Frothy Paradise

Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not. Just as Cheney is able to sow legal doubt where none exists, he is adept at issuing blanket legal proclamations about questions that are open-ended and theoretical. Some of his finest overstatements of this past week include the assertion that those prisoners still left at Guantanamo Bay represent “the hard-core.” Oh good grief. Even the CIA stopped believing that hooey six years ago.