Jesse Ventura: Jeb Bush’s Comments on Torture Should Disqualify Him from Being President

It is a crime to torture someone you have captured at war. That is a crime. There are no exceptions to a crime.

On one hand Jeb Bush is saying: generally feeling, I don’t support torture… But I can see the point where there would be an occasional exception. No there isn’t. Torture is torture.

I would like to know, Jeb, to whom does it fall to to determine the exception? You? If you’re the elected president will it come into the oval office with the name of the prisoner and they’ll lay it all out for you and you’ll make the call to torture? Or will an underling with the policy that allows it to be abused do it? Who would you trust to commit a war crime, to order a war crime, other than yourself?

And you blame 9/11. You say: well 9/11 happened so therefore torturing people was perfectly ok. The world’s greatest generation didn’t quite agree with that when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. Did we immediately start torturing people that we captured? I hope not. I hope we didn’t commit a war crime after Pearl Harbor. Your brother and Dick Cheney can’t make that statement because, under their administration, the US did commit war crimes. And I find it astounding that people in this county would accept that. That there would be an exception: “Well it’s ok, after all these are Muslims in the Middle East, who cares if we torture them or not.”

When you advocate torture, you’re putting our people in the service in danger. Because if we torture, how can we complain if someone else does?  I wonder if we thought the same thing when Russia invaded, or when the Nazis invaded, or when other people invaded other sovereign nations and tortured people.

Oh, but that’s right, there’s was different than ours.

-Jesse Ventura