Dick Cheney Gives Torture Five Stars, Would Torture Again

The Senate Intelligence Committee released its much-anticipated report on the Bush administration's CIA torture program today, and it's a pretty big deal. If we're to believe Fox News, it might be as inflammatory as that "Innocence of Muslims" video that sparked riots all over the Muslim world, except not in Benghazi.

The 500-page executive summary is now online, and the Daily Beast has a summary of the most terrible details (you'll need to scroll down a ways to mute the audio on the Seven Colbert video in a completely separate story). All in all, there was a lot of brutal, horrific stuff done in the name of preventing future attacks, although none of it resulted in actionable intelligence -- everything that was useful was obtained using more conventional interrogation techniques. 

On the other hand, we should also consider the very important rebuttal by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who took a break from his afternoon routine of swallowing live kittens to tell the New York Times  that the report, which he hadn't read, was naught but hogwash, hogwash he says!

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” he said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

After all, there weren't any further attacks on America in the years after the torture program went into effect, which proves it works, although we would also note that there were also no mass casualty terrorism attacks on America following the network television run of Joss Whedon's series Firefly from 2002 to 2003.

Cheney insisted that the CIA agents who conducted torture sessions were about as far as you could get from war criminals, of course: “They deserve a lot of praise ... As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized.”

We aren't entirely sure what kind of decoration would be appropriate for someone who would engage in this   intelligence-gathering practice:  

Maybe the Order of the Rectally Infused Hummus? That would look great on anyone's résumé.

In any case, says Cheney, setting the tone for every rightwing pundit's talking points this week, you gotta remember there was a war on, and desperate times called for desperate measures:

The program, he added, was “the right thing to do, and if I had to do it over again, I would do it.”

Of course you would, Dick, you rectal infusion. Of course you would.

[ NYT via TPM ]