Rep. Steve King: Interrogators Shouldn’t ‘Cuddle Up’ to Detainees

An Iowa Republican named Steve King wins the jackass award. He says first that we can’t trust interrogators who want to “cuddle up to someone” to get the truth, even though that’s pretty close to what professional interrogators actually do to get the truth. And then he says that Bush used the same “aggressive” reasoning to go into Iraq to deal with weapons of mass destruction, because if he hadn’t and “we had been attacked again,” or if we hadn’t waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and then we were attacked again, then the critics now would be perhaps impeaching Bush. This is his defense! A mess of counterfactual conditionals, factual misstatements (there, like, weren’t any WMDs in Iraq) and pure, unadulterated politics. God bless Mr. King.

Addington: “When you go to war, you ask the people some very tough things. You ask young men and women to do tough things. Same thing with intelligence agencies…[We don't want Congress saying] ‘Ah! Let’s investigate people.’  Things were different back then. The smoke was still rising, 3,000 Americans dead… [and] things are not as different today as some people might think. No american should think we’re free and al-Qaeda is beaten and the war’s over.”