"I'm Proud of What We Did": Delusional Cheney Believes He'll Go Down In History As America's Great Defender

How many times have you heard the famous fallacy: “torture saves lives?”

On August 30 former Vice President Dick Cheney sat on one of his thrones in a Fox News studio and criticized those who are pushing for investigations into his torture policies as they were utilized by the CIA under the Bush Administration. Cheney was disappointed with the nature of unfavorable discussions surrounding the contents of the newly released 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on prisoner interrogation which has prompted calls to investigate the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka torture techniques) that Cheney directly initiated and continues to support. Cheney was also outraged that Attorney General Eric Holder has named a prosecutor to investigate CIA abuses of suspects and proceeded to claim that he was merely speaking in defense (bless his heart!) of those who in the CIA will be investigated:

I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, Chris, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time? 

Instead, they're out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening contrary to what the president originally said. They're going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations. I just think it's an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say.

That’s right, Cheney doesn’t believe that people should be held responsible for their actions in the political arena. If we recall that he is one of the most notorious living war criminals today, we might be able to better understand where he’s coming from. 

As award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill reminds us , Cheney’s words in alleged defense of the CIA contradict his actual actions:

…Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised it to criticize the Bush administration’s lie-filled, one-way propaganda train to the Iraq war).