Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The evil spawn of Dick Cheney, his daughter and former State Department official Liz Cheney, was interviewed by Norah O'Donnell on MSNBC yesterday. Cheney's statements regarding the Bush torture program were no doubt first cleared with dear daddy and represent the official talking points of the apologists for illegal torture. This is "the ends justify the means" crowd.
What I found most shocking was Liz Cheney's tortured tautology regarding the military's SERE program, which is a program to train military personnel in evading capture and surviving harsh interrogation and torture techniques in capture. The program is based upon the techniques learned from the Communist Chinese during the Korean war. Liz Cheney Defends Father's Torture Legacy (you can view the full Cheney interview at Huffington Post).
CHENEY: What I'm saying is that there were a series of tactics, a series of techniques that had all been done to our own people. We did not torture our own people, these techniques are not torture. The memos laid out… Therefore, the tactics are not torture. We did not torture. The memos laid out the extent of exactly how far we could go before it would become torture, because it was important we not cross that line into torture.
To restate the Tortured Tautology of Cheney: Because the United States trains its military personnel how to survive torture techniques, those torture techniques cannot be torture because we do not torture our own military personnel.
Only the Chickenhawks who populated the Bush administration, who had no military experience or training in the SERE program could postulate such utter and complete nonsense. The SERE training course materials specifically describe the techniques as torture. Military personnel are trained to survive these tried and tested torture techniques. Therefore, the techniques are torture. See how this really works, Liz?
Following the Liz Cheney interview was an analyst segment with Lawrence O'Donnell and Jonathan Capehart. Lawrence O'Donnell, at length, takes down two key arguments that Cheney used to defend the practice: the first being her belief that anything done to soldiers during SERE training could not be considered torture, and the second being the "torture stopped a Los Angeles terror plot" story. Jonathan Capehart provides excellent support.