Cheney in Harrisburg
The Dark Lord was in Harrisburg yesterday, disrupting downtown traffic and arguing that waterboarding of captives isn't torture, but is necessary to the security of all Americans. He was among friends and could say things like that.
Cheney was the speaker at a Republican fundraiser at the Hilton in Pennsylvania's capital city, where the remaining faithful, like those in Hitler's bunker in Berlin in April 1945, pretended not to see the Soviet army a block away. They competed to show their loyalty and fidelity to the man who, as much as George W. Bush, was responsible for the Iraq War and every other evil thing to come out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the past seven years. That these bunker faithful would pay $2,500 to have their pictures taken with Cheney, and presumeably to then frame and hang these photos, beggars belief.
"We do not torture--it's against our laws and against our values," Cheney lied.
He will say things like this and in the next breath defend waterboarding and deny that it is torture. If he was pushed, and he won't be, the Dark Lord might point to the infamous August 2002 "torture memo" written by John Yoo, a high-ranking member of the Bush Justice Department, which gave the narrowest of definitions to torture and approved waterboarding. Yoo has since argued that the President as Commander in Chief has the authority even to torture an innocent child of a terrorism suspect to get the parent to talk.
In waterboarding, a prisoner is strapped to a slanting board, head down, feet up. A cloth is placed over his or her face and water poured on the cloth to simulate drowning. Here's one courtroom description of the practice. After World War II, we prosecuted Japanese army and secret police members as war criminals for doing the very same thing.
Cheney yesterday also called on Congress to approve explicit authority for the White House to listen in on your phone calls without a court order--also justified as an anti-terrorism measure--and to grant amnesty to telephone companies that went along with the administration's previous ventures into domestic eavesdropping.
It's not nearly as long a step as you might think from engaging in waterboarding of enemy prisoners and domestic wiretapping to arresting political critics on trumped-up charges and later throwing them, still alive, out of airplanes into the ocean like the Argentine military dictatorship did from 1976 to 1983. It all begins with a little torture, and soon nothing is too much to protect Argentina, or America, or whatever other nation comes to see their Bill of Rights as an impediment to power.
It is time for Americans to face up to what Cheney and Bush did in their names.