Waterboard Cheney!

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

07 Apri 14

ick Cheney has defended torture techniques so many times that a frustrated U.S. senator has finally offered to waterboard the former vice president.

“The accusations are not true,” Cheney told college television station ATV last week. “Some people called it torture. It wasn’t torture.”

“If I would have to do it all over again, I would,” he insisted. “The results speak for themselves.”

A report that has been completed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, however, has found that the CIA misled the government and misstated the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation program. The report concluded that the CIA lied when it said it had gotten “otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives.”

Sen. Angus King, who is on the intelligence committee, (I-ME) reacted to Cheney’s comments during a Sunday appearance on MSNBC.

“I was stunned to hear that quote from Vice President Cheney,” King explained. “If he doesn’t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through, one of them a hundred and plus-odd times.”

“That’s ridiculous to make that claim! This was torture by anybody’s definition,” he continued. “John McCain says it’s torture, and I think he’s in a better position to know this than Vice President Cheney. I was shocked to hear that statement that he just made.”

“And to say that it was carefully managed, and everybody knew what was going on, that’s absolutely nonsense.”

King concluded: “Sorry to be sort of wound upon this, but I couldn’t believe that quote from Vice President Cheney.”

Watch the video below from MSNBC, broadcast April 6, 2014.