I hate to admit — really, I do — but this week, none other than Bill O’Reilly asked one of the best questions in a Bush interview in a very long time. Maybe he did it by accident, maybe he asked it expecting the president to have a better answer, but whatever the explanation, it led to an important exchange.
O’Reilly sat down with the president and asked him about torture of detainees in U.S. custody. The Fox News personality brought up waterboarding, prompting Bush to say, “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.”
Now, I’ve never quite understood how terrorist suspects could “adjust” in preparation for waterboarding. As Jon Stewart once joked, what are they going to do, grow gills?
Nevertheless, O’Reilly followed up, asking if waterboarding is torture, regardless of whether we’ve utilized the method of interrogation or not. Bush dodged and said, “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’s responded, “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?”
At which point Bush looked around the room, cleared his throat, leaned forward, and said, “Uh, isn’t this a Fox News interview? Aren’t you Bill O’Reilly? How about you ixnay on the orture-tay?”
No, not really, but I bet he thought it.
The president’s actual response was about as compelling.
“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. The intelligence community believes strongly that the information we got from the detainee questioning program yielded information that made America safer, that we stopped attacks. […]
“What’s interesting about these votes that took place in the Congress is the number of Democrats that opposed questioning people we’ve picked up on the battlefield. And I think that’s an issue that they’re going to have to explain to the American people.”
In other words, when asked how Americans can judge the president’s policy if we don’t know what torture is by the White House’s standards, Bush said, “Trust me; I know what I’m doing. And by the way, Democrats are bad, because they keep asking pesky questions and talking about pesky laws. Heh heh.”
What’s more, Andrew Sullivan raised a good point about the president’s use of the word “questioning.”
Here’s his description of torture: “questioning people we’ve picked up on the battlefield.” It’s a direct lie on many levels. Many of those we have tortured were not on any battlefield. Many in Gitmo are innocent and many have been released as innocent. Secondly, we have moved from the plain English “torture” to “coercive interrogation techniques” to mere “questioning.” This is simply lying. If the president were asking for the right merely to question detainees, there would be no debate at all. But he isn’t. And we all know that, don’t we? Even those who support the president on this have to concede he’s lying, right?
I’m afraid those who support the president aren’t in the mood to concede anything right now; they have an election to win.