Interro-gate

"Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers."  The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan on the Fox host's Sunday interview with former veep Dick Cheney.



Obama spox Robert Gibbs responds today to ABC's Jake Tapper:



Here's Andrew Sullivan Saturday after the WaPo published an astonishing piece on how torture worked on the brains behind 9/11:

It details that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed gave up a wealth of information in the period after he was tortured by Cheney and Bush via the CIA. It does not and cannot prove that his information could not have been procured by legal or ethical interrogation methods. But what is interesting to me is the Washington Post's editorial and institutional position in favor of not calling waterboarding and sleep deprivation what they have always been called in every court of law and every society including the US in recent times: torture. They refuse to use the word "torture" for an act that is memorialized in Cambodia's museum of torture. That's how deeply the Washington Post is enmeshed in the pro-torture forces in Washington. The refusal to use this word is a clear, political act by the Post in defense of the Bush administration's torture and abuse policies. It places the Washington Post as an adjunct to the Bush-Cheney policy of torturing thousands of prisoners across every theater of war and across the globe.

Let's go to The Daily Banter's Ben Cohen, shall we?  "It shouldn't be too much to ask for a featured political journalist to ask him some tough questions. But given Cheney will only ever talk to Fox hacks like Wallace, we'll most likely never see that happen. Instead, we'll get fluff pieces glossing over his tragic record in office and no serious attempt to hold him to account. And torture, it seems, is a Fox News favorite. Tragic."

What's tragic is what Hezbollah did to CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley in the 1980s proving torture works. I'm not going to get into Buckley's case here.  Just click on the labels below. 

Had I been interviewing Cheney I probably wouldn't have been deferential like Wallace is at the end of the interview. He asked solid questions.  Predictably not tough enough for Sullivan and his liberal ilk.

Regarding the Washington Post story, my friend Bob Woodward is close to the CIA.  The WaPo is changing the torture dialogue much to the chagrin of those claiming Cheney's a "war criminal."  I'd make book that certain individuals at the Washington Post know more than their chest-beating media brethren.

Related:  What If Torture Did Work?  Daily Intel New York Magazine