Brit Hume and Bill Kristol were in usual form on Fox News Sunday crying about the release of the torture memos by the Obama administration. Without bl
April 20, 2009

Brit Hume and Bill Kristol were in usual form on Fox News Sunday crying about the release of the torture memos by the Obama administration. Without blinking an eye Bill Kristol dismisses the methods used in the interrogations.

Wallace: As you read the memos and you learn what we did and how top Justice Department officials justified it, are you struck by how brutal we were or how careful we were?

Kristol: How careful. I mean has any other country at war gotten memos from the Justice Department? Extremely carefully of recent I would say. Especially the Steve Bradbury 2005 memos before going ahead and trying to deal with the rather small number of terrorists who had been involved in murdering thousands of Americans and were very much intending to do more of that..I think..you read those memos, you think that's what everyone's so upset about.

Kristol goes on to rant about the memos being released and decry the potential investigations that can come from it. I'd like to know how anyone could read the things that were in those memos and have that kind of response?

Brit Hume thinks that this is just old news now since the Obama administration has decided to stop torturing prisoners and can't understand what possible benefit can come from the specifics being released to the terrorists. Brit I hate to tell you this but I think the gist of what was in those memos has been out in the public domain for some time now for those terrorists to read.

All of these talking heads today had a couple of themes with their arguments. One that if torturing prisoners "worked" and we got some vital information from them, then it's just fine to violate the law and it justifies this brutality. The other is the we need to look forward argument and that there's no need to dwell on what happened because the Obama administration says using these methods has stopped. Would they ever apply that same argument to defend some drug dealer on the street that killed someone or to any street crime that occurs in the United States for that matter? Somehow I doubt it.

I wonder just how "careful" Kristol would think anyone was being if he was waterboarded an average of over six times a day for a month? And if it didn't work the first five or ten times even, what are you going to get from anyone from waterboarding them that many times other than some sadistic pleasure from knowing you're punishing the person being waterboarded? I wonder how "careful" he would think they were if it was his child being tortured in front of him because someone thought he was a terrorist? I wonder how "careful" he would think they were if it was his head getting knocked in?

We have laws on the books that don't allow policemen to beat confessions out of people in the United States for a reason. Why these clowns can't manage to bring the same reasoning to this debate is beyond me.

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