Liz Cheney: "When Did It Become So Fashionable To Side With The Terrorists?"

It's to be expected, of course, that the Bush/Cheney administration will mount some kind of defence; but this one from Liz Cheney is especially appalling.

She's not content to try and simply write off war crimes as "policy differences", she takes the whole thing further:

I have heard from families of service members, from families of 9-11 victims, this question about, "When did it become so fashionable for us to side with the terrorists?"

So we now move away from the previous arguments, (a) the US does not torture, (b) waterboarding is NOT torture, (c) even if waterboarding is torture it's irrelevant as torture WORKS, to the completely new argument, (d) prosecuting Bush officials is siding with Osama bin Laden.

So now if one believes in the rule of law - and that the rule of law should apply equally and without favour to all citizens - then you are actually siding with the terrorists.

It's scraping the bottom of the moral barrel, but it's what Republican apologists have now been reduced to.

UPDATE:



It really appears as if there is no area of the media that a Cheney has not been dispatched to, to tell us that these programmes worked and that, anyway it's not really torture.

I think the discussion on whether or not this worked is a total side street and quite immoral. It would work if you threatened to have their children raped in front of them, would that then become acceptable?

Robinson: But look, efficacy isn't the only thing we should be talking about here. We should also be talking about legality. We should be talking about whether what was done was legal. If I rob a bank and get away with it, there's a lot of efficacy there, but it's not legal.

Cheney: Yeah, but that's not a fair comparison. That's not fair. Because this program was very responsibly and carefully done. And if you look at the history of it, with the CIA coming to the NSC and saying, 'We need to know what we can do legally.' And the very legal opinions that the administration has released are in fact the documents that set out in great detail, this is what you can do, and this is what you can't do. If you cross this line, it becomes illegal. If you cross this line, it becomes torture. It was very, very clear. So I think it does a real disservice to the people who ran the program to equate it with robbing a bank or with criminal activity. You have to look at the very specific and important legal restrictions that were put in place.

Robinson: I do not think that's the case. Torture is a war crime. It is a war crime.

Cheney: That's right. And this wasn't torture. Those legal memos demonstrated where the line was, and where it would become torture.

Robinson: Waterboarding was torture during the Spanish Inquisition, it was torture when Pol Pot did it, and I believe it was torture when we did it. But that --

Liz Cheney then responds by pointing out that the US waterboards it's own soldiers, whilst failing to admit that the US does so to prepare US soldiers in case they are captured and tortured.

And I don't know who the guy is at the end of this clip who states that, "responsible torture is an oxymoron, I'm sorry." But he gets it spot on.

And the argument that the lawyers said it was legal is especially weak. Any president can find a lawyer to tell him that something is legal, but that doesn't make it so.

UPDATE II:



Cenk Uyger reminds us that Liz Cheney is arguing on a pretext which is utterly false. These men were not waterboarded in order to find out the truth, they were waterboarded in the hope that they would provide a false link between al Qaeda and Iraq and help justify that war.

Tags: Liz Cheney, Cheney, Bush, war crimes, torture, Obama, terrorists