Here’s the official White House transcript of the interview. Of course, Cheney and the interviewer refer to waterboarding as “dunking the terrorists”, so they could leave Tony Snow room to parse for the press. “Dunking the terrorists? It’s not torture; it’s just like bobbing for apples. Well, yeah, you’re being forced to do it, and you can’t come up till you’re at the point of drowning, and it happens over and over, but it’s really just a party game.”
Q I’ve heard from a lot of listeners — that’s what we do for a living, talk to good folks in the Heartland every day — and I’ve talked to as many who want an increased military presence in Iraq as want us out, which seems to be the larger debate, at least coming from the left — cut and run, get out of there. One fax said, when you talk to the Vice President, ask him when shock and awe is coming back to Iraq. Let’s finish the job once and for all.
And terrorist interrogations and that debate is another example. And I’ve had people call and say, please, let the Vice President know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we’re all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that’s been a very important tool that we’ve had to be able to secure the nation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided us with enormously valuable information about how many there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth, we’ve learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that.
The Congress recently voted on this question of military commissions and our authority to continue the interrogation program. It passed both Houses, fortunately. The President signed it into law, but the fact is 177 Democrats in the House — or excuse me, 162 Democrats in the House voted against it, and 32 out of 44 senators — Democratic senators voted against it. We wouldn’t have that authority today if they were in charge. That’s a very important issue in this campaign.
Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President “for torture.” We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in. 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.
And thanks to the leadership of the President now, and the action of the Congress, we have that authority, and we are able to continue to program.
My follow-up question would be: Do you support the right of other governments to use waterboarding on captured US service members or government officials or suspected spies? And if not, why not?
Dear God. What have we become?
What have we become?
A country with leaders who deserve to be tried for war crimes. I mean it. Screw this impeachment crap — it’ll never happen anyway. We need to send Bush and Cheney to the Hague.
I’ll be happy to chip in for their plane tickets. Or maybe we should render them to an unnamed foreign country.
WE have lost our moral center and can’t get it back, maybe in our lifetimes. WE can start the long climb back on Nov 8. I get so depressed sometimes looking at the children around me and wondering what we twill truly leave them.
MWT-
I believe it will take a long time to get our credibility back with the rest of the world. We will not get our moral authority with the rest of the world back in our lifetimes. But we can begin doing the right thing immediately. Most of us don’t believe in torture. One important thing is that most Americans find Cheney repugnant. Our reputation will be hurt for a long time, but our actions can return to morality and decency as soon as these bastards are sent packing……
Interestingly enough, whether or not the US uses torture is, given examples in Vietnam, Somalia, and other locations, quite irrelevant to what other countries do to our soldiers and spies.
You may dislike waterboarding, but I have yet to see you direct half the vitriol or screams for “war trials” at the people who cut off our soldiers’ heads, burn them alive, or do other such pleasant forms of persuasion. And quite frankly, compared to the people you preferred in power like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, we’re rank dilettantes who scream when we break a nail. THOSE darlings of the Democratic Party really knew how to extract information, even if they had to cut your brain out to do it.
The Geneva Conventions and other assorted international treaties govern reciprocal conduct. Simply put, they protect you — as long as you follow the rules therein.
I’ll give you a hint; wanton attacks on civilians (aka 9/11), refusing to identify oneself as an armed combatant, using civilians as human shields — none of those allow you to qualify under Geneva.
The simple fact of the matter is this; we do what we must to get information, or we end up with more corpses from a terrorist attack. That’s not a pleasant reality, but it is reality.
If you and yours, Kathy, are willing to say that you would rather see a thousand people die from a terrorist attack than a terrorist be tortured to get the information to prevent it, that’s a principled stance.
Not one that will win you many points, but it would at least be principled.
CG, if you want to live in a country that sanctions torture, that lowers itself to match the behavior of its enemies, then please do pack up and move to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or — well, take your pick, but don’t ask me or others who actually love this country and what it is supposed to stand for to accept the same thing here. I don’t condone terrorism and I don’t condone cruelty. Neither of those things fits with the American values we’re supposed to be spreading around the world.
Well said Cosmic Glue. And Kathy you said:
“CG, if you want to live in a country that sanctions torture, that lowers itself to match the behavior of its enemies, then please do pack up and move to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia”
You have got to be kidding me. It really points out the difference bewteen the political sides today. You can not honestly think that the waterboarding equals decapitation or the other behaviors accomplished by our adversaries. By even stating that we have lowered ourselves to their level is absolutely ridiculous. Sooner our later you have got to realize that really bad people with completely warped ideologies want to do really bad things to any American they can get their hands on. Sitting at our computers blogging away from the comfort of our homes it is easy to second guess and nit-pick our leaders. I really don’t think you can feel what these people are capable of until you have seen them in action and been in hair raising situations that your own life is in jeopardy. Have you ever witnessed a 13 year old girl become a combatant because their family forces them into it? Have you witnessed the restraint by US soldiers not to engage that same girl when according to the Geneva Convention they would be perfectly correct in killing her as a combatant? Do you really think that our enemy matches our levels of morals? You really need to step back from your political goggles and view this one through reality.
Also Kathy, what moral plane would you like us to be on? Would you like us to go back to the moral highground we held on to during WWI or WWII? Or would you like us to create a new level of moral adherence not yet acheived? Morals are all relative in wars and the comments you and the liberal anti-war movements amount to rhetoric that only hinders our progress. We do have the moral high ground and to argue otherwise is ignorant.
BL, I respect your opinion because I know you’ve been there. Cosmic Glue, on the other hand, goes around to various sites pretending to be a gay man but basically trolling.
I’m well aware there are bad people who would like to hurt us. That’s always been so, even though the tactics change over time. But does torture really achieve some spectacular results? So many of the prisoners arrested and held in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have since been shown to have no or the most peripheral connection to terrorism. Does torture really elicit good information, or do the victims just tell the torturers whatever they want to hear to make it stop?
No, I don’t think our enemies match us morally. I don’t want that ever to be so, because I don’t want our leaders to continue lowering our standards. Our soldiers are working under almost impossible conditions, as you know, BL, from your own experience, and I am not criticizing them.
When war becomes a computer game, when torture becomes part of a polite conversation, when religion kills…….we’ve gone to Hell! Anybody got ice? Help!
I always thought you wanted to be better than those who do you harm.
And Hitler had justifications to concentration camps.
And there are 13 year olds who are picking up weapons to kill our soldiers and Marines because they are being told and believe they are the enemy, because we have invaded their country. Should our soldiers defend their lives if threatened by brain washed 13 year old kids? Heck, yeah. Will doing so cause more 13 year olds to pick up guns and try to kill more Americans? Of course. It’s called breeding terrorism, I believe.
Believing in our troops means wanting them out of a place they don’t and never did belong in. And if anyone is supporting a war simply because of a political party line, they are just plain stupid. I know plenty of conservative Republicans who are anti war because they are intelligent to realize and admit that it’s a GD FIASCO that’s killing American’ss AND Iraqi’s for nothing. Not to mention service members who have and do serve there feeling the same way and one family member who lost his life following the orders he would NEVER think disobeying.
But we’d better all shut up before they come get us in the still of the night and we wake up down at Gitmo.
CG, if you want to live in a country that sanctions torture, that lowers itself to match the behavior of its enemies, then please do pack up and move to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or — well, take your pick, but don’t ask me or others who actually love this country and what it is supposed to stand for to accept the same thing here.
“Sanctions torture” and “allows torture” are two different things, Kathy.
Countries that sanction torture — like Taliban Afghanistan, Ba’athist Iraq, Iran, and such use it as a standard operating procedure in a majority of their cases. If you were sent to prison under Saddam Hussein, the odds were overwhelmingly that you would be tortured. Individuals have no recourse and the practitioners are protected.
Countries that allow torture — as we do, as well as the other Western democracies — avoid it as much as possible, but will use it if absolutely necessary to protect their own citizens. Furthermore, its use is followed by review and can always be questioned; as we saw in the case of Abu Ghirab, it can prosecuted if it’s found to be wanton.
The reason for actually using torture in both cases is the same, though — to reinforce the threat of torture in peoples’ minds, and change their behavior accordingly. The threat of what would happen to you if you were sent to prison in Ba’athist Iraq kept people in line. The threat of being tortured if you absolutely refuse to cooperate is what encourages people to do so with us.
What you are doing, Kathy, is akin to a mayor announcing a crackdown on crime, that she will send more police out on the street — but then announce that they will be unarmed and cannot do anything but try to talk criminals out of committing crimes.
And as for this:
Cosmic Glue, on the other hand, goes around to various sites pretending to be a gay man but basically trolling.
I assure you, there’s no pretending involved. I am a gay man.
You simply cannot fathom the fact that there are gays who a) aren’t Democrats and b) aren’t Bush-hating liberals.
I don’t know which of these things is the worst:
That the US has lost any pretense for moral superiority
That torture even exists anywhere in the world
That torture could be a “no-brainer”
That Cosmic Glue spends time spreading hatred here instead of writing in his own blog, which existed for a week and then faded out.
“What you are doing, Kathy, is akin to a mayor announcing a crackdown on crime, that she will send more police out on the street — but then announce that they will be unarmed and cannot do anything but try to talk criminals out of committing crimes.”
Oh, bullshit. There is a huge distance between disarming police officers (or soldiers) and sanctioning torture. Cities are successful in “cracking down” on crime when they use neighborhood policing (the officers are present in the community and get to know the neighbors and vice versa so that there is a level of trust and understanding along with deterrence) and when they implement programs to deter people from becoming criminals in the first place. They don’t stop crime by coming in with guns blazing or by dragging off suspected criminals and beating “confessions” out of them. All that does is drive the crime further underground and build huge resentments, which — in the case of Iraq — turned a secular country into a recruiting hotbed for Islamic terrorists. And, no, I’m not defending Saddam Hussein. He was a horrible leader. And our government knew that when it supported him in the past.
As for sexual orientation, I can certainly understand anyone, gay or straight, believing in the things the Republican Party once stood for: limited government interference in our lives and fiscal responsibility. But that party is long gone, and pretending that George W. Bush is a real conservative is like pretending the sun rises in the west.
Sort of like the things the Democratic Party once believed in are nothing like the things today’s democrats believe in? Both parties have pretty much strayed away from their roots and old school ideology. Thinking the democrats of today represent the JFK and FDR democrats of old is not only thinking the sun rises in the west but also that it revolves around us. At least the most recent true conservative of the republican party was in the much nearer past (Reagan of course). Although Bush is not exactly a conservative, he is closer to his roots than the Democrats of today are to their “claimed” roots.
After WW2 we prosecuted as war criminals Japanese officers who used waterboarding on US prisoners.
I guess it’s ok when we do it though, huh? Times are different now and all that?
I remember when we were the good guys, and it wasn’t all that long ago.
Cities are successful in “cracking down” on crime when they use neighborhood policing (the officers are present in the community and get to know the neighbors and vice versa so that there is a level of trust and understanding along with deterrence) and when they implement programs to deter people from becoming criminals in the first place.
Well, Kathy, you’ll be happy to know that your fellow Democrats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors are doing exactly that.
And man, it’s real successful.
You’re a mother. How long do you think your children would obey you if they realized that you would never carry out or act on a threat?
You’re right that community policing and building trust is a good thing. However, what you don’t and refuse to realize is that abuse of that trust needs to be answered swiftly and harshly.
In San Francisco, they have implemented community policing, with rules that restrict officers’ actions so as not to be “provocative” and discourage arresting people; the DA’s office is the same, generally refusing to prosecute what they consider “minor” actions or charges like drug possession.
Inexplicably, though, people in the community still refuse to cooperate with the police and DA’s office. Why? Because they’re afraid of getting killed. They know full well that, if they witness a crime and they talk, the odds are good that they will be killed — because the police won’t arrest and the DA won’t prosecute. Meanwhile, the criminals do as they wish with impunity, knowing that the odds of their being stopped are fairly nonexistent.