Recently, Mancow Muller agreed to be waterboarded, hoping to prove that it wasn’t torture. A Gawker tipster writes that it may have been staged as a cheap publicity stunt. (Full text, and relevant videos, which you should read, are through the link.) In this case, I’m inclined to believe the radio host when he says it was torture.

It’s entirely possible that he went into it hoping for a half-hearted attempt, sitting through it for thirty seconds, and then saying “It’s not that bad.” That would be better publicity for a right wing radio host. He’d have the support of all the right-wing pundits, mocking the liberals. The liberals would be calling it a fraud. And it’s very possible he was hoping to make it deceptive in appearance. But now that I’ve watched him on Olberman, and another instance of waterboarding, I think his response is legit, whatever else happened before.

The biggest reason is this: if it is entirely fake and he wasn’t under any displeasure, or that displeasure wasn’t that bad, he has no reason to say that it’s torture. He would try to downplay it. I don’t think anyone was questioning its efficacy, so he doesn’t stand to gain from going on and proving “yeah, it’s bad and will make people talk.” No, a victory for him would be to go on the air, get waterboarded, and then be able to say “eh, it’s not that bad.” He didn’t. And I really appreciate that.

My biggest question, really, is how is it people can simultaneously believe that something is “not torture” and that it is an effective interrogation technique that involves subjecting someone to an unpleasant experience they want to avoid so much that they confess to whatever they know. That’s what torture is, isn’t it? Torture is subjecting someone to something that will make their will break. There isn’t a way to make it mild. It has to be unbearable. It can be psychological, it can be physical, it can be social, but in the end it’s all torture.

And you know what? If you think it’s okay to torture terror suspects, that’s really your right. Just stop pretending that it isn’t torture. It is. What they do to the students of SERE is torture. My father, a naval aviator who completed SERE training, once told me he would have turned in his wings rather than go through it again. If you want to talk about the effectiveness of these interrogation techniques, if you want to defend them, do so with the full understanding of what they are doing. If you really want to say that we need to torture these people, or that they are bad people who deserve it, do so with the full understanding of what we are doing to them. Watch the damn videos of people getting waterboarded. Listen to them talk about it. Read about it.

Because when the Bush administration authorized it, they knew. This wasn’t a decision they made lightly. It was a deliberate authorization. They weighed the options. They considered the morality. And they decided that their objectives were more important than that, that it was worth becoming monsters to pursue our goal.