Cheney Endorses Water Boarding ~ I Agree

Cheney endorses simulated drowning
Says use of water boarding to get terrorist intelligence is ‘no brainer’
WASHINGTON
Dick Cheney, US vice-president, has endorsed the use of “water boarding” for terror suspects and confirmed that the controversial interrogation technique was used on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the senior al-Qaeda operative now being held at Guantánamo Bay.
Cheney was responding to a radio interviewer from North Dakota station WDAY who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a “no-brainer” if the information it yielded would save American lives.
“It’s a no-brainer for me,” Cheney replied.
The comments by the vice-president, who has been one of the leading advocates of reducing limitations on what interrogation techniques can be used in the war on terror, are the first public confirmation that water boarding has been used on suspects held in US custody.

“For a while there, I was criticized as being the ‘vice-president for torture’,” Cheney added. “We don’t torture … We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we’re party to and so forth.

“But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture and we need to be able to do that.”

Cheney said recent legislation passed by Congress allowed the White House to continue its aggressive interrogation program.

But his remarks appear to stand at odds with the views of three key Republican senators who helped draft the recently passed Military Commission Act, and who argue that water boarding is not permitted according to that law.

“It’s a direct affront to the primary authors of the Military Commission Act in the Senate — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner — all of whom have publicly stated that the legislation signed by the president last week makes water boarding a war crime,” said Jennifer Daskal, advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

“This is Cheney ignoring the consensus of his own Pentagon,” she said, referring to comments by senior officials that harsh interrogation techniques do not produce reliable intelligence.

John Bellinger, the State Department legal adviser, last week declined to answer specific questions on water boarding, saying Congress would have to determine whether specific interrogation techniques were permissible under the Geneva conventions.

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Wild Thing’s comment……..
It’s a no-brainer for me too. What kind of people do the Dem/Libs think we’re dealing with anyhow? Our enemies would only put our heads under water AFTER they had sliced them from the rest of our bodies.
I heard Rep. Charles Rangel on FOX News the other day saying that “all the military experts” say torture used in interrogation doesn’t work. This is another liberal media/Democrat chant that like Goebbels’ “big lie” might be believed if publicly chanted enough times.