I have no words

[nancylebov]

Sean Hannity offers to be waterboarded for charity. Keith Olbermann offers 1K/minute, and double if Hannity admits he was in fear for his life and it was torture.

Link from The Agitator.

Comments

[xanath.livejournal.com]

Not good. Torture is torture, whether we perpetrate it upon enemy combatants or idiot mainstream reporters. I don't care that Sean Hannity will remain a free man even if he undergoes a few minutes of drowning. If the point we're trying to make is that torture is always wrong, then Keith Olbermann is failing to grasp the concept on a massive scale.

[siderea]

If the point we're trying to make is that torture is always wrong

I'm not sure it is. All discussions of the ethics of torture have assumed non-consensual torture. I'm completely with "non-consensual torture is always wrong."

I'm open to hearing arguments that its wrong to torture someone who completely and freely volunteers to be tortured -- say, to find out what it's like or to prove a point -- but highly dubious. Was it wrong for those SERE instructors to torture their students, who were in that training program specifically to be tortured in a controlled environment for the purpose of being hardened against it?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I'd like to alter(?) the definition of torture to include "non-consensual", the way 'rape' does.

[siderea]

Sure, I can be down with that, but then what do we call what SERE instructors do?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think the point we're trying to make is that waterboarding is always torture. Whether torture is always wrong is a slightly different argument.

I will say that the Hannity/Olbermann bet backs the notion that torture is more about spite than about getting information.