Dick Cheney’s View On Why Dick Cheney Can Do Whatever He Wants
By Daniel Strauss - Dec 26th, 2008 at 2:31 pmLately, still-Vice-President Dick Cheney has been doing a number of interviews, sharing his rationale for why the executive should not have to answer to anyone, despite the United States’ built-in separation of powers, and for why waterboarding is not torture despite the fact that… well, it is.
At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick has a couple of money paragraphs on this:
What about the legality of torture? That’s an easy one, says Cheney, again in his ABC interview. “On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture. We never have. It’s not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross.” Yet just a few moments later, when asked whether water-boarding a prisoner was appropriate, he said yes, adding that he was even involved in clearing the technique as part of the interrogation program.
Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one.
You know, all of Cheney’s senseless blathering about this has sparked my own theory: When he’s talking about “the executive” he’s actually referring to himself, who has very much been “the executive” during the Bush Presidency.
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