Fox News host Andrea Tantaros had a somewhat unique reaction to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture programs, which included for example forcing hummus into a detainee’s rectum and threatening to rape a detainee’s mother.
Fox News host on torture report: “America is awesome”
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
“The United States of America is awesome. We are awesome, but we’ve had this discussion” about torture, Tantaros said. She lamented, “the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are;” rather, “this administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.” This is because “they apologized for this country, they don’t like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again.”
She also alleges that the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report, announced in 2009 and released now over the Obama administration’s objections, was a plot to distract from Obamacare’s latest political woes. It starts around 2:59:
Inasmuch as one can discern a point from Tantaros, it’s that the United States has stopped torturing people and, thus, America doesn’t need to talk about it anymore.
What she misses it that, given that there’s been almost no legal accountability for torture at the highest levels, there’s not much of a legal barrier to the United States beginning to torture again. Being honest about the horror of the torture program is a substitute — incomplete, but something — for real justice.
(Hat tip: TPM)
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