Waldman asks the right questions about Cheney's torture efforts

David Waldman properly describes the torture effort directed by Dick Cheney. This is based on the recent revelations from McClatchy News and from Lawrence Wilkerson.




We now know that the so-called "ticking time-bomb" scenario did not occur. What did occur is that Dick Cheney used his position as Vice President to direct the invasion of Iraq, a nation which was no real threat to the U.S. and which had no capability to threaten the U.S. Cheney's real reasons for directing the invasion of Iraq are not known, unless perhaps it was a symptom of his paranoia.

Cheney could do this because he was the Vice President in a White House in which the person occupying the office of President permitted him to run anything he wanted in the federal government without oversight. He collected many of his acolytes onto the White House staff and ran the White House Iraq Group, pushing the propaganda effort that worked to justify the invasion of Iraq.

It is well known that Bush had no knowledge of national security matters and deferred to Cheney's widely acknowledged greater expertise. Bush himself concealed his lack of knowledge of government operations and his total lack of interest in them behind a wall of supposedly setting goals and then delegating their achievement to subordinates. Apparently no one ever got it through to him as he was handed his Harvard MBA (based on who is father was) that the manager who delegates in that manner has to set goals and hold the subordinates to their achievement with close oversight. Bush certainly never did that. He let Cheney run wild. For that failure, Bush is a failed President.

But for his successful efforts to invade an non-threatening country and then to try to direct the torture of prisoners to obtain confessions to justify that illegal invasion, Dick Cheney is a war criminal.

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Addendum 10:45am
How do we know that the torture was used to justify the war crime after the fact? Dick Cheney knows or should know the truth about torture, which Bob Cesca states very clearly:

"According to multiple accounts and experts, the efficacy of torture is limited to ascertaining what the torturer wants to hear -- rather than information that's actually true. "

Given that fact, the only possible reason for torturing prisoners is to obtain false confessions to justify the idiocy of invading Iraq when the real enemy was al Qaeda, an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

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Addendum II 12:45 pm
Batocchio has written an extremely good analysis of the torture situation and provides links to many good resources.