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April 30, 2009

WND On Obama's 'Dumb Enchanted Evening' (Updated)

Topics: Political News and commentaries

In last night's never-ending, ongoing, campaign presser Barack Obama - in responding to NYT's Jeff Zeleny's "fawning question" last night: "What has "Enchanted you the most from [sic.] serving in this office?" - defended his banning CIA interrogators of using harsh interrogation techniques against al-Qaeda operatives, with:

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.

As it turns out, like so many of Obama's claims and statements, what he said is simply not true at all. In fact, quite the contrary:

This tidbit was presumably gleaned from Niall Ferguson's 2006 piece "Why Churchill Opposed Torture" in the Los Angeles Times, or Andrew Sullivan's recent blog on a topic he's exploited for months. However, as Charles Johnson has long since pointed out, it's absolutely false. At the outset of World War II, the Chamberlain government passed Defence Regulation 18B, which allowed for the internment of anyone dubbed to be of "hostile origin or associations." Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert records how within a year Churchill detained "tens of thousands" of "enemy aliens," and some "were German anti-Nazi refugees...including many German and Austrian Jews." These detainees could be held indefinitely, without benefit of habeas corpus, and the ranks soon expanded to include native Britons of suspect political views. Shortly, Sir (yes, Sir!) Oswald Mosley would be carted off, along with most of the membership of the British Union of Fascists.

Nor did Churchill hold all uniformed German soldiers in placid dignity. Many were taken to a prison known as the "London Cage," a long-kept wartime secret, which operated from July 1940 to September 1948. Its commander, Lt. Col. Alexander P. Scotland, remarked how he would tell himself each day upon entering, "'Abandon all hope ye who enter here.' For if any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run." The (UK) Guardian reported the Cage's "prisoners had been forced to kneel while being beaten about the head; forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours; threatened with execution; or threatened with 'an unnecessary operation.'" (You can read more on the London Cage here.)

Not only did Conservative icon Winston Churchill support the measure, there is every reason to believe his socialist successor, Clement Atlee, approved of Regulation 18B (which he helped implement) and presided over even worse tortures of Germans.

Much more here ...

Related:
Obama's Mistake: Britain Did Torture.
NYT "reporter" Jeff Zeleny: The Perry Como of the press corps

Posted by Hyscience at April 30, 2009 7:30 AM

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