Friday, April 24, 2009

Shepard Smith: "We are America! We do not fucking torture!"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It was on Colbert last night, and it's been making the rounds. Here's Fox News' Shep Smith taking a definitively un-conservative line on torture.

Of course, he's wrong. America does torture. Or, at least, it did, under Bush. And it's not like Smith is arguing, as some conservatives are (like his colleague Bill O'Reilly), that waterboarding, say, isn't torture. Smith is pretty clear that even if it worked -- it meaning torture, the enhanced interrogation techniques -- it's wrong, always.

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3 Comments:

  • Yes, Shep is a liberal, barely closeted gay, and of course we torture, as necessary. If torturing somebody could save your child's life, would you do it? You need these people so you can keep living in your fantasy world GROW UP!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:26 AM  

  • "After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

    Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding."

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7:41 PM  

  • "You need these people so you can keep living in your fantasy world GROW UP!"This line almost demands Jack Nicholson to read it. That attitude almost demands an avenging deity to drown its author and his unclean ilk.

    It's all about abandoning civilization because someone is afraid. No, we can't handle the truth, can't afford decency, justice or in fact civilization itself because we are afraid, afraid, afraid.

    There is no child, no likelihood that torturing suspects would produce good information and our "fantasy world" is all that stands between us and the savage apes we are descended from.

    To be sure, my particular fantasy world includes a red hot poker and the anus of the piece of garbage who thinks we need to torture people to save our children. In his case, I agree. Because of people like him, not only did al Qaeda win; Hitler won, Stalin, Pol Pot, Tamerlane, Attila, Tomas de Torquemada.

    By Blogger Capt. Fogg, at 9:16 AM  

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