Sean Hannity still loves torture. Tonight, he discussed the bombshell news that a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report has found torture “yielded little if any significant intelligence.” Hannity didn’t bother to debate any facts of the report. Heck, he barely even discussed the substance of it. Nor did he interview anyone with real knowledge of it. No, he and his guests were too busy singing the praises of torture and demonizing those who disagree.
Not one of Hannity’s three guests had any real knowledge of torture, interrogating or national security
Each guest was almost surely chosen for his or her politics: Fox Business host Stuart Varney, Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock (whose expertise is in business and economics) and Fox News host Dana Perino – unidentified as a press secretary for George W. Bush.
Nobody disagreed when Hannity made his hammy, fact-free declaration, “This reeks of a political document and a witch hunt.” He also showed his utter contempt for truth and information by sneering, “First of all, only government writes a 6,300 page document that nobody’s ever going to read.”
Hannity doesn’t need no stinkin’ report nor expertise to know that torture is great! He said:
The further we get away, Stuart, from the memory of 9/11, and 3,000 Americans killed – it’s like now we’re gonna micromanage what we had to do in light of the worst attack in our country’s history.
Varney also didn’t need anything like real knowledge to know better than any of the experts in the report:
If I’m in the intelligence business, I’m going to lie. I’m going to confuse the enemy. I am never gonna tell the truth. … So here you have this report that says, “Oh, the CIA concealed black sites, concealed alleged abuse, exaggerated the extent of the information.’ That’s precisely what I would expect an intelligence operation to do! Especially when the interrogators face prison because of this report.
You have to wonder if Varney bothered to read these two paragraphs in the Post:
Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.
The report describes previously undisclosed cases of abuse, including the alleged repeated dunking of a terrorism suspect in tanks of ice water at a detention site in Afghanistan — a method that bore similarities to waterboarding but never appeared on any Justice Department- approved list of techniques.
Hannity and Murdock promote the phony “ticking time bomb” excuse for torture
Hannity said to Murdock:
If you knew that somebody in your family was killed on 9/11 or potentially was kidnapped and we needed to extract information, I wonder if these very same critics would be as harsh against them in that scenario.
In fact, the answer is probably yes. Professor Alfred W. McCoy has an excellent deconstruction of Hannity’s “ticking time bomb” myth – filled with the just the kind of facts Hannity can't be bothered with.
Murdock said, “I think they’d be a lot more forgiving of these patriotic Americans who got this information out.” He claimed that waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed had saved the Brooklyn Bridge and revealed other terrorism plots.
McCoy writes that the facts indicate otherwise.
Meanwhile, Perino cited “a continued political witch hunt, in particular against, not just the Bush administration, but the individuals who were carrying out orders to extract information from terrorists. …Why not protect men and women that were involved?" she asked.
Hannity added, “We asked these guys to do this and this is how our country treats them. It’s outrageous!” He banged on the table for emphasis.
By the way, it has now been 1805 days, or nearly five years since Hannity agreed to undergo waterboarding and prove that it’s not torture. He may want to forget that promise, but we won’t.
Last night, he then did a group interview with “the women of Duck Dynasty,” which his writers thought would be cute to have him promo as “what’s real life like behind the beards.” I changed the channel before he got to it.
The so-called study that the Bush administration put out to justify torture was no better than what this panel babbled on and on about (a circle-jerk?, but the foxies do so want their revenge and the idea of turning that screw just a little teeny bit more turns them on. So long as it’s them with the screwdriver, that is.
NOTE TO HANNITY
Man-up and waterboard yourself for our troops. They put their lives on the line for cafeteria Catholics like you.
Did ya’ll know that Hannocchio is such an accomplished, bald faced liar that he knows instinctively when anyone else lies.
Take, for example, Hannity’s tanking radio show We know it’s tanking because for the second month in a row, Savage is destroying him:
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and here in NYC, WOR will find any excuse to pre-empt Slanthead. Not only the scheduled Mets games, but the other day, a Rutgers basketball game knocked Hannity off the air for the full three hours.
Anyway, Slanthead spends a good deal of his radio time these days in trivial chit chat with his producer and interns. But on a recent day, he was back to a full first-hour rant. He started by telling his handful of listenters how he instructs his kids not to lie, then charged full bore into Kathleen Sebelius who had just announced an ACA extension.
“She lied!!” shrieked Slanthead. “She lied with she earlier set a firm signup date. She lied… She lied!!! Obama lied! Obama is a dictator, breaking his own law. They lied!!!”
On and on…
Isn’t a shame when they pre-empt great radio like this? Of course the NYC tri-state audience could always find Slanthead on iHeartradio (or so I’m told, I don’t bother). I don’t think they have a live stream on Hannocchio’s own web site. But hell, if they did and included a webcam so we could all see his nose growing in real time… now that would be something no one would pass up!
Instead:
By the way, it has now been 1805 days, or nearly five years since Hannity agreed to undergo waterboarding and prove that it’s not torture.
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