April 29, 2009

Obama, Churchill and Torture
Paraphrasing the Great Man’s Words April 2009

=====

In his press conference, in response to a ques­tion on the dis­clo­sure of top secret memos on the use of “enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods,”  President Obama said:

I was struck by an arti­cle that I was read­ing the other day talk­ing about the fact that the British dur­ing World War II, when Lon­don was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t tor­ture,’ when the entire British—all of the British people—were being sub­jected to unimag­in­able risk and threat….the rea­son was that Churchill under­stood — you start tak­ing short­cuts, over time, that cor­rodes what’s best in a peo­ple. It cor­rodes the char­ac­ter of a country.

While it’s nice to hear the Pres­i­dent invoke Sir Win­ston, the quo­ta­tion, is not entirely correct. While Churchill did express such sen­ti­ments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about pris­on­ers of war, enemy com­bat­ants or ter­ror­ists, who were in fact tor­tured by British inter­roga­tors dur­ing World War II.