Mr. Olbermann, I have great respect for you. And I know where you're coming from in taking up Sean Hannity on his dare to be tortured. It is just so perfectly tempting.
But I urge you to reconsider. Others here have spoken wisely about why this is such a bad idea. Don't contribute to Hannity's stunt. Because that's exactly what it is, and you should resist it even though backtracking now will, I concede, be difficult.
Sure, our reptile brains take a vengeful pleasure in seeing a tool like Sean Hannity screaming "enough!" after a half-minute or so of what we all know to be torture. And of having the chosen torturers deny him relief at least for another half-minute.
Indeed, there would be a perverse gratification in seeing Hannity waterboarded 183 times in a month, stripped of his clothes, having snarling police dogs threatening his dick, seeing somebody with a scalpel actually taking cuts on it the way they did Binyam Mohamed, and then ultimately forcing this benighted fellow into a naked dogpile with Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter.
Let him donate to his favorite charity after 30 days of that kind of treatment.
But that's our Rumsfeldian persona speaking. And we should shut it up. Because Hannity will not be undergoing what real torture is like, even though the physical part will be there. Real torture is being waterboarded for, oh, say the 10th time in two days and wondering whether this time your afflictors will actually let you die, intentionally, or by accident. Of wondering what else they may have in store for you. Of hearing from your cell the screams of others being tortured. Of not knowing how long you will be held and subjected to this treatment. Torture is decidedly NOT being handled by people who have your best interests at heart and give you a taste of the treatment but remove the threat at the first indication of distress.
The truth is spoken here:
"Long before Justice Department lawyers were tasked to justify torture, U.S. psychologists were busy actually perpetrating it," said Steven Reisner, PhD, advisor on psychological ethics at [Physicians for Human Rights]. "These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law, they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics."
He told IPS, "The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice." He said the proponents of these techniques "cherry-picked the research to reach a foregone conclusion. How can you compare U.S. soldiers who volunteered for SERE training, and could have stopped their interrogations at any time, with the effects on a prisoner who has been ‘disappeared’, is in fear for his life, and believes he will never see his family again?"
He added that the CIA’s own research into the effects of SERE training showed that it produced "extreme and lasting effects to the point of psychosis."
Please, Mr. Olbermann. Change your mind on this.