Colbert: Let kids conduct torture trials

   Stephen Colbert has a great idea: Let kids conduct torture trials…

   “Kids have no political agenda. They ask great questions like ‘Do dogs go to heaven?’ and ‘When is it appropriate to abandoned the values of our country in order to save our country?’ Plus, kids will accept ‘because I told you so’ as a legitimate answer,” he explained.

   Condoleeza Rice recently stumbled while fielding a question from a fourth-grader about torture, repeating the same phrase three times.

   Paraphrased, the question was: What did Rice think about the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?

   Colbert was inspired by the fourth-grader’s question. “So let’s have Rice, Cheney and everyone else explain the nuance of their rationale to a jury of children,” he said.

   How might lawyers argue for torture in front of a jury of children? Colbert explains. “For example, kids, Mr. Bunny was a bad, bad bunny and he had information that President Raccoon needed so the president got his lawyer squirrels to write a magic letter which made everything did he did perfectly legal.”

   “Then Mr. Bunny was strapped to an inclined bench with a blanky over his nose and mouth and Willie the Whale squirted water into his face so Mr. Bunny thought he was drowning,” Colbert explained as if he were telling a children’s story. “But, remember, President Raccoon had a magic letter so it was not a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Then he married a princess. The end.”

   Colbert summed up his argument for allowing children to serve as jury to torture prosecutions. “After all, remember children are the future. And if we explain torture to them right, it will be a future where torture isn’t wrong.”

This video is from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, broadcast May 5, 2009.