Blah blah blah... waterboarding? Yeah, we do that. Ho-hum.

It's a no-brainer.

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.
Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism [...]

The radio interview Tuesday was the first time that a senior Bush administration official has confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding against important al Qaida suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammad was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and turned over to the CIA [...]

In an interview on Tuesday, Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo, N.D., told Cheney that listeners had asked him to "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?" Hennen said.

"I do agree," Cheney replied, according to a transcript of the interview released Wednesday.

We knew this was happening, it's the nonchalance that cuts me to the quick. And then there's this absolutely stunning claim:

"Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" asked Hennen.

"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," Cheney replied. "We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth."

This isn't torture, then:



By the way, Alan Dershowitz is a morally repugnant jackass. He's in the video, I'm not just throwing that out there.

We have completely lost ourselves when the Vice President of the United States can cavalierly state that we simulate drowning in other human beings as off-handedly as asking to pass the sugar. In this election, you either enable waterboarding or you don't. There is no halfway. And I realize some Democrats actually supported the noxious Military Commissions Act. They were wrong. But if the Democrats were in power it wouldn't have come up for a vote.