This Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation, former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime. In an interview with host Bob Schieffer, Cheney explained why he wants classified memos released. "[What the memos show] is that overwhelmingly, the process we had in place produced from certain key individuals, such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, two of the three who were waterboarded, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the man who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, blew up the World Trade Center, attacked the Pentagon, tried to blow up the White House or the Capitol building," he said. "An evil, evil man that's been in our custody since March of '03. He did not cooperate fully in terms of interrogations until after waterboarding. Once we went through that process, he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about Al Qaida."Waterboarding is torture. The idea that this is debatable should be seen as laughable. In a 2007 op-ed for the Washington Post, current judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School, and former JAG officer Evan Wallach showed that we had prosecuted waterboarding as torture in the past. We convicted Japanese soldiers for war crimes stemming from waterboarding, so it's illegal as a "weapon of war." Later, in 1983, a Texas sheriff and three deputies were convicted of waterboarding, so it's illegal as a law enforcement tool. In the Philippines, plaintiffs won $766 million in damages from the estate of former president Ferdinand Marcos over waterboarding. Clearly, waterboarding is illegal. The "it was only waterboarding" defense has never gotten anyone sprung.
And what difference does it make if it worked? If you're broke, bank robbery works really, really well. Breaking the law -- even if you claim to have a really good reason for doing so -- is breaking the law. As legal defenses go, this isn't one -- there are legal ways to get money, just as there are legal ways to get information... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
