On today’s Outnumbered, two Fox News hosts tried to diminish the Senate torture report by accusing the Democrats of releasing it to distract from ObamaCare. But Jesse Watters went a step further in announcing that he doesn’t think the tactics revealed in the report constitute torture.
One of the major takeaways from the Senate torture report is, as Think Progress noted, “the torture methods were far more brutal than originally reported.”
The “CIA applied its so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in near non-stop fashion for days or weeks at a time.” Detainees were forced to stay awake for up to 180 hours while “standing or in painful stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.” Some were kept in a “dungeon” that was completely dark and were “constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. ” At least one detainee was told he could only leave CIA custody “in a coffin-shaped box.” The government also rectally force-fed detainees.
But Watters, today’s #OneLuckyGuy on Outnumbered, said, “I don’t want to know about it. People do nasty things in the dark, especially after a terrorist attack.” Apparently more interesting to him was the “ironic” (as he saw it) fact that the report was released on the same day Jonathan Gruber testified about ObamaCare. Watters concluded – without offering a scintilla of evidence that the report was released today “to knock that out of the front pages.”
Watters also concluded that the report was not likely true and that Senate Democrats are “just trying to get one last shot in at Bush before they go into the minority.” He added, “I’m just not buying it.”
I’ve been very critical of co-host Kennedy in the past. But I applaud her for withstanding the Fox News party line here. She said, “We’re the United States of America. We’re better than this.” Kennedy also said we’re strong enough to have “this level of discourse and transparency. …To say that this is somehow going to lead to death and destruction imminently is really irresponsible and they’re just trying to shift that narrative which I fully disagree with.”
Watters interrupted her to say, “I don’t think it’s torture. I do not think it's torture”
Well, of course he wouldn’t. This is the guy who stalks and harasses women in his "reporting" and runs a Fox website that caters to people who would like to see Ferguson protesters lynched and salivate for the death of President Obama - among others.
Not surprisingly, co-host Andrea Tantaros also made the report about politics. This is the woman who urged her radio show listeners to “do me a favor” and punch an Obama supporter in the face. One would expect a woman with those kinds of scruples to support torture, too.
“The Bush administration did what the American public wanted and that was do whatever it takes to keep us safe,” Tantaros began. Then “Punch” offered up her special brand of analysis to co-host Harris Faulkner: “It’s about Democrats being so fundamentally lost as a party, Harris, they have to return to an old playbook, the plays that they ran right when Obama got into office, trying to prosecute CIA officials for these terror tactics. And that same playbook that they feel got them the House of Representatives back, even under Tom DeLay’s electoral map. …It’s how they win elections. …They have nothing else to talk about and they don’t want to talk about Gruber or health care or the IRS or anything else.”
Yeah, right. Releasing the report a few weeks after the midterm elections, with nearly two full years to go before the presidential is so obviously an electoral stunt, it can only be that the rest of the media is so liberal, they didn’t see the writing on the wall right away.
Watch it below, via Media Matters.
As I remember it, the phrase “I had to do it because my superiors told me to do so …” was not considered to be a valid defense. Didn’t work then, shouldn’t work
Oh, who am I kidding? He’d never do that; he’s got a “reputation” to uphold and if the people he