Drum roll, please.

Maboud Ebrahimzadeh

Never heard of him? You saw him in action yesterday. Here’s the AP’s account of his brilliant performance.

Mukasey protesters act out waterboarding

For once, the AP’s headline is dead-on accurate.

On Monday, about 25 protesters describing themselves as anti-war activists and actors responded with a demonstration of waterboarding that brought a volunteer to retching coughs and tears in less than four minutes.

“I wanted desperately to scream but I couldn’t because as soon as I would – water,” said Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, a 26-year-old Iranian-American actor from Maryland. “Water would go through the mouth and through the nose.”

Set up outside the Justice Department’s headquarters, Ebrahimzadeh struggled against his supposed interrogators as they yelled questions and forced him to lie on his back, a cloth over his face, his legs elevated. They poured two gallons of water over his face.

The process was supposed to resemble the process that CIA interrogators are believed to have used on terror detainees until a few years ago. However, Ebrahimzadeh’s interrogators put a plastic cage between his face and the cloth to make sure he did not inhale too much water and, potentially, drown or asphyxiate.

Hearing about it pales in comparison to seeing it, so here’s the man himself in his starring role.

All that wriggling around, the look of fear, the emotional speech afterward. It’s all so…convincing. He’s a genius!

It’s good to see that the star of Five Petals, Get Stuffed, and Fear Up is finally getting his day in the sun.

(h/t Liberrocky)