Dick Cheney Needs to Go Away

I wish Dick Cheney would just ride off into the Wyoming sunset. But no. He insists on climbing up out of whatever dark hole he has lurked in since leaving Washington, sluicing away the slime and mud, putting on a suit, and appearing before cameras to defend torture.

His arguments, which boil down to “those things we did—they were not torture. (We know they were not torture because our lawyers told us they were not torture.) And anyway, the stuff we learned from the tort…enhanced interrogation techniques--saved American lives.  I would do it all over again.”

Couple of quick points: 

• Dick Cheney did not “do” any of the interrogations, so he could not do them all over again.  In fact, Dick Cheney is the classic “chicken hawk.” During the war in Vietnam, Cheney applied for and received five deferments. When asked about it, he later said, “I had other priorities in the ‘60s than military service.”

• Depriving prisoners of sleep for up to a week at a time, force-feeding them rectally for no medical reason, and threatening summary execution can be nothing BUT torture. If any enemy of the United States did that to a captured soldier or civilian, we would call it torture. 

• The Senate investigation of the CIA’s role in the capture and interrogation of people after the attacks of 9/11/01 found at least 26 prisoners had been taken by mistake, subjected to torture, and then released. Let me repeat that—at least 26 innocent people were captured, whisked away to secret CIA prisons, tortured, and then released. And Dick Cheney would do that all over again. That is simply evil.

In summary, Dick Cheney insists the torture inflicted in my name and your name is not torture. He says it made America safer. I do not think that is true. It is certainly not true for American soldiers who might be captured by Islamic militants. It is only a matter of time before some of these same “enhanced interrogation techniques” are used on our soldiers.

Dick Cheney needs to go away.  Wyoming would be fine. Europe would be even better. People there know he is guilty of ordering torture, (which is a war crime,) and maybe there he would have to face the consequences of his actions instead of strutting around like the aging pathetic chicken hawk he is.