Obama Misquotes Churchill in Press Conference
Not quite the Great Man’s words:
In his press conference of 29 April, in a response to a question on the disclosure of top secret memos on the use of “enhanced interrogation methods,” Mr. Obama said:
…“I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when the entire British-all of the British people-were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat….the reason was that Churchill understood - you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.”
…While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Winston Churchill, the quotation is unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. While Churchill did express such sentiments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about prisoners of war, enemy combatants or terrorists, who were in fact tortured by British interrogators during World War II.
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