Waterboarding the media

The Belmont Club:

Steve Harrigan gets waterboarded on Fox and you can watch at on Hot Air at the link? How does it feel? It feels like s**t, beyond a doubt. What does it prove? Apparently that you don't suffer any perceptible damage from it or that, if you had a choice, it would be far preferable to getting your fingers chopped off, your teeth knocked out or your arms broken by dangling you from the ceiling. But what does it prove morally? Ah, there's that word! Whose morality, then? Didn't you know this post was going to be difficult?

Nobody even admits to waterboarding, though the individuals depicted on the video apparently know a lot about it. But assuming somebody did this kind of stuff would you never approve it if you had reason to think the interrogation would save lives? Here are a variety of answers whose logical flaws are interesting to pick out. Readers, start your brain cells!

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There is more. There are many more in the media who need waterboarding more than Harrigan. He has always been one of the most courageous reporters on the scene today. I first saw him in Afghanistan with not apparent US units in sight, much less an embed situation. What he has done is bring some rationality to the debate over this method of persuading people to cooperate. When you hear people caterwauling about waterboarding as torture, you sometimes forget that the US special forces and CIA interrogators all get a chance to experience it.