A conservative US radio host has allowed himself to be "waterboarded" live on air in a bid to prove to the controversial practice is not torture.
But the stunt backfired when Erich "Mancow" Muller lasted just six seconds of the treatment before raising the alarm and conceding it was indeed torture.
"It is way worse than I thought it would be," the Chicago radio man told his listeners on station WLS.
"I thought I could hold out 30 seconds … it was instantaneous.
"I don't want to say this, I do not wish to say this — absolutely torture."
Video footage of the experiment shows Muller lying on a table and a man placing a towel over the upper part of his face.
The man then blocks his nose and pours a jug of water over his face.
Muller lasts a few seconds before throwing the toy cow he was holding as an emergency signal.
The radio man said the experience felt exactly like he was drowning.
"When I was a kid I drowned," Muller said.
"My brother pulled me out of this pool I fell in and I had to be revived.
"I remember the feeling and it's the feeling of drowning."
"I wouldn't have done this if I had known it was going to be this bad."
Mancow isn't the first conservative pundit to see the light on waterboarding.
Iraq War advocate Christopher Hitchens also submitted to the torture for an article in Vanity Fair magazine.
"If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture," he wrote after the experience.
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