http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/05/conservative-radio-hosts-waterboarded
Conservative radio hosts gets waterboarded, and lasts six seconds before
saying its torture
Raw Story Published: May 22, 2009
Watch him be waterboarded in the following video:
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/05/conservative-radio-hosts-waterboarded/
Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided he'd get himself
waterboarded to prove the technique wasn't torture.
It didn't turn out that way. "Mancow," in fact, lasted just six or seven
seconds before crying foul. Apparently, the experience went pretty badly --
"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," according to NBC Chicago.
"The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay
South told his audience before he was waterboarded on air. "He's going to
wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this."
Mancow was set on a 7-foot long table with his legs elevated and his feet
tied.
"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.' "
The upshot? "It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no
joke," Mancow told listeners. "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."
"Absolutely. I mean that's drowning," he added later. "It is the feeling of
drowning."
"If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it," he said.
The 42-year-old radio host is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he was
maligned for saying that then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard
Dean was "vile," "bloodthirsty," "evil" and "should be kicked out of
America."
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074/the_pressure_of_an_expanding_war
Going for Broke
Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding
By Tom Engelhardt
Tomgram: May 21, 2009
Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it).
So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less
than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the
Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke.
It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big
muddy."
General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm
and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years
he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as
an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office.
(Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a
ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than
Stan McChrystal.")
McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man
responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of "manhunters" he commanded had its
own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where
bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its
own slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it."
Since some of the task force's men were, in the end, prosecuted, the
bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.
In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact,
part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert,
on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.
Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the
hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his
command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the
death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat
Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and
Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature
adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak -- that is, expanded -- war. While in
Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate...
of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American
commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term
Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was
reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed
civilians.
All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new
approaches" -- to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words -- that the
Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving
Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst
days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era
Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.
To read more of this dispatch, Click
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074/the_pressure_of_an_expanding_war
***
From: Sid Shniad
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1242212417034&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Ex-AIPACer: There is no military option in Iran
By Douglas Bloomfield,
Jerusalem Post: May 19, 2009
There is no viable military option for dealing the Iranian nuclear threat,
and efforts by the Israeli government and its supporters to link that threat
to progress in peace with the Palestinians and Syria are "nonsense" and an
obstacle to the Arab-Israeli and international cooperation essential to
changing Iranian behavior.
That's the conclusion of Keith Weissman, the Iran expert formerly at the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), speaking publicly for the
first time since the government dropped espionage charges against him and
his colleague, Steve Rosen, earlier this month.
There's no assurance an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities - even if all of
them could be located - would be anything more than a temporary setback,
Weissman told me. Instead, a military strike would unify Iranians behind an
unpopular regime, ignite a wave of retaliation that would leave thousands
dead from Teheran to Tel Aviv, block oil exports from the Persian Gulf and
probably necessitate a ground war, he said.
"The only viable solution is dialogue. You don't deal with Iran with threats
or preaching regime change," said Weissman, who has lived in Iran, knows
Farsi (as well as Arabic, Turkish and French) and wrote his doctoral
dissertation at the University of Chicago on Iranian history. That's where
the Bush administration went wrong, in his view.
"President Bush's demand that Iran halt all nuclear enrichment before we
would talk with the regime was an excuse not to talk at all," Weissman said.
"And the administration's preaching of regime change only made the Iranians
more paranoid and told them there was no real desire to engage them, only
demonize them. The thing they fear most is American meddling in their
internal politics."
HE SAID PRESIDENT Barack Obama is right to make it clear that regime change
is not our goal. "Without that assurance we can't begin any dialogue or hope
to be able to do anything about their nuclear program. Without a doubt,
talking with Iran will be very difficult and frustrating, but there are no
other viable options."
AIPAC has been the driving force on Capitol Hill for a get-tough policy,
pushing through Congress a series of sanction bills, and Weissman was the
lobby's expert on the topic.
"All along the idea was that sanctions were a bargaining chip to be traded
for something tangible," he said. "We never opposed America and Iran talking
to each other about these issues. However, the US strategy should have been
directed at the supreme leader; he's the guy at the top and the one who
makes the important decisions, not politicians like presidents Khatami or
Ahmadinejad."
Weissman said Israel's worries about Iran getting a nuclear weapon are
understandable, but despite some of the rhetoric coming out of Teheran, the
Iranian leaders "are not fanatics and they're not suicidal. They know that
Israel could make Iran glow for many years." He was referring to reports
[reports?] that Israel may have 200 or more nuclear weapons as well as the
missiles and aircraft for devastating retaliation.
He believes Iran has the know-how to build a nuclear device, but he doubts
it's made the final decision to go ahead with it. Iran may be "a few years
or more" away from having an actual weapon and the means for accurate
delivery.
"However, they would be crazy to test a weapon," he said. "That would
essentially unite the world against them. Right now we can't get Russia and
China to seriously help us deal with Iran, but if the Iranians tested a
weapon, that would change in a flash. I don't think the Iranians are that
stupid."
THE ARAB STATES, especially in the Gulf, are at least as worried as Israel
about Iran's nuclear ambitions, and they should all be working together to
deal with it, Weissman said, "but because nothing is moving on the
Palestinian problem, there can't be any overt and probably little if any
covert cooperation."
Trying to separate the issues, even refusing to endorse the two-state
approach, "is part of the sophistry of people like [Binyamin] Netanyahu who
want to avoid confronting the peace process," he said. "Iran's ability to
screw around in the Israel-Arab arena would be severely impaired by pressing
ahead on the Palestinian and Syrian tracks instead of looking for excuses
not to."
"We're going to have to end up accepting some kind of peaceful Iranian
nuclear energy program - and they actually need it; it's already too late to
stop it entirely. That's why it is so important to establish a relationship
with Iran in which they accept international inspection and obey
international law," he said. [Great idea; how about getting Israel to do the
same?] "For that to happen, there has to be a discussion of some overarching
security architecture for the region that includes both Israel and the
Arabs, but before that can even be considered there has to be Arab-Israel
reconciliation."
The end of his long legal nightmare also ended Weissman's public silence,
and now that he's out from under AIPAC's anti-media paranoia, he feels free
to express his own views for the first time in a decade.
What's next for Weissman? "I don't know. I couldn't seriously look for work
with this case hanging over my head."
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