Interrogation tactics used on captured terrorists are hardly a suitable matter to be decided by millions of members of the general public in a partisan debate, but the left is never inhibited by either national security or common sense, and how US authorities dealt with 3 major Al Qaeda prisoners was turned into a weapon used to blacken the reputation of the Bush Administration and to undermine the legitimacy of American counter-terrorism operations long ago.

Barack Obama is not content with having gained an underhanded election victory in significant part based upon demagoguery on that issue, he is still trying to score political points by attacking the previous administration for mildly coercive interrogation tactics applied only in three cases of major terrorist figures believed to possess particularly vital information.

Dick Cheney is rightly calling Obama’s bluff. If the democrats want to keep debating coercive interrogation of terrorists, let’s have a full debate. Put the rest of the story on the table. We’ve heard all about how unjustified and ineffective coercion is for several years now. Let’s look at exactly what was learned and what Al Qaeda attacks were prevented.

The Politico:

Researching his memoirs, former Vice President Dick Cheney is pushing the CIA to declassify files that he claims would vindicate the CIA’s use of coercive interrogation techniques that President Barack Obama has banned.

The request, which the CIA has not yet answered, sets up a showdown between the past and current administrations. Cheney can be expected to argue that the Obama administration’s publication of other files last week is a precedent for release of the reports he wants. Cheney contends that the information he seeks does not pose a threat to anyone, nor to intelligence sources and methods.

Cheney originally requested the reports in late March as he worked on his book, but now thinks the documents should be made public immediately as evidence that waterboarding and other controversial practices deterred terrorist attacks and therefore saved American lives.

left:Ali al-Kurdi, Right: Mohammed el-Qahtani in Yemen jail

Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority for military commissions, Bob Woodward gleefully reports, has announced that she is unwilling to try Mohammed el-Qahtani (the intended 20th 9/11 hijacker who missed his flight) because interrogation techniques applied to him, including “sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold” impaired the poor chap’s health and thus amounted to torture.

Crawford . . . .said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge” to call it torture, she said.

MacRanger is unsympathetic.

He says, if discomfort, embarrassment, and water poured on your face are torture, he was tortured himself.

Sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold I experienced in basic training. Waterboarding I experienced later during escape and invading training.

Here we have a Bush Administration official, with a long record of working for Dick Cheney, by the way, inhibited from prosecuting a principal participant in the worst attack on the United States in history costing the lives of 3000 innocent civilians
because she is willing to regard discomforts used in interrogation essentially identical to stresses endured by US military personnel in training as “torture.” Once Crawford is gone and some Obama appointee is in her place, we’ll have hairy Pathan mass murderers released because some corporal crushed their spirits with a cutting remark.

All this demonstrates that the Bush Administration approach of military commissions operating at Defense Department level in the full view of the domestic media and the humanitarian bien pensant left was always insane. The correct procedure was always minimum formality and drumhead courts martial for illegal combatants and captured terrorists under the immediate local US military authority followed by speedy dispatch to the Muslim Paradise at rope’s end.

In the course of a valedictory interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, Vice President Cheney took some satisfaction in the administration he served having succeeded in preventing a second mass terrorism attack, and shrugged off its loss of popularity.

CHENEY: We didn’t set out to achieve the highest level of polls that we could during the course of this administration.

We set out to do what we thought was necessary and essential for the country. That clearly was the guiding principle with respect to the aftermath of 9/11. I feel very good about a lot of the things we’ve done in this administration. I think that they will be viewed in a favorable light when it’s time to write the history of this era.

I think the fact that we were able to protect the nation against further attacks from Al Qaida for 7.5 years is a remarkable achievement. To do that, we had to adopt some unpopular policies that have been widely criticized by our critics.

But I think in terms of — is 29 percent good enough for me? Well, we fought a tough reelection battle. We won by an adequate margin in 2004. We’ve been here for eight years now. Eventually, you wear out your welcome in this business.

But I’ve — I’m very comfortable with where we are and what we achieved substantively. And frankly, I would not want to be one of those guys who spends all his time reading the polls. I think people like that shouldn’t serve in these job.

And in response to a predictable reference to alleged Constitutional overreach, Cheney effortlessly eviscerates his democrat opponent.

WALLACE: Biden has said that he believes you have dangerously expansive views of executive power.

CHENEY: Well, I just fundamentally disagree with him. He also said that the — all the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch are laid out in Article 1 of the Constitution. Well, they’re not. Article 1 of the Constitution is the one on the legislative branch.

Joe’s been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a member of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, for 36 years, teaches constitutional law back in Delaware, and can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature and which provides for the executive.

So I think — I write that off as campaign rhetoric. I don’t take it seriously. And if he wants to diminish the office of vice president, that’s obviously his call.

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And on the inadvertent comedy front, excitable Andrew Sullivan uses the Cheney interview as the occasion for one of the most spectacular displays of begging the question achieved by any leftwing commentator all year.

What Cheney has advanced is that the president has the right to dissolve the constitution permanently. That he has the right to commit war crimes with impunity. That there is no legal authority to which he is ever required to pay deference in a war that is his and his alone to declare and end. Now when you consider that, in Cheney’s view, these war-powers are limitless, and that war is declared not by the Congress but by the president, and can be defined against a broad, amorphous enemy such as “terrorism”, and never end, you begin to see what a dangerous man he is, and how much danger we have all been in since he seized control of the government seven years ago. …

The vice-president long ago became an enemy to the Constitution and to all it represents. He should have been impeached long ago; and the shamelessness of his exit makes prosecution all the more vital. If we let this would-be dictator do what he has done to the constitution and get away with it, the damage to the American idea is deep and permanent.

And then he stole the baby’s candy and kicked the cat, too, right, Andrew?

This crazy.

That little Obama endorsement video was a comedy satire, but this moonbat is completely in earnest.

Blake Fleetwood, at Huffington Post, thinks Dick Cheney and Karl Rove persuaded Georgia to provoke war with Russia to help John McCain win the US presidential election.

He just needs to get some of his ultra-left blogger friends to repeat this nonsense a few times, and my college classmates will become believers. The same process worked with “Bush went to war with Iraq to avenge the assassination attempt on his father” story and the ever-popular “We invaded Iraq to steal the oil” theory.

Peter Schweizer, whose written a new book, titled Makers and Takers, about all this, contends that liberals are the kind of people who do not put their money where their mouth is.

Samuel Johnson once reported on a man who was privately stingy but publicly touted the merits of sharing. Dr. Johnson said sarcastically that the man was a “friend of goodness.” What he meant was that flesh-and-blood goodness is very different from supporting “Goodness” in the abstract.

Many modern liberals like to openly discuss their altruism. Garrison Keillor explains that “I am liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness.” But it rarely seems to turn into acts of kindness, especially when it comes to making charitable donations.

Consider the case of Andrew Cuomo, current New York Attorney General and advocate for the homeless. He has, according to his website, “compassion toward the most vulnerable of us.” And this is how the New York Times described the courtship of Kerry Kennedy (of guess which family): “Ms. Kennedy-Cuomo, 43, said she fell in love with Mr. Cuomo, 45, when he took her on a tour of a homeless shelter on their first date and agreed to fast for the labor leader Cesar Chavez.”

But that advocacy should not be confused with actually giving to the less fortunate. Cuomo was a homeless advocate throughout the 1990s, but according to his own tax returns he made no charitable contributions between 1996 and 1999. In 2000 he donated a whopping $2,750. In 2004 and 2005, Cuomo had more than $1.5 million in adjusted gross income but gave a paltry $2,000 to charity.

Cuomo made no charitable contributions in 2003, when his income was a bit less than $300,000.

Cuomo IS NOT alone in this Scroogery of course. Barack Obama has a rather poor track record when it comes to charitable contributions. He consistently gave 1 percent of his income to charity. In his most charitable year, 2005, he earned $1.7 million (two and a half times what George W. Bush earned) but gave about the same dollar amount as the President.

The last two Democratic Party nominees for President have come up short on the charity scale. Al Gore has been famously stingy when it comes to actually giving his own money to charities. In 1998 he was embarrassed when his tax returns revealed that he gave just $353 to charity. …

According to his tax returns, Reagan donated more than four times more to charity — both in terms of actual money and on a percentage basis — than Senator Ted Kennedy. And he gave more to charities with less income than FDR did. In 1985, for example, he gave away 6 percent of his income.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have continued this Reagan record. During the early 1990s, George W. Bush regularly gave away more than 10 percent of his income. In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney gave away 77 percent of his income to charity. He was actually criticized by some liberal bloggers for this, who claimed he was getting too much of a tax deduction.

The main point of liberal compassion appears to be making liberals feel good about their superior virtue. Such are the rewards of being a “friend of goodness.”

The MSM and the blogosphere has moved on from unimportant subjects like Islamic terrorism and the upcoming presidential election to what really matters: Is that really a babe reflected in Dick Cheney’s fishing shades?

McClatchy:

Since Wednesday, the blogosphere has been atwitter over a photograph on the White House Web site of Cheney with a caption that said he was fly-fishing on the Snake River in Idaho.

The photo is a tight shot of Cheney’s face sporting dark sunglasses and his trademark grin.

What’s stirring all the buzz is the reflection in the vice president’s dark glasses. Some thought that the reflection looked like a naked woman and, this being Cheney and this being the Internet Age, they immediately shared that thought with the world.

In a Google search for the words “Dick Cheney” and “sunglasses,” 79,300 hits came back at mid-afternoon on Thursday. By 7 p.m., the count was 130,000.

On DemocraticUnderground.com, the discussion starts with this question: “Notice anything … interesting … reflected in his sunglasses? Something that has little to do with conventional ‘fly-fishing’?”

Photographers discuss.

What are the democrats doing with their Congressional majority? Are they modifying the tax system to eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax trap which is soon going to be nailing middle-class Americans? No. Are they taking steps to prevent the impending bankruptcy of Social Security? No. Are they considering making individual health insurance policies tax deductable? No.

They’re too busy arguing about impeaching Dick Cheney and deciding on whether Rep. Barney Frank’s new Employment Non-Discrimination Act ought to include not only the homosexual but also the transgendered.

Lynn Cheney explained in an MSNBC interview:

“This is such an amazing story,” Cheney said in an interview on MSNBC, “that one ancestor, a man that came to Maryland, could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dick’s and Barack Obama’s.” Cristina Allegretto, Mrs. Cheney’s research and project manager at the American Enterprise Institute, said the vice president’s wife did an exhaustive genealogical search of her family while working on “Blue Skies, No Fences.” Her research led her to an early Cheney settler named Richard Cheney, whose granddaughter married Samuel Duvall, whose mother, Mareen Duvall, is distantly related to Obama. Lynne Mrs. Cheney read a story that said Obama was related to Mareen Duvall, and realized the link.

Obama, whose mother was white, did not immediately comment on the revelation. But his campaign made light of the tie, without confirming it. “Obviously, Dick Cheney is the black sheep of the family,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.

ThinkProgress has the video.

And the Chicago Sun Times elucidates further:

Obama and Bush are 11th cousins.

That’s because they share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents — Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Soole Hinckley of 17th century Massachusetts.

That means Obama and former President George Herbert Walker Bush are 10th cousins once removed. Obama is related to Cheney through Mareen Duvall, a 17th century immigrant from France.

Mareen and Susannah Duvall were Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents and Cheney’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.

That makes Obama and Cheney ninth cousins once removed.