Dick "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is not torture" Cheney

From the WaPo blogs:

From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials.

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

This is just really hard for me to fathom. How do they even pretend there is a non-semantical difference? They don't, really. They just want to avoid the word "torture" because of its connotations, not because it is, like, ya know, EVIL or anything.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

This, folks, is the very heart of "legal wiggle room". No absolutes here. Bushco is praised for their "moral absolutism" against the godless relativists on things like stem cell research, gay marriage, etc. They keep it simple, stupid, by saying, "Yes," and "No," but not when it comes to torture.

Then, it's to a certain extent, and consistent with principles rather than particulars.

How people can claim that they are religious, and love God and humanity, then claim Bush is too, and that torture is okey-dokey, is beyond my comprehension.

This previously unreported meeting sheds light on the origins of one of the Bush administration's most controversial claims. The Justice Department delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002, stating that the U.S. law against torture "prohibits only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" and therefore permits many others. [Read the opinion] Distributed under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, the opinion also narrowed the definition of "torture" to mean only suffering "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "organ failure ..... or even death."

Well isn't that nice. 1) Gonzo's name isn't on there. 2) Torture is now redefined, just as "truth" has been for six years.

When news accounts unearthed that opinion nearly two years later, the White House repudiated its contents. Some officials described it as hypothetical, without disclosing that the opinion was written in response to specific questions from the CIA. Administration officials attributed authorship to Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who had come to serve in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Turns out not to be hypothetical at all.

The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

The law doesn't apply to them. Has anyone NOT fuc#in' gotten this, yet? These people truly think they are above the law in every important sense.

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA -- including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

What, Dick, you lost your balls when it comes to burying them alive? Why commit one war crime but not another? The law doesn't apply to executives like you and King W.

Impeach.
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