Radio host Mancow waterboarded--admits it's torture.

I have to give it to him, he tried it, and he admitted that it was torture even though he didn't want to. I think what this demonstration points out is that it really doesn't necessarily sound or look like something that has a horrific effect on somebody--it's just water being poured over one's face. I can appreciate that there are people who don't make the connection about why it's torture. But human reflexes are involuntary. Trying not to desperately want to breathe under that circumstance is like not blinking when something is coming for your eye. You'll blink. And not being able to breathe, even if it's just for seconds, tells your brain only one thing:

"You're going to die."

Things that you rationally know and things that you physically feel have very different levels of impact. What Mr. Muller rationally knew was that he was surrounded by people who didn't want to hurt him. But what he physically experienced was something pretty close to dying--and that was more impactful.

If you take away the safe, controlled environment, add some sleepless nights and being cut off from everyone and everything you know, being put in a hostile situation where some people are wanting something from you, and they will continue taking you right to the point of death until they get it--whatever it is, is what we're really talking about when we talk about "enhanced interrogation". It's kind of a never-ending loss of control, where physical stressors like light, cold, sound, are constantly used against one, and the ability to even choose to stand or sit is taken away, to sleep and eat when needed, to not be physically violated--the things that make one feel human, even things like wearing clothes or having a name, are taken away. The idea that a person broken down like that is going to resist waterboarding because they heard about it or whatever (as the Cheneys contend regarding the release of the torture memos), is just weirdly out of touch with how sensitive our bodies really are and how even little things can drive us to madness when it seems like pain, discomfort, and fear never end.

In the course of seconds, experiencing this wretched physical sense of dying, Mr. Muller had the ability to demonstrate that he had enough. If we can imagine experiencing this with the only way to demonstrate "having enough" being to talk and talk--and lie and lie, if necessary (and of course, it's necessary--how does anyone know when they've said the right thing to make it stop?), you see the real problem with this method. This method doesn't get the thing said in confidence, the boast, the tipping of a hand, things that the experienced interrogator can tell are true--it just gets anything a desperate person would say in order to live and get something of himself back.

I don't like that we've sanitized the language of torture so much that people need to "see for themselves" in this way, without being able to just understand the awfulness of these methods, and how they would make another feel. Hopefully, maybe by seeing it vicariously through someone who volunteers like this, more people will wake up to how potentially destructive such a method can be.