I don’t know what is more repulsive, Liz Cheney crying “my daddy’s innocent” or the mainstream press actually giving her airtime. Today she was back on the circuit on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, arguing that daddy is not a crook and that even second-guessing him or his subordinates would be partisan, unpatriotic and make us less safe. Transparency, by the way, is bad for America. Amongst her ridiculous and legally untenable claims, Lizzy now also argues that investigating someone twice is double jeopardy (double jeopardy attaches to prosecution, not investigation, Lizzy).
Worse, though, and particularly dangerous for democracy is the question that the press poses and the Cheney’s affirm: whether torture works. Who cares? There is no but-it-was-effective defense to a crime. In an another article by Glenn Greewald highlighting how the establishment press publishes unsubstantiated, uncorroborated and self-serving anonymous CIA leaks (as with the faux claims of Guantanamo detainees’ rates of recidivism or that waterboarding was effective with KSM after just one 20 second session) that are immediately repeated by other media outlets (including Mr. Stephanopoulos himself), considered credible and then spit back by Cheney in his defense, Greenwald explains why the question of the effectiveness of torture is irrelevant to the debate at hand:
The debate over whether torture extracted valuable information is, in my view, a total sideshow, both because (a) it inherently begs the question of whether legal interrogation means would have extracted the same information as efficiently if not more so (exactly the same way that claims that warrantless eavesdropping uncovered valuable intelligence begs the question of whether legal eavesdropping would have done so); and (b) torture is a felony and a war crime, and we don’t actually have a country (at least we’re not suppoesd to) where political leaders are free to commit serious crimes and then claim afterwards that it produced good outcomes. If we want to be a country that uses torture, then we should repeal our laws which criminalize it, withdraw from treaties which ban it, and announce to the world (not that they don’t already know) that, as a country, we believe torture is justifiable and just. Let’s at least be honest about what we are. Let’s explicitly repudiate Ronald Reagan’s affirmation that “[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture” and that “[e]ach State Party is required [] to prosecute torturers.” [Emphasis added]
And I am still waiting for Liz, Dick or any other Republican for that matter to tell me what the CIA is not allowed to do.
Grave Error 