Liz Cheney Defends her Dad, Dick Cheney, for Torturing People

by TheCameraObscura | April 24, 2009 at 11:48 am

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Another Republican has come forward in a desperate attempt to defend the torture practiced by the Bush administration. This time it is Dick Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney claiming on MSNBC that waterboarding isn't torture, a claim debunked by numerous sources, including Sen. John McCain and Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and perhaps the most successful U.S. interrogator of al-Qaeda operatives.

Liz Cheney, former Deputy Assistant to Condoleezza Rice joined MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell this afternoon to defend her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding detainees in US custody.
“It’s what our own people go through in SERE training,” Cheney said, parroting a Fox news talking point.

But she skipped the portion of the OLC memos that explains that the techniques used on US detainees was specifically designed to go above and beyond what our troops go through in SERE training.

“Naturally, I’m pretty sure that our soldiers undergo SERE training to learn what it’s like to be tortured, if not withstand it. I mean, if we’ve reached the point where it’s okay to not be outraged when our own soldiers are waterboarded, someone should say so. But either waterboarding is a tolerable technique for military interrogations in every case or it is torture and thus the provenance of sadistic regimes,” Cheney quips.

“Liz, the CIA, on its own after 2005, stopped waterboarding on its own,” O’Donnell reminded her. “The U.S. prosecuted people for waterboarding after World War II. So to suggest there’s a consensus out there that waterboarding is not torture is not in fact accurate,” she states vehemently.