http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=2735You might reasonably have surmised that Dick Cheney fears where an investigation into the torture and mistreatment of terrorist suspects could eventually lead. Until now Cheney has restricted himself to lying about the effectiveness of the CIA and DoD interrogation programs, claiming to know decisive information that remains classified, and denouncing those who seek to investigate the government officials who abused prisoners under the color of law. But now we have some direct evidence of how rattled Cheney has become by Attorney General Holder's decision to initiate what is after all an extremely limited investigation. Its scope currently is limited to the CIA interrogations that employed even more abuse than the torture memos had actually authorized.
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Here is how Strobel describes the Cheney interview:
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What Cheney fears is pretty obvious. First, he believes that the investigation into a few CIA officers who scandalously flouted the torture memos' rules for coercive interrogations could provide the sharp edge that might pry open the whole sordid program of systematized abuse and expose it to judicial and public scrutiny. It was a program that Cheney apparently sponsored and helped to design.
Secondly, Cheney fears that he could then become a target of investigation. He is especially vulnerable to prosecution because of the close interest he took in the most abusive interrogations. One might be able to persuade a slightly gullible grand jury that the "conditioning" or "exploitation" of prisoners (hypothermia, for example) does not constitute torture. But waterboarding universally has been considered torture since at least the times of the Great Inquisition. Cheney seems to think now that he needs to build a case that he was no more aware of actual instances of waterboarding than anybody else who was briefed on the CIA program.
Cheney may also be aware that his likeness has now been put on one of the "Torture Team" playing cards that the Center for Constitutional Rights has created ("Collect and prosecute them all"). He's in the big leagues
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