Olbermann: Bush Regime Were Warned That, "Torture did not produce reliable information.".

I am honestly left utterly puzzled as to why the Bush regime engaged in torture. They were told that it produced no reliable evidence and must have known that,once you have tortured people, that their evidence would be inadmissible in a court of law.

But, from the way that the defence is currently being conducted, one gets the feeling that Cheney is in this up to his neck.

Alter:

And what's so fascinating is that Dick Cheney stands almost alone. You don't see former president Bush out there pursuing this. You don't see Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld or others. It's the former vice president who is becoming a forlorn and I think soon to be even further disgraced figure. But this is his bid for resurrection.

Cos what he's betting on in this - and this is the sick thing to me, Keith - is that if there is another attack that he will then be back as a huge important figure who predicted that this would happen if we stopped torturing.And this is his bid for historical resurrection.

[...]

He is positioning himself to say, "I told you so" should we be attacked again.

I think Alter is utterly correct in what he states about Cheney's intentions. This attitude is also prevalent in O'Reilly's statements where the ground is being laid to blame Obama should the US ever be attacked again for being too weak to torture.

I've said a thousand times that I am simply astonished at where the right wing now find themselves but, as Alter points out, I am actually wrong to do so. For, in truth, most right wingers - and certainly most former members of the Bush administration are maintaining a silence on this subject.

It is only Cheney and the lunatic fringe - O'Reilly, Glenn Beck - who are daring to make the blatantly immoral argument that "torture works".

I seriously think that Cheney is shitting himself. He can see what's coming towards him when even some members of Fox are acting with barely disguised disgust at the things which he championed.

And, as we discover today, they were told that what they were proposing was, in fact, "torture".

And the disgusting thing is that the Bush torture regime left US soldiers to face charges after Abu Ghraib, when they must have known that they ordered many of the techniques which were being carried out at Abu Ghraib.

Tags: countdown, keith olberman, secret, torture, documents, cheney, waterboarding, bush, administration, eugene robinson, abu ghraib