“I was a big supporter of waterboarding.”

February 15, 2010 in Cheney, Criminal, Torture, Waterboarding | 5 comments

So said former VP Richard Cheney over the weekend on “This Week” with ABC’s Jonathan Karl. There is not a court in the United States or in the world that does not consider waterboarding torture. The Red Cross certainly does, and it’s the governing body in international law. It is certainly torture according to the UN Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The British government, America’s closest Western ally, certainly believes it is torture. No legal authority of any type in the US or the world has ever doubted that waterboarding is torture.

So the former vice-president has just confessed to a war crime.

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  1. Anonymous’s avatar

    Anonymous on February 15, 2010 at 12:53 pm

    So terrorists are back to being enemy combatants, and not common criminals?

    Reply

  2. Curator’s avatar

    Curator on February 15, 2010 at 3:49 pm

    Enemy combatants…common criminals?!?!?!

    Nice strawman but the topic is whether Cheney just admitted to a war crime.

    Try and keep up.

    Reply

  3. Anonymous’s avatar

    Anonymous on February 16, 2010 at 4:59 am

    It’s no straw man. The question goes to the heart of the topic. I’m sorry I didn’t make that crystal clear for you.

    Don’t we have to be at war for someone to commit war crimes?

    And if we are at war, why would we ever entertain the idea of giving those we pick up on the battlefield civilian trials and the civil rights of Americans?

    So please get your president to make up your minds on the issue, so the rest of us can “keep up.” Are we at war with an enemy, or are we simply battling crime?

    Until that gets settled, its useless to discuss war crimes. Because maybe all Cheney did was support the violation of their civil rights.

    Get back to us when you get it all worked out, mmmkay?

    Reply

  4. Curator’s avatar

    Curator on February 17, 2010 at 3:56 pm

    “And if we are at war, why would we ever entertain the idea of giving those we pick up on the battlefield civilian trials and the civil rights of Americans?”

    So why did the Bush/Cheney admin mirandize Richard Reid (shoe bomber) 5 minutes after he got off the plane? Why from 2001 to 2008 did we prosecute every other terrorist in federal court?

    You do know that Bush’s DOJ had cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas at Bagram AB Afghanistan in order to preserve the quality of evidence? Don’t you?!?!?!

    I guess the problem is largely that the FBI is getting answers without waterboarding anyone and that doesn’t sit well with you.

    Tell me did Cheney admit to torturing POW’s or did he admit to torturing federally incarcerated prisoners?

    Reply

  5. Curator’s avatar

    Curator on February 22, 2010 at 5:19 pm

    What about this Najibullah Zazi character?

    Mr. Zazi, who was born in Afghanistan and was raised in Pakistan and later Flushing, Queens, where he attended high school, was working as an airport shuttle driver in Denver when he was arrested in September 2009.

    The federal authorities said he had received weapons and explosives training at a Qaeda camp in Pakistan, bought beauty products that contained the raw materials to build a bomb and traveled to Queens with bomb-making instructions in his laptop on the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

    We stopped a terrorist through law enforcement and intelligence gathering (which the GOP considers an example of “weakness”), read him his rights and gave him a lawyer (which, again, the GOP finds offensive), gained valuable information through torture-free questioning (which the GOP seems to think is impossible), brought him to a civilian courtroom (another thing the GOP finds outrageous), and will soon lock him up in an American prison (which the GOP considers dangerous for some reason).

    Perhaps the Cheney Wing of the GOP thinks the only thing these people understand is having their nuts crushed. So if Zazi’s talking now, just imagine how much he’d have said if we had crushed his nuts first. Probably would have confessed to the Kennedy Assassination, among many other important revelations. And then we’d have Iran right where we wanted them.

    True?

    I guess until President Obama stops rewarding his terrorist pals with Miranda rights and access to our sacred judicial system, terrorists won’t get their nuts crush. That would make Baby Giuliani cry.

    Reply