Liberal Media Bias: MSNBC Reports Mancow Waterboarded, Leaves Out the Important Stuff

So guess what? Conservative shock jock Mancow tried waterboarding—and he hated it.

This is news to Ryan Pollyea at the MSNBC website:

Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It’s Torture
By Ryan Pollyea
NBCChicago.com

Shock jocks shock.

And so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.

Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on—actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining.

“I want to find out if it’s torture,” Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture. […]

With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.

Turns out the stunt wasn’t so funny. 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. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,”Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. “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.’ “

Last year, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens endured the same experiment -- and came to a similar conclusion. The conservative writer said he found the treatment terrifying, and was haunted by it for months afterward. [Um, Christopher Hitchens is not a conservative, liar. He is an athiest, was on Forbes list of the 25 Most Influential Liberals in U.S. Media. He supports the War in Iraq. So? That doesn’t make him a conservative.]

“Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture,” Hitchens concluded in the article.

Some important pieces of info left out of this article:

First, Pollyea didn’t report whether, if Mancow were demanded to give accurate information while being waterboarded, would he have been forthcoming? In other words, does waterboarding work?

Second, after being waterboarded, was Mancow asked what he considers worse: being waterboarded (as Khalid Sheikh Mohamed was) or having your head sawed off alive (as was done to Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed)

Finally, he didn’t determine whether Mancow’s experience made him change his mind about whether it should be continued on hardened terrorist detainees.

The thing about the “waterboarding = torture?” debate is that nobody ever said that it was a walk in the park. Sean Hannity never suggested it. Neither did Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, or Dennis Prager. It’s meant to be extremely uncomfortable. Otherwise, how do we expect people to be afraid of it? But whether Mancow or Hitchens want to call it torture, it is still light years better than having your hands, your tongue, your head sliced off. Because that’s what our enemies would do to you and you don’t have to be detained in a prison for them to do it. 

Besides, for me, personally, it was never an issue of whether waterboarding constitutes torture. If we use it to get information from terrorist scum who are trying to kill my family and yours, what difference does it make? None at all. What’s important to me is whether it’s effective and whether it’s being used it on the right people. This isn’t a g*ddamned game, people; it’s a war. And the enemy isn’t tiring of the desire to waste you any time soon. I don’t lose any sleep over waterboarding of terrorists, and I don’t worry about having lost our moral bearings because of it. You know what will make me lose sleep and worry about having lost our moral bearings? Whether the next 9/11 could have been prevented if only we had waterboarded these bastards.

So, I think this MSNBC article strengthened, not weakened, the case for waterboarding. Based on Mancow’s experiment, let them continue. Get all the info we can get from this terrorist scum. 

Then unleash them like the rabid dogs they are in Nancy Pelosi’s district. What are peacenik San Franciscans gonna do? Kill them?

UPDATE: Chicago Ray gives his two cents on the Mancow waterboarding.