DAVID BAUDER | April 28, 2009 09:03 PM EST | AP

Read More: Hannity Waterboarding, Hannity Waterboarding Offer, Keith Olbermann, Keith Olbermann And Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann Sean Hannity Waterboarding, Sean Hannity, Media News

By DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer

NEW YORK — The debate over torture is getting personal for two of cable TV's prime-time hosts.

After Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity made a seemingly impromptu offer last week to undergo waterboarding as a benefit for charity, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann leapt at it. He offered $1,000 to the families of U.S. troops for every second Hannity withstood the technique.

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FILE - In this Feb. 23, 2009 file photo, MSNBC talk show host Keith Olbermann attends the 'Defying Inequality' Broadway concert, a celebrity benefit for equal rights, in New York. (AP Photo/Peter Kramer, file)

Olbermann repeated the offer on Monday's show and said in an interview Tuesday that he's heard no response. He said he'll continue to pursue it.

"I don't think he has the courage to even respond to this — let alone do it," Olbermann said.

Fox News Channel representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The two men are on opposite poles of a debate that has preoccupied the worlds of talk TV and radio. Hannity says waterboarding is a fair and necessary interrogation technique for suspected terrorists; Olbermann calls it torture, says it's ineffective and should not be done by Americans.

Charles Grodin was challenging Hannity on the issue on Fox last week, and asked whether he would consent to be waterboarded.

"Sure," Hannity said. "I'll do it for charity ... I'll do it for the troops' families."

It wasn't exactly clear how serious the conversation was, since Grodin joked, "Are you busy on Sunday?" and Hannity laughed.

"I'll let you do it," Hannity said.

"I wouldn't do it," Grodin said. "I'll hand you a towel when you come out of the shower."

Olbermann's offer was quick. Besides the $1,000 per second, Olbermann said he'd double it if Hannity acknowledges he feared for his life and admits that waterboarding is torture.

"The idea of putting somebody in a position they have volunteered for, for charity, to respond to their own unsupportable claims, is in many ways priceless," Olbermann said.

Olbermann, who hasn't missed any chance to criticize his ideological enemies at Fox, concedes TV competition plays a part in his offer. But he said it was sincere, because he believes Hannity has had a damaging role in the debate.

"If you expose people to reality, even with someone who is denying reality, that can have a powerful and important impact," he said.

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April 29, 2009 - 5:36 a.m. CDT

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http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/grapeshot/entries/2009/05/06/a_couple_of_weeks_ago.html

By Jody Seaborn | Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 01:04 PM

A couple of weeks ago on his Fox News Channel show, Sean Hannity agreed to be waterboarded “for charity … for the troops’ families.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, whose sense of humor has declined as his dislike for all things Fox has increased, jumped at the chance to see his cable news rival drink his words and offered to give $1,000 to Hannity’s cause for every second he endures the controversial interrogation method. Liberal bloggers and other groups quickly offered to chip in additional money. Thus Hannity could raise a good chunk of change for America’s military families if he honors his offer, especially if he undergoes waterboarding as many times as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind who was waterboarded 183 times by CIA interrogators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?_r=1

Hannity’s “seemingly impromptu” remarks, as The Associated Press described them, came while he was interviewing actor Charles Grodin. During the course of some good-natured joking, Grodin asked Hannity, who pooh-poohs the idea that waterboarding is torture, if he had “ever been waterboarded.” Hannity said no, but that “Ollie North has and I talked to him about it.” Grodin then asked Hannity if he would agree to be waterboarded, and Hannity said, “Yes. Yeah, sure.” For charity.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jADf7Acwh1ozkVvkjNQ9dkk7GQuQD97RPCCO0

Here’s a video excerpt of the exchange:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2I6qRYJfYg&feature=player_embedded

Sean Hannity Offers To Be Waterboarded For Charity - 04/23/09   (2:36)

NewsPoliticsNews
April 22, 2009

"FOX's Sean Hannity Offers To Be Waterboarded For Charity - 04/23/09"

If Hannity was serious and follows through — he has been pretty quiet on the matter since the Grodin interview — he might want to talk first with journalist Christopher Hitchens, who last year endured a waterboarding session and wrote about the experience in the August 2008 issue of Vanity Fair.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808 

Though Hitchens could stop his waterboarding when he had had enough, “and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell,” his session still was designed to be as realistic as possible. He was told to wait at a prearranged place but he wasn’t told when, how or where the waterboarding would occur. His interrogators “abducted” him, bound and blindfolded him, and subjected him to moves that left him dizzy and disoriented. He was taken to a secret location and waterboarded:

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

After a short interval, Hitchens was waterboarded again. He again lasted only a few seconds.

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Hitchens (pictured below as one of his waterboarding sessions ends) understands the argument that waterboarding, when compared to, say, thumbscrews, electrodes or the rack, might not be “actual torture.” But that argument, Hitchens writes, crumbles when you consider four facts about waterboarding:

“1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.“

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.“

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. …“

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious ‘ticking bomb’ question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? …”

As compelling as Hitchens’ article is, perhaps the best argument against waterboarding comes from Mark Danner, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Bard College. In a recent op-ed published in The Washington Post, Danner wrote that calling “enhanced interrogation techniques” critical to keeping America safe “is deeply pernicious, for it holds that it is impossible to protect the country without breaking the law. It says that the professed principles of the United States, if genuinely adhered to, doom the country to defeat. It reduces our ideals and laws to a national decoration, to be discarded at the first sign of danger.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/24/AR2009042402654.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Forget, then, paying to watch someone pour water up Sean Hannity’s nose until he begs for mercy, even if it is for a good cause and would make a cathartic show. Opt instead for an (unenhanced) interrogation, one designed to find out why he trusts the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, the Japanese Imperial Army of World War II, the Khmer Rouge and military dictatorships throughout the world more than the values and laws of the United States?