Fox hosts think CIA black site torture criminal is “hero”

Greg Gutfeld

The reactions are coming in to Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel, a career CIA official who ran a “black site” in Thailand and oversaw the torture of prisoners there, to run the agency. Much of them are rightly condemnatory, but there are those who’ll stop at nothing to defend Trump’s every decision and praise anyone he picks, and you already know I’m talking about Fox News, don’t you. Here’s a representative take:

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): I think she should be proud of what she did. […] She has to make decisions that a lot of her critics don't have to make. She answered the call, and that call forces you to make decisions that could put you in jail. So, the thing is, if you are faced with a potential terror attack that could kill thousands, and they say "But if you do this, you go to jail," -- if you follow that order, you are wrong. If you follow the order that puts you in jail, that makes you a hero.

DANA PERINO (CO-HOST): And they save lives.

GUTFELD: And they save lives, so I think she is a hero. And if she was a TV character, she would be a hero, a woman running a black site, that's -- that's -- that's a great character.

You know, I fully expected Fox News talking heads to defend Haspel in spite of her involvement in torture. I didn’t expect them to praise her because of it. But that’s what blind partisanship does – you don’t just excuse the inexcusable, you claim them as your own and try to spin their monstrosity as a gain, even if that makes you as ghoulish as they are.

Funny of Gutfeld to say that Haspel’s actions could have landed her in prison, though. We all know that government officials don’t get punished by their own when they commit crimes; they’re defended and even promoted. Accountability isn’t a word that exists in the US government’s lexicon.