Fox’s Shep Smith: ‘Sad and Horrifying’ That We’re Still Debating Torture

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith is clearly disturbed by the sight of U.S. officials like CIA Director John Brennan defending actions that the Senate Intelligence Committee report has unequivocally labeled “torture.” During his coverage of Brennan’s press conference Thursday, he called the ongoing debate “sad and horrifying.”

“All these years later we’re sitting around debating whether terror — whether we were torturing, whether that was okay — it’s sad and horrifying,” Smith told his guest, Wall Street Journal assistant managing editor John Bussey.

Bussey agreed, adding that the debate will “continue for some time” given that Brennan is insisting that “enhanced interrogation techniques” did help provide useful information to the CIA. But as Smith pointed out, the Senate report shows that interrogators got the information they needed “before we tortured these people.”

“It’s torture, that’s what it is,” Smith said. “Is there going to come a time when we can just look and go, ‘we did bad things, we shouldn’t have done those bad things, and we need to make sure these bad things don’t happen again?'”

The anchor then quoted former President Ronald Reagan’s description of America as a “shining city on a hill” and declared, “We’re America, we don’t torture.”

That’s a statement that’s a lot harder to make after the release of the Senate report this week.

Watch video below, via Fox News:

[Photo via screengrab]

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