It's Sunday, just a week after Osama bin Laden was killed by a Democratic president. So who's on your TV to talk about national security? The Cheneys of course, Dick and his venom-filled spawn Liz, given air time to remind America how much the Republican party loves torture. And how much better they were at protecting America, never mind that whole Bush/Cheney didn't capture bin Laden and took us into an unnecessary war.
Here's Dick, on (where else) Fox News.
Cheney resurrected an old GOP talking point in insisting that waterboarding was not torture, despite testimony of people like CIA Director Leon Panetta to the contrary. “It was a good program, it was a legal program, it was not torture,” Cheney maintained....
Many former Bush administration officials have falsely credited torture tactics with leading to the raid on Osama bin Laden, but Cheney went further by insisting that torture was the key policy that has kept the country safe for a decade after the September 11th attacks....
Finally, Cheney had tough words for the Obama administration when it came to Libya. He smirked when Wallace mentioned the policy described as “leading from behind,” and admonished Obama for turning over operational control of the mission to NATO. He further tried to suggest weakness on the president’s part by telling Wallace, “the policy of the administration has been to hope for Gadaffi’s departure but not be prepared to do enough to make sure it happens.” Most gallingly, one week after Obama took decisive action to eliminate the world’s most notorious terrorist, Cheney said “it’s not clear to me that this administration is up to the task” of taking out Gadaffi.
Of course, U.S. and international law would argue that, John Yoo's memos aside, it was not a legal program and it was absolutely torture, a war crime for which Cheney should be having to give interviews from a jail cell. On to the evil spawn, who appeared on ABC's "This Week."
Christiane Amanpour asked if the killing of bin Laden “reignites the debate” over whether to “bring back” Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Cheney replied:
“I think it does. I think the fact that you clearly have the current CIA director saying that part of the intelligence came from enhanced interrogation, it’s important to remember, you know, Chip Burlingame, who was the pilot on American Airlines Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon, he himself was subjected to these techniques when he went through SERE training.
“These are not torture. These are techniques that we know work. That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn’t torture. It was legal.
“It seems to me the key question now is, we’ve got this trove of intelligence, what looks to have been perhaps the biggest trove we’ve ever been able to get a hold of. If that leads us to other Al Qaida operatives, it’s not clear to me that we have any way to effectively interrogate them. We don’t have enhanced interrogation anymore.”
All of which is patently untrue, as Steve Benen unpacks at the above link. But let's just take one little part of it, the SERE training part. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program was created by the military "as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." The military knew these techniques would be used to get false confessions.
And false confessions are precisely what the Bush administration wanted, and got. They tortured Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who made the false confession "that two al-Qaeda operatives had been receiving information from Saddam Hussein about the use of chemical and biological weapons." The administration used the product of their torture, this false confession, as justification for the invasion of Iraq.
Every assertion made by torture apologists has been debunked, time and time again. It doesn't work, it didn't work. It added fuel to anti-American fires throughout the region and the world. It was not only illegal, but immoral. And, as the resurgence of torture apologism in the wake of bin Laden's killing shows, the stain it left on America will never go away. Had it been confronted, had there been at the very least a truth commission exposing this program as illegal and immoral, turning the page might have been possible. But as it stands, the world will forever be "looking backward" and dealing with the aftermath of this reprehensible and immoral period in America.