Colbert: US Constitution doesn't say 'don't torture'
Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert set out on Tuesday to mockingly challenge author Jane Mayer's assertion that "America is synonymous with torture." Mayer is the
author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.
"Walking on the dark side," Colbert began. "Vice President Cheney warned us we'd have to do it. ... Did you selectively forget that?"
"I named the book after his quote," Mayer replied. "He said it was going to be a war we fought in the shadows, and I thought it'd be nice to shine a little light and see what that war consisted of. ... It's the story of how we became a torture state."
"There's nothing in the Constitution that says, 'Don't torture,'" Colbert pointed out. "It says 'cruel and unusual. What we're doing may be cruel but it is no longer unusual for us to do it."
"One of the things I write about here is how many clever lawyers it took to come up with analysis like that," responded Mayer. "Waterboarding ... used to be a crime, a major crime, but now it's not any more. Same with things like extraordinary rendition, where you could pick somebody up ... put them in a dungeon and throw away the key."
Colbert quickly noted that those dungeons are all "in another country. ... What I don't know about, 'no harm, no foul.' Except for the harmful fouls."
Mayer continued to emphasize the distortions of language involved in the torture program, noting that "enhanced interrogation is a euphemism for hurting people on purpose."
"You're making it sound bad," Colbert objected. "'Enhanced,' that's a positive term, like 'male enhancement.' We spend lots of money. I get emails all the time."
Colbert then turned to Mayer's central argument that the war on terror has damaged American ideals, saying, "Even if we torture -- Donald Rumsfeld said it best, about Abu Ghraib -- the problem here is people found out that we were doing it."
"Ideals are eternal until you do something publicly," Colbert explained. "If we had never known that the government is doing this, the way the government didn't want us to know, the ideals would still be intact. But people like you want to harm our ideals by letting us know what it is we're doing on the dark side. Aren't you part of the problem?"
"It could be a real problem for some of the top people in the administration," Mayer acknowledged.
Colbert concluded by saying optimistically, "In 1971, the CIA led a coup that led to the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile.... Now they're kind of just three-quarters drowning people to get information. I'd say, isn't that progression?"
This video is from Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, broadcast August 12, 2008.
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