I am great fan of Jon Stewart and I feel that he is the voice of sanity among the TV talk show hosts (sorry Bill O'Reilly). He talks perfect sense and let me state upfront that I am both liberal and conservative. Well you should be getting that from blog name. I think I will need another post explaining the title of my blog.
Yesterday on Daily Show Jon Stewart interviewed George Bush's speech writer and author of the book "Courting Disaster- How Obama is making America unsafe " Marc Theissen. I have never heard of this guy and as soon as I saw the book title I realized he was some right wing propagandist. Jon Stewart clearly was in a mood to destroy this guy and also set his record straight. On Jan11th, Jon interviewed John Yoo on torture laws of US, what constitutes as torture and where to draw the line. (Video). This was the first time I saw Jon was very incoherent in his arguments and John Yoo literally pwned Stewart. At the end of the video even Jon acknowledges that the interview was "pretty unsatisfying" and he was under-prepared. Right wing bloggers had field day criticizing Jon, calling him the liberal buffoon and Jon had to apologize to his liberal supporters.
Lets look into the backdrop of the interview. Liz Cheney's (daughter of Dick Cheney) Keep America Safe new ad demands to make public the details of all the lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees which was even criticized by the right wing. Marc Theissen has defended this ad in his Washington Post column. In the column he asks Should a lawyer who advocates setting terrorists(alleged, they may be innocent as well) free, knowing they may go on to kill Americans, have any role in setting U.S. detention policy? This point seems ridiculous to me. Pakistan for example, it has been alleged that ISI has been arresting individuals from tribal areas and having them extradited to US as Taliban terrorists. This was the focus of battle between Chief Justice Ifthikar and then dictator of Pakistan Parvez Musharaff. The CJ has asked the govt. to provide the list of all missing persons and also to investigate cash for arrests "scheme" of ISI.
Marc Theissen does not seem to be as intelligent as John Yoo or atleast he too thought he can win over Stewart the same way Yoo has done it. Only this time Jon Stewart was well prepared. You have to see the videos
David Frum in his blog writes that Jon Stewart was not graceful in his interview and that he just did not let Marc to speak. I have to say that I tend to agree with David Frum on this. There were instances in the interview when I felt Jon was not letting him speak but overall I think Marc had no right to say that he was not allowed to speak. Marc was not putting forth any valid points and he was making the same arguments that the terrorists are going to kill thousands of Americans and US needs to torture them to get information from them.
Here I will be treading the middle path. I do not think terrorists deserve Miranda rights and they need to be tortured to get the information. I do not have answers on what constitutes as torture. Well if only I had then I would be in law school.
PS: an interesting term I came to know from the interview was waterboarding. This is way of torture and people subjected this kind of torture cannot survive it for more than 15 seconds. You can watch a video of it over here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58
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