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| Senator Sleaze Scott Brown (R-MS) |
Identity Politics cartoon thumbnail via Kos
Sean Hannity Is Pissed That Obama Killed Bin Laden So He Takes Revenge In Unhinged Attacks
Sean Hannity devoted his Fox News show Friday to furthering misleading attacks on President Obama's record on national security.Hannity once promised to undergo waterbroading to prove it was not torture. To this day Hannity has not kept his promise to be waterbroaded. Like your average conservative pundits Hannity has one quality in great supply, cowardice. Hannity may be even be a bigger coward than he is a liar and hypocrite. Hannity is not an American patriotic he is a blister, a pox, trying to degrade American values. That is the reason he has so many conservative fans. Sean-boy reflects their values. Regardless of what pretend patriots like Hannity and his fans think waterbroading is illegal and immoral. The U.S. government prosecuted the Japanese for using water torture during WW II.
Hannity opened his show by playing a misleading political ad from a right-wing political activist that deceptively edited statements President Obama made about the Osama bin Laden raid to make it look like Obama took all the credit for the success of the raid himself. Hannity then asked audience members whether they agreed that Obama "politicized the killing of bin Laden this week":
The reality is that President Obama has repeatedly thanked and praised the American troops and other military and intelligence individuals who participated in the mission.
Hannity later turned to birther and less than ethical Fox military analyst Gen. Thomas McInerney to criticize the Obama administration for attempting to negotiate with the Taliban. McInerney said "you can't negotiate with them." However, CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and many other national security experts have said that it is in America's interest to negotiate with the Taliban.
Perhaps the most disgraceful part of Hannity's special was when he brought up the topic of waterboarding and said that "President Obama calls that torture." Fox national security analyst KT McFarland then offered a full-throated defense of the practice:
McFARLAND: No, it's not torture. And there's a second issue, which is: Did it work? And it worked. And if it worked, it's kept the United States safe for this last 10 years -- even if it's torture, it's probably worth doing.
In fact, former interrogators, intelligence officials, and experts have stated that torture did not lead to bin Laden's whereabouts, and furthermore, that it doesn't provide trustworthy information.
And it's not just President Obama that "claims" waterboarding is torture.
In April 2006, Human Rights Watch sent an open letter to Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, signed by more than 100 law and legal studies professors, which stated that "waterboarding is torture." The letter continued:
Waterboarding is torture. It causes severe physical suffering in the form of reflexive choking, gagging, and the feeling of suffocation. It may cause severe pain in some cases. If uninterrupted, waterboarding will cause death by suffocation. It is also foreseeable that waterboarding, by producing an experience of drowning, will cause severe mental pain and suffering. The technique is a form of mock execution by suffocation with water. The process incapacitates the victim from drawing breath, and causes panic, distress, and terror of imminent death. Many victims of waterboarding suffer prolonged mental harm for years and even decades afterward.
Military experts, including a Bush adviser on terrorism, agree. So does Republican Sen. John McCain, who wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in May 2011 that waterboarding "is a mock execution and thus an exquisite form of torture."
And according to the most recent major polling on the issue, a majority of Americans also consider waterboarding to be torture.
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