On Fox News last night, Karl Rove suggested that President Obama’s decision to treat captives decently will become an incentive for terrorists to join al-Qaeda:
It has served, frankly, I think, as a recruiting tool. They can now take these memoranda and go to prospective, you know, recruits and say, This is the worst that the enemy, the United States, would ever do to you….It’s given them a tool to make it more attractive to recruit people, and you know, this kind of thing is harmful to us over the long haul.
Even by the normal standards of torture apologetics, this is batshit crazy. “The Americans are so civilized they treat their prisoners decently! We must destroy these infidels!”
That’s quite a sales pitch, isn’t it? Once again, Rove is demonstrating the tin ear for human nature that led him to destroy the fortunes of the Republican Party in a mere eight years.
