Dick Cheney's Bloodlust

Here's Dick Cheney, quoted recently in the WSJ:

Mr. Cheney said interrogators should have had the option to use the "enhanced interrogation techniques" his administration approved—including the use of simulated drowning, or "water-boarding." He called himself "a big supporter of water-boarding," which critics say amounts to torture.

"Now, President Obama has taken [those techniques] off the table," Mr. Cheney said. "He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake."

Cheney was roundly criticized by the left, and cheered on by the right, who apparently get very excited by the idea of torturing people, and whose masochistic and authoritarian streaks are obviously closely related. Today, the New York Times reported General Patraeus as saying this:

General Petraeus also reiterated his strong opposition to using torture to gain information from important captives like Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top military commander, who was seized recently in Karachi, Pakistan.

“Whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside,” he said. In cases that lack the approval of organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross, he said, “we end up paying a price for it ultimately. Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are non-biodegradable. They don’t go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick.”

Interrogation methods approved by the Army Field Manual, he said, work well to gain significant information.

So who are you going to believe-the head of US Central Command, or an admitted war criminal who was a key figure in the most disastrous presidency of all time- a man who said this:

"In Iraq, a ruthless dictator cultivated weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. He gave support to terrorists, had an established relationship with al Qaeda, and his regime is no more." –Dick Cheney, Nov. 7, 2003 

What's really scary is that we know that torture doesn't work, and that you get bad intelligence from it, and that you only succeed at infuriating our enemies, justifying terrorism in the eyes of many and isolating the United States even further. 

It is simply not possible for Cheney to be unaware of this fact, and yet he wants it even more! 

It's obvious that his uncontrollable urge to torture other human beings-in the most excruciating ways possible-is so strong that Cheney is willing to sacrifice the security of the United States (and risk being prosecuted as a war criminal) in order to satisfy his bloodlust.

He truly is an evil, evil man.