This is an excerpt from The Take Away
Many of the individuals most closely involved in the tactics disclosed and criticized in last week’s Senate report on CIA torture have defended their actions. And over the weekend, former Vice President Dick Cheney did it again.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Cheney said he wouldn’t change his stance on the use of so called enhanced interrogation techniques, and he insisted that no matter what the Senate report says, that there was no torture.
“There’s this notion that somehow there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists did and what we did,” he said. “We were very careful to fall short of torture. The Senate has seen fit to label their report torture, but we worked hard to stay short of that.”
Is one man’s torture another man’s self defense? That perspective may put people like Dick Cheney at odds with international law. The Obama Administration has apparently decided not to prosecute officials from the Bush Administration over torture, but could another government do it?
