Did Jon Stewart call Harry Truman a war criminal? Yes he did

It was in the course of a segment that was announced at the beginning as about torture. Escort81, posting at TigerHawk's place, elicits a lot of comments.

That's not all he said. Listening to the full unedited conversation between Stewart and Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies requires hearing a lot more Stewart than May. It seems to be the reverse of an interview. Stewart is uninterested in what May thinks, and is too busy preaching to let him speak much.

Preaching not so much to Cliff May as to the audience. It brings to mind a thread at Making Light in which a consensus developed of agreement with the notion that if ordered to use torture, defined as the enhanced interrogation techniques mentioned in the Bradbury/Bybee memos, interrogators should refuse:

If this leads directly to a terrorist attack on my home city which causes my crushed body to be found under a pile of smoking rubble?

I am counting on someone from ML to make sure my gravestone says "she preferred this to condoning torture".

Most of the bodies of the 9/11 victims were never found. They were vaporized. The others who died in the pile of smoking rubble might have been more interested in, say, the continuation of Western Civilization than in display of moral superiority.

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Bill Whittle's reply to Stewart is both fact-filled and heartfelt. This is really a must-see, even if you don't care about Stewart at all.

Stewart has apologized, or recanted, or something, about the war criminal remark. It's not much.