Well, this week, a friend and colleague of mine, Cliff May, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, who I work with Weekly here at PJTV, made an appearance on the Daily Show with John Stewart.

Now, Cliff and Mr. Stewart were having a heated argument on the subject of what constitutes torture and what is merely coercion.

Here's how the conversation unfolded.

In the World War II, we did not inflict pain and suffering on suspects in New York in Japan.

I would hope we didn't waterboard people. I would hope that's why we

We did do Hiroshima. You think you think Truman is a war criminal for that? Yeah. You do? Yeah. Okay.

Okay, look, this view expressed by John Stewart and shared by millions is becoming ever more

widely held the further away from the event we become. Stuart and others

maintained that the atomic bombings were criminal acts, claiming that the targeted cities

received no warning, or that they were of no military value, that the Japanese resistance

was crumbling and their use was necessary, and that Japan was trying to surrender at the

time of the bombings, which were therefore nothing but an unjustified and brutal signal

to merely show the Soviets who's the boss.

None of these positions stand up to the facts.

We'll come back to the moral issue in a moment,

but let's begin with the historical facts.

Here's what John Stewart himself had to say about the whole idea of warnings.

Here's what I think on the atom bombs.

I think if you dropped an atom bomb 15 miles offshore

and you said the next one. I think if you dropped an atom bomb 15 miles offshore and you said the

next one's coming and hitting you, then I would think it's okay. To drop one on a city and kill 100,000

people? You think that way? I think that's criminal. Okay, so Mr. Stewart's main point is that if the

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