Mancow on the waterboarding controversy…

The Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal writes about the reality of the Mancow waterboarding…

Erich “Mancow” Muller, responding to a report he faked being waterboarded on Chicago’s WLS-AM 890 a week earlier, said Friday that both his experience and subsequent newfound belief that the controversial interrogation technique is torture were “absolutely real.”

Muller said he was scheduled to go on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” for the second time this week on Friday night to discuss the latest developments, including allegations he considers laughable that he and Olbermann were in cahoots.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Muller readily acknowledged thatthe waterboarding stunt was not and never meant to be an exact re-creation of how the technique is administered to detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

He also said that Chicago police, station management and others were misled ahead of time and told “we weren’t really going to do” the waterboarding “until we did”; otherwise, he said, it would not have been permitted.

I tend to believe it was real, not because I doubt the veracity of the email timeline Gawker laid out but because faking it makes no sense. Mancow was a waterboarder supporter/advocate. It makes no sense to fake a waterboarding incident so that he could reverse a position he believed in. It’s a completely self-destructive approach full of risk should the “reality” of the fakery leak out.

Update: Gawker talks to Mancow and tries to put its own spin on it…

UPDATE: Mancow called us back to say that even though his waterboarder didn’t know what he was doing, and his publicist called the whole thing a “hoax,” it wasn’t supposed to be a REALLY real waterboarding to begin with. Just the radio stunt kind! “Of course I wasn’t a radical terrorist,” he said. “Of course it was simulated. To compare what I went through to what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed went through—of course it was not the same. I’m sure it was worse for them.”

Undoubtedly it was. But isn’t the whole point of these exercises to let people know exactly what we talk about when we talk about waterboarding? We’ve learned that Mancow can’t take six seconds of having water poured on his face—we guess he doesn’t take showers?—but we’ve learned absolutely nothing about the mechanics or ethics of what goes on at CIA black sites. If anything, a bullshit stunt like this one gives ammunition to torture proponents, who can poke holes in Muller’s grand conversion by pointing out that it’s a bullshit stunt. Keith Olbermann and other righteous anti-torture advocates are holding up Muller’s experience as evidence—someone who was inclined to support waterboarding and deny that it’s torture has actually experienced it, which Sean Hannity and his ilk lack the courage to do, and the facts have changed his mind. Only he hasn’t actually experienced it, or anything remotely approaching what actual torture victims experienced. None of it is real.

Ok, so what do I make of all this now? Well, was it a “real” waterboarding? Probably not. But here’s the point Gawker is (probably deliberately for it’s own reasons because it just wants to make Mancow look bad) missing: Mancow went into this thinking waterboarding was not torture and the fact that he had such a horrid reaction to the “simulated” waterboarding was enough to change his mind. It doesn’t matter whether it was textbook waterboarding (which is probably much much harder on the interrogatee) or not.