I don’t participate in Twitter or FB except to plug new writings, mainly because I don’t have the time. I admire people who can keep up with them. It is nice of you to want to read more. See the “books” section of this site, or my Amazon author’s page, or the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. The latter has a good search engine where you can find all sorts of stuff—er, erudite, wise commentary.

I think the best way to solve this is for Sean Hannity to submit to waterboarding as a charity benefit.

Frank: Duly corrected, thanks. The point of this post is to correct misquotations of Churchill, not to debate “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Thingumbob: Obama himself does not mention torture of his grandfather. See: richardlangworth.com/2009/03/more-obama-and-the-churchill-bust/

Mr Lofton: Keep reading. I did cover the anthrax charge (paragraph 6 above). If there is a reliable source showing Churchill wanted to use anthrax, neither I nor Martin Gilbert nor John Keegan has seen it.

Logical US: That is not a claim that torture was ineffective.

First, Obama claimed it didn’t work, then when called on that lie, Obama simply said “I don’t care.” That lives were saved doesn’t matter to Obama. It is his position, so own it.

Obama, who has no qualifications and no experience with interrogation, intelligence or military operations, claimed to know of all these wonderful techniques for getting information to save lives—from people who would kill him and you at a moment’s notice because they believe that they are doing the work of their religion—is quick to say that there are other ways BUT he never gives any examples. Why?

Because he has no clue. He is living in the fantasyland where his judgment overrules decades of experience and history. But when his judgment is wrong, Obama will simply do as he did with the photo-op attack on NYC: feign to be furious and try to appear above the whole issue, as if he was simply an innocent bystander like the rest of us. He just the same thing with the huge deficit, claiming that wasn’t him, even though he had voted for every measure as a member of the majority party from 2006 forward. He was a Senator was he not? Fact is, Obama and other leftists do not want to use anh coercion on terrorists because they believe that we deserved the attacks from “oppressed” people.

Dear oh dear. Where to begin?

Churchill’s memo reads: “I should be prepared to do anything that might hit the Germans in a murderous place. I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention. We could stop all work at the flying-bomb starting points.”

Churchill’s references to “poison gas” (as in Iraq, where he meant tear gas) are constantly misinterpreted. From Martin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life, 1991: “What he had in mind in this memo was mustard gas, ‘from which nearly everyone recovers.’ He would use it only if ‘it was life or death for us’ or if it would ‘shorten the war by a year.’ To this end it might even be used on the Normandy beach-head. ‘It is absurd to consider morality on this topic,’ he wrote, ‘when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course.’

“It would be several weeks or even months, Churchill added, ‘before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas.’ In the meantime he wanted the matter studied, he wrote, ‘in cold blood by sensible people, and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across, now here, now there.’ The enquiries were made. It emerged that the Air Staff had already made plans for one-fifth of Britain’s bomber effort to be employed on dropping gas, if such a form of warfare were decided on. But the military experts to whom Churchill
referred doubted whether gas, of the essentially non-lethal kind envisaged by him, could have a decisive effect, and no gas raids were made.

“News had just reached London of the mass murder in specially-designed gas chambers of more than two and a half million Jews at Auschwitz, which had hitherto been identified only as a slave-labour camp.”

So you tell me who the killers were.

Author Mike Davis in Dead Cities claimed that Churchill pursued using anthrax-laden bombs as a first-strike weapon against Nazi Germany. Davis based this “fact” on a 1987 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that pretended to know Churchill’s mind; it was later authoritatively rebutted in the same journal. Historian John Keegan wrote, “Nobody responsible thinks that Churchill intended to use anthrax against the Germans.”

Churchill lamented his inability to direct the American Air Force, as when he urged the bombing of the Auschwitz rail lines and his request was shuffled aside in favor of military targets. It was Stalin not Churchill who demanded the bombing of Dresden, Attlee who carried it out, though Churchill would also have complied with his ally’s request. Of RAF bombing, Churchill remarked: “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” No other leader on either side ever expressed reservations.