Fox News doubled down its support for the Central Intelligence Agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”—also known as torture—during a broadcast of its hit show The Five on Wednesday.
The showed began with a rant from Greg Gutfeld, host of the late-night show Red Eye, in response to the release of a long-awaited Senate report on CIA torture.
We enjoy this bubble of freedom thanks to stuff we don’t see, stuff we don’t wanna see. Tactics that aren’t for spin the bottle, but to protect a civilization—ours. The CIA, God bless them, understand this question. If your family was targeted for attack, wouldn’t you want every tool available to stop it?
“Our enemies gladly do things far worse than what’s alleged here,” Gutfeld added. “And not to save lives, but just for sick kicks.”
Arguing in favor of the morality of torture, Andrea Tantaros presented this hypothetical: “If there was an attack on Times Square, it would be impending, and if we knew someone had information, it would be immoral not to ask.”
It’s unclear if by “ask,” Tantaros means to forcefully insert inanimate objects into prisoners’ anuses, one of the practices detailed in the Senate report. Despite her own argument, she added that debating the morality of torture is irrelevant. “This stuff about dealing with it in the abstract—is it immoral is it not?—I just don’t buy it,” she said. “Whether you’re for torture or not, we used to torture, we don’t anymore. We do not, right? So that’s why. Why are we bringing this up now?”
Who can argue with that?
Gutfeld once again chimed in: “They were fighting a new war,” he said. “There were new rules. And all they were trying to do was save a civilization.”
“They keep calling it the Senate report, which I think is an injustice,” Dana Perino answered. “This is a Senate minority… majority report—meaning that it’s a Senate Democratic report, that didn’t even bother talking to the people who were involved.”
Perino continued on, pausing once in mid-thought to remind herself that she isn’t supposed to refer to it as torture: “President Obama says that’s not who we are, okay, the torture stuff or whatever—I’m not going to call it torture, I’m going to say ‘enhanced interrogation,’ tough talk to some terrorists. That’s not who we are, but we are okay with blowing to smithereens people who we think may or may not be involved in terror, and not trying to capture them and get the human intel from them?”
Reading from a script, Eric Bolling told Gutfeld that there were no detainees killed while in CIA custody. The agency has, by the way, admitted the death of a detainee in Nov. 2002 at an Afghan black site known as the “Salt Pit,” or as the “Dark Prison” by former captives. None of Bolling’s colleagues, including Gutfeld, who opened the show Senate report fact sheet in hand, bothered to correct the blunder.
Screengrab via Fox News/YouTube
