Cheney wants to tell us everything about his role in approving torture...so let's give him enough rope to hang himself!

In the 1992 film 'A Few Good Men' there is a scene where Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise) tells his legal team that the key to winning the trial is to get Col. Nathan R. Jessep (played by a snarling Jack Nicholson) to admit that he gave the order for a 'code red' to be carried out against a young Private in his company at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, which subsequently led to his death. When Kaffee's team scoff at the idea that a high-ranking military figure like Jessep will simply confess, he explains his optimism thus:

"I think [Jessep] wants to say it. I think he's pissed off that he's gotta hide from us. I think he wants to say that he made a command decision and that's the end of it...no one's gonna tell him how to run his base."

Do you know who the Jessep character reminds me of? Dick Cheney.

When Cheney casually admitted that he sanctioned torture during an interview with ABC's Jonathan Karl last December, I got the distinct impression that he was just desperate to make it known. Not because he's been carrying a terrible burden of guilt; but because, like Jessep, he was incensed at the notion that he should have to field questions about the decisions he's made. If Barack Obama grew a pair and decided to bring the Bush cabal to trial for their crimes, Cheney wouldn't go into hiding - he'd be front row, centre, with a discernable smirk-cum-snarl painted across his punchable face.

He was at it again recently. When the Obama administration recently published the 'torture memos', who do you think was in the cheerleading section for even more memos to be released? That's right: Dick Cheney! He wasn't running the other way, lying low, or booking a one-way ticket to some South American resort for old war criminals, he was doing everything in his power to secure the release of further memos. Memos he believes will show "how good the intelligence was" that was obtained through torture; namely waterboarding.

Not too long after Cheney's calls for more memos to be released, former FBI agent Ali Soufan - who interrogated Abu Zubaydah for three months in 2002 using traditional methods - wrote in the New York Times that no actionable intelligence was gained from Zubaydah using 'enhanced interrogation techniques' that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. Furthermore, according to Soufan, such techniques also "backfired on more than a few occasions" (although, these instances remain classified).

Still, Cheney's so desperate to trumpet his involvement in the torture of these men that he's actually trying to make us believe that the intelligence they got was "good"!

But it's worth remembering Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's testimony before a closed-door hearing at Guantanamo Bay in March 2007, where he claimed to have been involved in a plan for a “second wave” of attacks against major US landmarks, which included the Plaza Bank building in Seattle, Washington, as a potential target. However, the Plaza Bank was founded in early 2006 (around three years after his arrest), which made this particular claim an unusual one. Furthermore, his confession to the beheading of journalist, Daniel Pearl, was also unconvincing. In fact, Pearl’s own father said that the facts surrounding his son’s murder “don’t match [KSM’s] story".

It's also worth remembering that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was reportedly waterboarded 183 times in one month. ONE MONTH! And yet that's the best intelligence his torturers could get out of him. When John McCain was told this figure on Fox News, he responded:

"Waterboarding is torture, period. I can assure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear."

For once, McCain's absolutely right. But the fact that torture wasn't really as effective as Cheney believes it was, doesn't matter. He just can't bare the fact that people are daring to question his highly questionable (and morally repugnant) decisions. In his twisted mind, torture works, and he's pissed off that he's got to keep justifying himself to a bunch of bleeding heart liberals.

He's untouchable, unrepentant and seriously unhinged...which is why we need to get him on the stand! I promise you, he won't be able to stop himself from admitting the very darkest aspects of his involvement (with his frugal use of words), so we should give him an ample length of rope and watch what he does with it.

Cheney is up to his neck in lies and torture and death...and yet more lies. It was Cheney's office that cultivated a pro-torture environment post-9/11. And it was he and Donald Rumsfeld who demanded that interrogators find evidence of an al Qaida-Iraq link (which was never found). Furthermore, by May 28, in accordance with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Pentagon plans to release hundreds of photos showing US personnel allegedly abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e. not just a few low-ranking "bad apples" at Abu Ghraib). The shit is still to hit the fan. And when it does, Cheney's face will be so spattered as to be almost unrecognisable.

So, if Cheney's itching to reveal all about his role in torture, then let's give him a stage...and the rope. I just know he'll put it to good use.