Dick Cheney, torturer-in-chief, emerges from his evil lair to advocate torture

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Dick Cheney thinks it's an "outrage" that the Obama Administration continues to investigate those who used torture in their interrogations of terror suspects:

Though it's unclear what role so-called enhanced interrogation played in finding bin Laden, Cheney told "Fox News Sunday" the techniques probably "contributed" and suggested the circumstances make the Justice probe all the more unsettling.

"It's unfortunate," Cheney said. "These men deserve to be decorated. They don't deserve to be prosecuted."

That's right, Cheney thinks the torturers are heros. That pretty tells you everything you need to know about him.

And he wants waterboarding back:

"It was a good program. It was a legal program. It was not torture," Cheney said. "If it were my call, I'd have that program ready to go."

Cheney said that with those techniques taken "off the table," it's not clear whether there's a reliable interrogation program that could be used if another high-value detainee with crucial information is captured.

Ah, but it was torture. Every decent human being knows that. (The Nazis certainly used it as torture.) And it was understood to be torture until Bush and Cheney and their minions needed to defend its use, and until the media obliged in advancing the Bush-Cheney lie.

And, in this case, it appears that torture didn't actually lead to Osama bin Laden's killing:

More and more evidence suggests a key piece of intelligence -- the first link in the chain of information that led U.S. intelligence officials to Osama bin Laden -- wasn't tortured out of its source. And, indeed, that torture actually failed to produce it.

"To the best of our knowledge, based on a look, none of it came as a result of harsh interrogation practices," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a wide-ranging press conference.

Moreover, Feinstein added, nothing about the sequence of events that culminated in Sunday's raid vindicates the Bush-era techniques, nor their use of black sites -- secret prisons, operated by the CIA.

"Absolutely not, I do not," Feinstein said. "I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and in my view nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used."

What Cheney is doing is what he and his ilk did when he was in office, stirring up fear to justify torture, and to try to secure public support for it, and essentially anything else he wanted to do as part of his "war on terror," from invading Iraq to building an authoritarian national security state at home, with the power of the Executive Branch threatening the very foundations of American democracy.

The use of torture has left a black mark on America. It is mirrored in Cheney's soul.