on Linus Pauling's garage door in San Francisco after he hired a Japanese gardener after the internment camps closed. Pauling's wife was an ACLU activist who had been vocal in opposing their forced evacuation and internment, while Pauling himself had been a "center right" Republican up until the jingoes attacked him and his wife in 1945. It included death threats.

Now, can O'Reilly produce a single shred of evidence -- any document, statement, speech, photo, whatever -- that the ACLU "believes America is a bad place, desperately in need of an overhaul"? No. He's talking out of his rear quarters, as usual.

Mostly, O'Reilly wants us all to forget that clear and irrevocable object lesson of this controversy: Torture makes us less safe.

It's not the photos themselves that have made us vulnerable, but the policies that enabled the acts captured on film:

What's clearly never occurred to O'Reilly is the reality that what he's looking at is one of the very pragmatic and practical reasons American forces have historically eschewed torture: Indulging it not only gives our enemies a rationale to employ it on our own soldiers when captured, but in fact motivates them to capture our soldiers solely for the purpose of retaliatory torture.