Sean Hannity was aghast that CIA Director John Brennan has refused to waterboard or torture. So Hannity called on a few of his right-wing buddies to argue that we must torture, based on the bogus“ticking time bomb” scenario.
Hannity began by playing a clip of Brennan saying, on Meet The Press, “We’ve learned lessons from the past,” and “I don’t believe that we need to resort to certain types of tactics [like waterboarding]. Absolutely, I would not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again.” Furthermore, Brennan smacked down Republican calls for torture by saying, “I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques that I have heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure.”
But what would the director of the CIA know about intelligence compared to businessman Donald Trump? Hannity played a clip of Trump “firing back” at Brennan and calling his comments “ridiculous.”
In further support of torture, Hannity brought on Breitbart’s terrorism expert, Sebastian Gorka, and former police detective Bo Dietl.
HANNITY: Enhanced interrogations, specifically, we didn’t get bin Laden without them. I interviewed Jose Rodriguez on this show. You wouldn’t have found the courier which led us to bin Laden without Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, giving that information after being water boarded.
In fact, there is much evidence to suggest that Rodriguez and others are simply lying when they claim that the torture produced reliable intelligence. But Hannity was so intrigued with Rodriguez’ description of “insult slaps” to prisoners, “conditioning” them and, as Hannity enthusiastically described it, making them “as uncomfortable and miserable as possible so you can get information!,” he didn’t seem to bother to do any fact checking.
Gorka was a bit less eager.
GORKA: We have to be factual here. Only three people underwent the enhanced interrogation techniques. In this case it was crucial. I am a little bit skittish about making it a policy across the United States. If there’s a ticking time bomb, if there’s something, if it’s the number one HVT, the number one high-value target, I can understand it. But to say we just do it willy-nilly, that is another issue.
So Hannity turned to Dietl with the hasn’t-happened-in-all-of-human-history and probably never will, “ticking time bomb” hypothetical, to argue that we must torture!:
HANNITY: Bo, with all your ears, let’s say you get called, you’re a detective, you get called on a job, kidnapping. Three people enter somebody’s house, a home invasion. Two of them get away with two children. The father or mother tackles the one other guy. He knows where they’re taking those kids. How soon do you have to act to get those kids back?
DIETL: You’ve got to act immediately. I always use this thing, if I’m the president and Brennan is the head of my CIA and he makes a statement like that, I’d say, Mr. Brennan, you don’t have a job anymore.
My point is we should not be advertising what our CIA does. That’s one. We can’t blow up our mouths all the time when we do these things. It can be used in certain situations.
If Hannity loves torture so much, he really ought to start with his own self. Hannity pledged to undergo waterboarding – which he called “dunking” – on April 22, 2009, almost seven years ago. He may want to forget but we won’t.
Watch the pledge Hannity has weaseled out of above along with his stomach-turning enthusiasm to torture others, from the April 12 Hannity.
(Crossposted at Newshounds.us
