The only question remaining now is whether former Vice President Dick Cheney personally participated in waterboarding people. When it comes to torture, hell yes, Cheney was totally on board.

On Sunday, Cheney unequivocally stated the Bush administration tortured prisoners. On ABC’s “This Week” Cheney said, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding.”

I guess one could argue that waterboarding isn’t torture, or illegal. But if you remember Vietnam, you might recall the story about the US soldier who was court-martialled for waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Washington Post ran a photo of the torture.

That was back when the US had a news media willing and able to challenge the government. Now we just have media without the news.

“Water boarding was designated as illegal by US generals in Vietnam 40 years ago,” ABC News reported in 2005 in their story “History of an Interrogation Technique: Water Boarding.”

Sen. John McCain(R-Ariz), who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam, said the water-board technique is a “very exquisite torture” that should be outlawed, according to the ABC News report.

Waterboarding has been outlawed. We signed the Geneva Convention that prohibits torture. And here’s what the US Justice Department’s Criminal Manual says about torture.

Section 2340A of Title 18, United States Code, prohibits torture committed by public officials under color of law against persons within the public official’s custody or control. Torture is defined to include acts specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. (It does not include such pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions.) The statute applies only to acts of torture committed outside the United States. There is Federal extraterritorial jurisdiction over such acts whenever the perpetrator is a national of the United States or the alleged offender is found within the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or the alleged offender.

So where’s the Justice Department investigation Attorney General Eric Holder was yammering about last year?

The story is that Holder is waiting on the Office of Professional Responsibility to complete its report on the Bush torture program. Well, it’s been a year now, and it looks a lot more like a cover-up than an investigation.

The sad truth is that this is NOT a nation of laws but rather men, and this case proves that. These men can break any law they want and get away with it.

Maybe an international war crimes tribunal is a more appropriate venue anyway?

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Here are links to stories last year about the pending Bush torture investigation.
Criminal investigation into CIA treatment of detainees expected LA Times
Top prosecutor orders probe into interrogations; Obama shifts onus CNN
Holder Probe Would Be Big Break From Bush Torture Policy Washington Independent
Justice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Abuse Cases New York Times

On Sunday, Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused the Obama administration of making the country less safe by mirandizing terror suspects, trying them in civilian court and abandoning torture.

“It’s the mind-set that concerns me,” Cheney said. On “This Week” he explained, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Read this article on Examiner.

A recent CNN public opinion poll shows that Sarah Palin’s favorable rating is now higher than former Vice President Dick Cheney.

According to the 1,041 adults polled, 46 percent have a favorable view of Palin. Cheney is still hanging on to 39 percent.

It’s worth mentioning that this opinion poll was not restricted to “likely voters,” but any adult who answered the phone.

“We’d like to get your overall opinion of some people in the news. As I read each name, please say if you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of these people — or if you have never heard of them.”

President Obama was not among the “people in the news,” and respondents were not asked their opinion about the president, despite some on the right trying to sell these poll results as embarrassing for Obama.

Oddly enough, the results do show that 6 percent of those polled had never heard of Vice President Joe Biden. Only 3 percent said they had never heard of Palin, and 5 percent don’t know who Cheney is. One percent responded, “Al Gore who?”

This poll has a 3 percent margin of error.

View the poll results

Andrew Sullivan makes an interesting point in his column today about the so-called journalists at Fox News.

“When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.”

I don’t know if Wallace will burn in hell, but there’s no doubt history will not look favorably on the Chris Wallace’s working for Fox News. However, the same can be said about a lot of the mainstream news media. Corporate controlled news organizations go out of their way to toe the corporate line. That explains why they failed to cover changes to the FCC encouraging further corporate consolidation of news organizations. That also explains why the majority of mainstream media duck-walked in lockstep with Bush and Cheney into the war in Iraq.

Is MSNBC any better than Fox News?

During the fervor following 9/11, MSNBC made a concerted effort to go as far to the right as they could. Now that Democrats control the White House and Congress, MSNBC has swerved hard to the left.

But we’re talking about cable news, which, well, it isn’t really news. So when Sullivan condemns Chris Wallace to hell for his lack of journalistic integrity, it’s a false claim because Wallace is no more a journalist than is Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Wolf Blitzer or Lou Dobbs.

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Check out Sullivan’s column Chris Wallace, A Teenage Girl Interviewing The Jonas Brothers at the Atlantic

Dick Cheney is amazing. It’s like he’s really living in another universe. Here’s what he said on Fox this morning about torturing prisoners.

“I’m very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully,” Cheney said.

Here’s an excerpt from a review by the CIA inspector general of the torture program.

In June 2003, the U.S. military sought an Afghan citizen who had been implicated in rocket attacks on a joint U.S. Army and CIA position in Asadabad located in Northeast Afghanistan. On 18 June 2003, this individual appeared at Asadabad Base at the urging of the local Governor. The individual was held in a detention facility guarded by U.S. soldiers from the Base. During the four days the individual was detained, an Agency independent contractor, who was a paramilitary officer, is alleged to have severely beaten the detainee with a large metal flashlight and kicked him during interrogation sessions. The detainee died in custody on 21 June; his body was turned over to a local cleric and returned to his family on the following date without an autopsy being performed.

Now that’s just one incident in which one man was murdered after he turned himself in. I wonder what his family and neighbors felt when they were returned a corpse?

But back to Cheney’s assertion about keeping us safe for eight years. There was that little event we call 9/11. I know I won’t forget that nearly 3,000 of us were killed on a sunny Fall morning while Cheney and Bush were “protecting” us. Now I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking that they weren’t torturing people before 9/11, and we were attacked, ergo when Cheney started waterboarding people and beating them to death with flashlights, that’s when we were safe. One can find a correlation between torture and a lack of terrorist attacks here in the US, but correlation does not equal causation. In fact, in the documents Cheney cites as evidence that torture saved lives, the author clearly states that there is no evidence that torture provided any actionable intelligence that saved our nation from attack.

And in terms of who’s to blame for 9/11, I know Cheney tried to pin that on President Clinton, but it never stuck. So if 9/11 happened on Cheney’s watch, why does he feel he gets a pass? If 9/11 had happened under Clinton, do you think Cheney would just chalk it up to “stuff happens”?

Also, it’s common knowledge that President Bush and Vice President Cheney did not consider terrorism a serious threat before 9/11. If they did, they certainly didn’t act like it. Just read the 9/11 commission report. The authors of the report tried very hard to give Bush and Cheney a get of jail free card for 9/11, but there’s no doubt that the Bush administration had a laissez-faire attitude to towards terrorism.

What happened after 9/11 could never have happened without it. What we know of so far is that there was torture, eavesdropping, prisons full of suspected “terrorists,” two wars, a bloated privately owned military industrial complex, a shattered economy and a radicalization of a pretty sizable segment of the population here and around the globe.

Dare I say, the reason Cheney doesn’t show remorse for 9/11 is because he knows it was the best thing to have happen during his tenure in the White House – it’s almost like he planned it himself.

Without 9/11, Bush could very well have become a one-term president. There certainly would not have been the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and the level of fear, paranoia and overt patriotism could never have reached post-9/11 heights.

No, Cheney needed 9/11, and so he sees no reason to show remorse or take responsibility for this failure, because to him it wasn’t a failure.

To learn more about the policy discussion in neo-conservative circles just prior to 9/11, read the Project for a New American Century policy report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century.”

Here’s a story in the Washington Post about Cheney’s latest case for torture.
CIA Special Review of Torture program May 7, 2004