Last night, Barack Obama said he had recently read an article about Winston Churchill during the London blitz. "Churchill said, 'We don't torture,' when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat," Obama said. "And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country."
It was, perhaps, the most powerful anecdote of the night, and an apparently powerful moral condemnation of President Bush, an admitted admirer of Churchill who kept the British leader's bust in the Oval Office. But it was not entirely true. Churchill may well have said that Britain did not torture, but British archives show clearly that captured Nazis were subjected to harsh treatment in order to extract information during World War II. This morning, Michael Tomasky points to this 2005 story in the Guardian about a secret World War II detention center called the "London Cage":
Of course, the Obama administration wouldn't want to let facts get in the way of their policy arguments.
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