Bush: The U.S. doesn’t torture. Cheney: Oh, yes it does!
San Francisco Chronicle, USA Lies. Truth. More lies. More hard-to-determine truth.
Fresh from the mother of all disingenuous flip-flops, in which self-styled “war president” George W. Bush admitted that he was changing his strategy in Iraq instead of “staying the course” there, Vice-president Dick Cheney has now made it known, in his own way, that the U.S. tortures detainees.
For Cheney, using the waterboarding torture technique is a “no-brainer”
Never mind Bush’s November 2005 assertion, “We do not torture.” That’s when the president made a point of dodging reporters’ questions about the just-revealed network of C.I.A. facilities in other countries where detainees reportedly had been “interrogated” using abusive techniques. (We now know, thanks to Bush himself, that those once-secret jails did exist; his Republican-led Congress recently approved legislation to keep the torture program going.)
When the secret-jails story broke late last year, ABC News reported that it had learned from C.I.A. sources that the spy agency had been authorized to employ “enhanced interrogation techniques” to squeeze information or statements out of detainees. Among them: sleep deprivation, a common way to force confessions; making prisoners stand naked in cold cells for long periods, while routinely dousing them with cold water; and waterboarding, in which a detainee “is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over [his] face, and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in, and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.” [more]