Making It Up As He Goes Along

I got a chuckle out of one incident during last week's 100 Day Celebration Presser. ABC News Jake Tapper asked the President a question about torture. The President's answer was long, rambling and historically inaccurate.

"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. And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country."

Yesterday, Mr. Tapper put together a column that told the real history of Winston Churchill's torture policy.

On the other hand, of President Obama's quoting Churchill saying "We don't torture," Churchill scholar Richard Langworth writes that "While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Sir Winston, the quotation is unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. 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.

Langworth writes that the word "torture” appears 156 times in his "digital transcript of Churchill’s 15 million published words (books, articles, speeches, papers) and 35 million words about him—but not once in the subject context. Similarly, key phrases like 'character of a country' or 'erodes the character' do not track. Churchill spoke frequently about torture, mostly enemy murders of civilians. His daughter once told me, 'He would have done anything to win the war, and I daresay he had to do some pretty rough things—but they didn’t unman him.' But if Churchill is on record about 'enhanced interrogation,' his words have yet to surface."

More importantly though is that in all the wars that the Brits fought while Churchill was PM, torture was used on enemy prisoners of war.

A November 2005 story in the Guardian details torture by British soldiers between 1940 and 1948, at the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre -- known as the "London Cage" -- run by MI19, responsible for interrogating enemy prisoners of war.

The Guardian concluded that the London Cage "was used partly as a torture centre," where 3,573 German officers and soldiers were brutally interrogated. SS Captain Fritz Knoechlein, taken to the Cage in October 1946, alleged he was starved, beaten and kept awake for four days straight.

The author of the story, Ian Cobain, told NPR last Friday described The Cage as an interrogation center "the British ran during and immediately after the Second World War, which German officers, suspected spies or some civilians would be interrogated. And the methods used there, most people would agree, were torture. We used sleep deprivation. We used beatings. We used exposure to extreme heat and extreme cold. And at the Cage, at least, we used the threat of unnecessary surgery."

But most troubling is that the President seemed to forget (if he even ever knew) about his own personal ties to Sir Winston and torture. As I noted in an earlier post his own grandfather was tortured by the British who thought that Grandpa Obama was part of the Mau Mau Rebellion.

If I could be so bold as to make a suggestion Mr. President. It might not be a half bad idea, if you are going to get your history from a partisan opinion meister like Andrew Sullivan that you to go to a second source to back up what you read there. You should not take what you read in a partisan opinion site (any partisan opinion site) as the gospel. In Latin the phrase is "Caveat Emptor" - let the buyer beware. It is something that we should ALL remember when it comes to dealing with any media sources - alternative or mainstream.