Rear Admiral John Hutson Speaks Out on CNN

Rear Admiral John Hutson, who met along with a group of retired military leaders with the transition team on Wednesday appeared on CNN that night:

REAR ADMIRAL JOHN HUTSON (RET.), U.S. NAVY: The conversation went very well. It was productive. It was very forthright. We have come together. We are a group of 12, but we are a subset of about 40 admirals and generals who over the course of the last three years have been dealing with this very important issue. And we came here to talk with the transition team. We talked with Greg Craig and Mary DeRosa and Eric Holder, the attorney general nominee, to tell them how important we think it is that the new president say up front in the inaugural speech that the United States is not going to engage in torture or enhanced interrogations and then go through a series of actions to demonstrate that. And — and we feel this way, basically, because it — we think that gaining actionable intelligence is so incredibly important to protecting the United States and protecting U.S. troops and that those kinds of interrogation techniques are actually less effective. They are ineffective ways of doing it.

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We want to make sure that the United States takes the moral high ground. Now, I can’t promise you that, if your son goes into the military — and I hope he does — that how he is going to be treated if he is captured by the enemy. But, as John McCain said, you know, it is not about them. It is about us. And if we maintain the moral high ground, we are at least in a position where we can argue that this is the way it should be across the board. We are not — this group of admirals and general isn’t so naive as to believe that everybody is going to live up to our standard, but we sure as heck should live up to our standard ourselves.