Well, if you missed Dick Cheney's recent interview on Face the Nation, here's a great summation of what the former VP thinks on looking back on his days as co-president. I direct your attention to two arguments of the presiDick's:
1. As I alluded to a few weeks back, Cheney is still clinging to that same tired "We kept America safe" line. The former VP relies far too heavily on an increasingly weak counter-factual assertion that the Bush administration's enhanced terror techniques, those that "were not torture," made and kept Americans safe. Cheney even presses Bob Schieffer to think of the grilling (no pun, maybe) he would have received had the administration not gone forward with torture. Oh, Dick, you are as Limbaugh suggests, "the lone voice."
2. Enhanced torture worked well. Proof? No attacks post-9.11. And even if it didn't, Cheney continues to feel that defying the U.S. Constitution and refusing our commitments to international law and treaty obligations was needed and legal during "a time of war." Shockingly, Cheney boldly compared the administration's actions to those of Lincoln's suspension of habeaus corpus and FDR's WWII Japanese internment camps and concluded that the torture he and Condi, Rummy, GW, et. al., designed/approved were not nearly as severe as American war time precedents. When Schieffer rightly states that those actions by both Lincoln and FDR are viewed by historians and constitutional law experts as illegal, Cheney echoes the logic of his fellow Dick, Tricky that is: We took seriously our role to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic...and that no one's civil liberties were being denied. Is anyone as outraged as I am by this defense of torture via the politics of fear and "safety"? Ever heard of human rights, Dick? Again, I don't care how many lives you say you saved. America, as a nation that prizes the rule of law, should not be engaged in torture... for any reason.
Given the testimony of former FBI agent Ali Soufan, a participant in the early interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, torture did NOT work as VP Cheney has proclaimed. Sorry no video has been posted yet (he testified before Congress this morning), but do read what Soufan had to say in a NYTimes op-ed, as well as this enlightening New Yorker profile by Lawrence Wright and an informative piece on Soufan's place inside an intelligence community hamstrung by the Bush administration's decisions that the U.S. should use torture. This last article can be found at the The Washington Independent.
Comment. Let me know what you think.
TCH
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2 comments:
I don't know if you saw Dick's speech today, but I've never been so angry dealing with politics. That man is horrible and a murderer. I am appalled that Christians are no outraged by this sin. Oh yes I forgot, Dobson and Co. are too busy praising Ms. California for not liking gay marriage. Maybe she even put a shirt on for her interview...
Yeah, I get it. There's a lot of anger going 'round these days and not enough of it directed at the fellas who put us in our current situations. You gotta love ole Darth, I mean Dick, though...he sure keeps liberals fired up and conservatives distracted (or is it bored?) beyond disbelief.
TCH
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