You people are overreacting re: Torture/Patriots
There's a full paragraph between the mention of torturing some folks and the mention of the national security team and law enforcement doing horrific things out of fear being patriots.
So stop taking it out of context.
I understand why it happened. I — I think it — it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the twins towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And, you know, it — it — it — it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.
But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And that’s what that report reflects. And that’s the reason why after I took office, one of the first things I did was to ban some of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of that report. And my hope is, is that this report reminds us once again that, you know, the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy but what we do when things are hard. And — and — and when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line. And — and that needs to be — that needs to be understood and accepted. And we have to as a country take responsibility for that so that hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.
= new reply since forum marked as read
that the unbolded sentences were a list of ways to understand the 'it', the torture, the 'things we did wrong'. He was listing reasons why the 'wrong' things were understandable, in his view ("I understand why it happened"
.
He's cautioning us not to be sanctimonious. It wouldn't occur to anybody to be sanctimonious about what law enforcement and national security teams did RIGHT. That's not logical. He's cautioning us not to be sanctimonious about what those people did WRONG. Which was torture.
He has one more excuse for those 'folks'—that they had a tough job. Well, there were people who had a tough job who DIDN'T torture. But he doesn't make any distinction there between them. He just says vaguely that 'a lot of them' were patriots.
He's weaseling through this little speech and I can forgive that it's probably because it's extemporaneous; I don't think he's as gifted in spontaneous speech as he is when he prepares his thoughts in advance. I don't even give a shit about the 'patriots' part. What I can't forgive is the accusation that I am sanctimonious in judging the people who carried out torture.
. . . with his family held hostage in the WH by the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI holding pictures of him eating thanksgiving turkey only hours after the public pardoning.
