Guilt By Jon Stewart
One day my interrogator told me that, ‘We have video evidence of you working as a spy,’ and then when he put the DVD of The Daily Show in the laptop, I just thought, ‘Oh my God.’
The myriad of arguments against torture aside, do pro-torture advocates really want to place themselves in the same camp as folks who can’t tell that The Daily Show is satire? If there is a more relevant argument to demonstrate why the mindset of folks who support torture is not worthy of American ideals and values, I’ve not seen it.
In all seriousness, though, Bahari’s full interview with CBC’s Nancy Durham (sorry, not able to embed it) is well worth the thirty-eight plus minutes of your time.
The comment that most caught my attention was when Bahari said that it was important that the West engage Iran so Iran understands there are consequences to its decisions. Think about that for a moment: a man who was imprisoned and tortured for 118 days on clearly fictional charges of espionage, who was told regularly that he would be executed without ever having the chance to see his unborn child, whose mind and spirit became so strained that he seriously contemplated suicide thinks that engagement with Iran is the right course of action.
Perhaps the “Obama is an appeaser because he wants to engage countries like Iran” meme will ease up a bit in light of Bahari’s commentary. Or perhaps they think Bahari himself is a pro-appeasement Manchurian candidate set loose by the Iranian government. Maybe they saw it on the Colbert Report…
November 23, 2009 23 Comments
