“Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”“There’s this notion that there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists did and what we do, and that’s absolutely not true. We were very careful to stop short of torture.”The report itself simply disproves that one. This isn't a debatable issue. There were doctors available to repair the potential damage done by each "interrogation", and their services were used. There was "waterboarding", which America itself defined as torture up until the very moment the Bush administration wanted to use it. There were "stress positions" that consisted of hanging someone upright by their wrists for 22 hours a day. There were "ice water baths", and "rectal rehydrations", and prisoners being forced to stand upright on their broken bones for two uninterrupted days.
Indeed, Cheney seemed proud of his role in creating the interrogation program.We should believe him. We should believe that all the other American officials who say they would restart the program would, in fact, restart the program. Our penalty for not mounting a prosecution against the enablers of torture will be a continuation of that program on an administration-by-administration basis, indefinitely.“I’d do it again in a minute,” he declared.