Cheney was unrepentant about his support for the technique. He answered with an emphatic "yes" when asked if he had opposed the Bush administration’s decision to suspend the use of waterboarding – after it was employed against three "high-value detainees" sometimes in repetitive sequences. He added that waterboarding should still be "on the table" today.
Cheney then went further. Speaking with a sense of impunity, he casually negated a key line of defense that senior Bush officials had hidden behind for years – that the brutal interrogations were approved by independent Justice Department legal experts who thus gave the administration a legitimate reason to believe the actions were within the law.
However, on Sunday, Cheney acknowledged that the White House had told the Justice Department lawyers what legal opinions to render. In other words, the opinions amounted to ordered-up lawyering to permit the administration to do whatever it wanted.
In responding to a question about why he had so aggressively attacked President Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism policies, Cheney explained that he had been concerned about the new administration prosecuting some CIA operatives who had handled the interrogations and "disbarring lawyers with the Justice Department who had helped us put those policies together. …
"I thought it was important for some senior person in the administration to stand up and defend those people who’d done what we asked them to do."
There you have it irrefutable proof from the mouth of the man himself... the boogey man existed and he worked for the White House. Or as the writer Robert Parry puts it:
If, however, that narrative proved to be false – if the lawyers had colluded with the policymakers to create legal excuses for criminal acts – then the Bush-Cheney defense would collapse. Rather than diligent lawyers providing professional advice, the picture would be of Mob consiglieres counseling crime bosses how to evade the law.
Cheney doesn't have any reason to hide these facts anymore. His only option is to come out with the truth in the hopes that more wignut fanatics will see his vision as the greatest policy ever and defend him with the same vitriol that has forced Congressional Democrats to believe that while they hold a clear and strong majority, they are defenseless against the logic of idiots.
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