Stephen Colbert

Here’s something I never thought I’d say: kudos to Bill O’Reilly.

From FOX News, via Andrew Sullivan:

O’REILLY: Now Brian Ross of ABC said — reported the CIA waterboarded [Khalid Sheik] Mohammed. That is dunked him in water, tied him down and then that broke him. Is that true?

BUSH: We don’t talk about techniques. And the reason we don’t talk about techniques is because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust. We’re in a war.

O’REILLY: Is waterboarding torture?

BUSH: I don’t want to talk about techniques. And — but I do share the American people that we were within the law. And we don’t torture. We — I’ve said all along to the American people we won’t torture, but we need to be in a position where we can interrogate these people.

O’REILLY: But if the public doesn’t know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?

BUSH: Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we’re not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.

But what the American people need to know is we’ve got a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people. And we’ve used it to stop attacks.

Before we begin scanning the skies for flying pigs, it should be known that the tough questioning in this excerpt is not necessarily typical of the interview as a whole. Nevertheless, O’Reilly deserves credit for putting the waterboarding question directly to Mr. Bush – it was more than anyone else had done.

Bush’s ham-fisted evasion, “We’re not going to talk about techniques… because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust” is ludicrous on several levels. First, it’s such an obvious smoke screen that it practically begs for a Colbert-esque “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ” The absurdity is dialed up further with the notion that Bush’s answering the question would enable the enemy to “adjust.” This assumes that the preceding several weeks of public controversy over such interrogation methods somehow escaped the terrorists’ notice. To top it off, the president apparently believes that our foes are capable of turning themselves into amphibians in order to resist being waterboarded. This just in: Aqua-Man has defected to Al Qaeda.

George W. Bush is not just a bad president – he’s an embarrassment to the office. The loftiest hope I can summon for the next two years is that he does as little further damage as possible. The toll his policies have taken on the American citizenry is severe, and the stain he is leaving on the good name of our country will take years to scrub away.