NEOCON PROPAGANDIST, STEPHEN ‘SMOKEY’ HAYES, ATTEMPTS TO JUSTIFY THE UNJUSTIFIABLE.

A Murdoch propagandist with the neocon comic ‘The Weekly Standard’, Stephen ‘Smokey’ Hayes, has ludicrously attempted to justify torture based on the age-old simplistic argument; that it works.

Apart from the fact that there is much evidence to suggest that torture actually very rarely works, there is also the small matter of it being completely illegal, not to mention immoral. Old Smokey reckons that there has been some “high-value information” resulting from torture but doesn’t say what that was saying that we should blame Obama for that because Dick Cheney “has asked for them to be declassified and made public” but, of course, according to Smokey, Obama is as likely to do that as Dick Cheney is likely to “take up synchronised swimming in his retirement”. One can bet that Dick Cheney made the suggestion about ‘declassifying them and making them public’ knowing full well that that was never going to happen.

It would be a good idea if the Obama administration did declassify this stuff and make it available to the public because the validity of such so-called “high-value information” can soon then be checked out.

But that’s missing the point; regardless of whether or not torture yields “high-value information”, it is just plain illegal and totally immoral by any standards. Smokey Hayes and his kind may want to take us back to the dark ages of history but most people on this planet would prefer to move forward rather than backwards.