government is that having and following laws. Ignoring them leads to chaos.

By the way, Mr. Kristoff twitters.

Keith Olbermann, of Countdown on MSNBC, offered to put Olbermann’s money where Hannity’s mouth is.

Olbermann followed up his challenge to Hannity on DailyKos. Using Dr. Albert Sabin’s experience in opposing Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, to illustrate a point, Olbermann attacks Hannity’s trivializing of the waterboarding torture technique.

Hannity’s acceptance of Charles Grodin’s offer to endure waterboarding led to Olbermann to offer Hannity:

I will donate $1,000 (one thousand dollars) for every second of water-boarding Hannity endures. We will start the clock the moment the first water is poured on him. The clock will stop when Hannity confesses or begins to shout or scream on a prolonged basis, or the medical supervisor determines he is danger of organ failure.

Interesting. Think Hannity will do it? He is between a rock and a hard place. Put up or shut up. Be interesting to see how it unfolds.