Dick Cheney once again has tried to say that enhanced interrogation was not torture, and so obviously if President Obama says that, he must be committing libel and/or slander against the brave members of the intelligence agencies, and all those who helped us torture (we even outsourced torture, hooray for the free market!). While it is not especially surprising that Cheney has risen from his lair to defend the practices that in the past the United States itself had prosecuted others for, his words are almost too unbelievable to read. Cheney of course once again tried using the myth that we obtained information vital to the defense of the country as a good reason to be torturing people, even though those involved with the program of interrogation have said many times that the truly useful and important information came about through the use of interrogation methods that did not include dragging the U.S. back into the dark ages, and that entirely false intelligence like the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq were the result of torture. And that just worked out so well.
Not that reality was ever Cheney’s strong suit but here is some of his crap -
From The Weekly Standard:
…to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed.
For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings – and least of all can that be said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel. They have done right, they have made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
But stranger than his rationale for torture might have been this statement:
It’s worth recalling that we were engaged in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, supporting the Mujahadeen against the Soviets. That was a successful policy, but then we pretty much put Afghanistan out of our minds. While no one was watching, what followed was a civil war, the takeover by the Taliban, and the rise of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. (Emphasis added)
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So that was a succesful strategy? Strange, I had always thought that using religious zealots that hated the West might have been a bad idea, though at the time we were much more interested in defeating the Soviets than thinking of the long-term effects of such policies. Sure, give tons of weapons to radical Muslims and then let them run a country, what could possibly go wrong with that plan.
Dick Cheney, some of those in the government lost their moral bearings as soon as enhanced interrogation was approved, you frikken demon spawn from beneath Hades. Others like yourself never had any morals to lose, much less moral bearings.
