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Accuracy in Media 40th Anniversary: National Review's Andrew McCarthy says torture keeps us safe
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Andrew C. McCarthy Senior Fellow National Review Institute
Today C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2 provided full coverage of the conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media's 40th Anniversary Conference. Right-wing speakers came from across the country, and even one from Ireland, to the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC today to say that torture is good, organic food is bad, global warming is a hoax or at least a good thing, Al Gore is not evil just wrong and journalists are patsies for the Democratic Party.
Let's talk about torture.
Andrew McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He spoke about the Bush torture memos and how without torture the US could get hit again with another 9/11 attack.
Torture's not torture if lawyers say it's not.
"The Bush torture memos are a methodical effort first to identify the legal line separating torture from permissibly aggressive questioning, and second, to steer the CIA interrogators away from that line," McCarthy said, "ensuring that they were not violating the law."
He said that the Bush torture memos "actually prove a motive not to torture."
The current torture investigation by Attorney General Eric Holder is all about politics - not justice.
"That is why the ongoing investigations of the Bush administration officials, and the CIA interrogators are so shameful. It is sheer, brute, noxious politicizing of our justice system," McCarthy said.
To legally be considered torture, he asserted that the intent of the interrogators has to be considered. In May, Attorney General Eric Holder was questioned by Congress as to whether the training exercise of water-boarding US Navy Seals was torture. Holder said that it wasn't torture because the intent was to train and not to inflict physical or mental harm.
And that's the issue - intent. According to McCarthy, Holder's statements proves that the Bush administration did not torture anyone because the intent was not to inflict pain but to get information by inflicting pain.
"We didn't water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and a grand total of two to other terrorists six years ago," McCarthy reasoned, "in order to torment them physically or mentally, we did it to obtain lifesaving intelligence."
By supporting a policy of timidity, as he said the Obama administration is now doing and evidently the Bush administration was implementing prior to 9/11, the president sends a message to the intelligence community "not to take the measures necessary to prevent another 9/11. And that is how the last 9/11 happened," McCarthy theorized.
"And now here we are back in a September 10th world. Only I think it's worse now." McCarthy added, "It is the stuff of Banana Republics. It is the stuff of tyranny."
Accuracy in Media is a non-profit "conservative media" watchdog group "that critiques botched and bungled news stories and sets the record straight on important issues that have received slanted coverage," according the organization's Web site.
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