Waterboarding: Company Used It to "Motivate" Employees

Claims Former Employee in Lawsuit

Prosper, Inc.

About Prosper, Inc.

Prosper, Inc. provides executive-level coaching for individuals. Our mission is to provide our students with the education and hands-on experiences they need to achieve their personal and professional goals. We strive to make the road to personal achievement meaningful, rewarding, and enjoyable.

By understanding our business and by becoming sensitive to our world, we position ourselves to help others become leaders in an ever-changing marketplace. Our products and services are based on proven principles that, when applied, produce positive results in the lives of individuals and families. Source - Prosper, Inc.

So how does a company that "provides executive-level coaching for individuals" motivate its own employees?

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.

In a lawsuit filed last month, former Prosper, Inc. salesman Chad Hudgens alleges his managers also allowed the supervisor to draw mustaches on employees' faces, take away their chairs and beat on their desks with a wooden paddle "because it resulted in increased revenues for the company." Source - Salt Lake Tribune

"[Prosper] allowed the supervisor to draw mustaches on employees' faces, take away their chairs and beat on their desks with a wooden paddle because it resulted in increased revenues for the company." --Chad Hudgens, former Prosper employee

Former Prosper, Inc. salesman Chad Hudgens has filed a lawsuit accusing Joshua Christopherson and Prosper, Inc. of assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and wrongful termination.

Hudgens claims he volunteered for a "motivational exercise" with his team leader, Joshua Christopherson. Hudgens also claims he volunteered in order to prove his "loyalty and determination" to Prosper, Inc..

Hudgens alleges Christopherson took the sales team outside the office to the top of hill. This is where the story gets bizarre, Hudgens alleges Christopherson told the rest of the sales team to hold Hudgens' arms and legs. Christopherson then took a plastic jug full of water and began pouring it over Hudgens' nostrils and mouth while extolling team members that "he wanted them to work as hard on making sales as Chad had worked to breath".

In his suit Hudgens says he required psychological counseling for emotional trauma.





According to How Stuff Works, waterboarding is known as a controversial form of interrogation that has been used for centuries.

Water boarding has been around for centuries. It was a common interrogation technique during the Italian Inquisition of the 1500s and was used perhaps most famously in Cambodian prisons during the reign of the Khmer Rouge regime during the 1970s (see David Corn: This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like for pictures of a Khmer Rouge water board now in a Cambodian museum). As late as November 2005, water boarding was on the CIA's list of approved "enhanced interrogation techniques" intended for use against high-value terror suspects. In a nutshell, water boarding makes a person feel like he is drowning.

Socrates, you dummies!

Prosper Inc., President Dave Ellis came up with an alternate view of that day's events, that no, it wasn't waterboarding, it was a "dramatization" of a Socrates story, how a young man asked Socrates to become his teacher. Socrates responded by "plunging the student's head underwater and telling him he will learn once his desire for knowledge is as great as his desire to breathe."

The company president claims that what happened to Hudgens was a form of "Socratic thinking" and not good old fashioned waterboarding.

In the end it will be up to a judge or jury to make that determination.

By LGB

Image - Waterboarding
Image - Socrates



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Mukasey Might Prefer Waterboarding: Hearings Are A Form of Torture

News continues from the Mukasey hearings and it's not good if you're an administration looking for a few good men. The time is long past when hearings about administration nominees, for any post with more responsibility than Department of Amoeba Research, was routine.

More on this from the New York Times:

In adamantly refusing to declare waterboarding illegal, Michael B. Mukasey, the nominee for attorney general, is steering clear of a potential legal quagmire for the Bush administration: criminal prosecution or lawsuits against Central Intelligence Agency officers who used the harsh interrogation practice and those who authorized it, legal experts said Wednesday.

Three Republicans have hopped on the waterboarding issue, presidential candidate John McCain, as well as John Warner and Lindsey Graham. While McCain's stand is understandable, the other two Senators will be among the first voices heard if U.S. intelligence agencies fail to come up with information before the next catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Three Republicans who have denounced waterboarding wrote to Mr. Mukasey on Wednesday, suggesting that they would support him but urging him to declare waterboarding illegal after he is confirmed.

The senators, John McCain of Arizona, John W. Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said anyone who engaged in waterboarding “puts himself at risk of prosecution, including under the War Crimes Act, and opens himself to civil liability as well.”

Senate confirmation hearings are the biggest of political footballs, especially in the run-up to an election year. All of the questions about waterboarding obscures the real issue here. Torture now are the hearings themselves.

by Mondoreb
[image:boingboing]



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I Survived Waterboarding And Other Tales Out of the Left's Basement

It has the smell of a middle school science project. We have a hypothesis and an experiment by a Junior Left Science Club member. One that he might pull off in his parents' basement. As he explains it:

I was thinking about the AG confirmation and how Mukasey isn't certain that waterboarding constitutes torture. And then I started thinking about how Rudy Giuliani doesn't believe waterboarding is torture either.

So I figured I'd find out for myself. I mean if it isn't torture, it can't be that bad, right?

Let me tell you this, it's not pleasant. And we were operating under circumstances where we absolutely knew that the other person wasn't going to kill us with the technique.

Hot Air then picks up the scent:

“[I]f it isn’t torture, it can’t be that bad, right?” our hero wonders rhetorically before declaring it most definitely bad — and recounting how he went in for one, two, three, four rounds of the stuff. Which, incidentally, was fewer than his brother managed. A possible alternative standard: If it is torture, you probably wouldn’t be so willing to have it done to you.

Hot Air provides a video of another water-boarding experiment, that of Fox's Steve Harrigan. Neither Harrigan nor the JLSC member doesn't seem much the worse for wear.

But--boy!--did he come up with a Certified Left conclusion.

So yeah, it's torture. And if Rudy or Dick Cheney or anybody else doesn't think it is, well, I'd like to see how they would react if they had it done to them.

And there are members of the Right Wing Blogosphere who don't want to give the Left any style points for originality.

It'd be original if the Left spent 1/10th the time trying to recreate the victims of terror's experience: being blown to bits, fingers and hands chopped off, the beheadings. Perhaps they might bring a more useful perspective to the discussion of what constitutes torture.

Of course, all that would really mess up the basement.

by Mondoreb

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