Dick and Liz Cheney Tag Team the Constitution

Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:08 pm

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After the Obama administration announced an investigation into the CIA’s interrogation tactics, both Dick and Liz Cheney returned to the Sunday morning talk shows. On ABC’s This Week Liz Cheney continued to claim that waterboarding is not torture, while over on Fox News Sunday, Dick Cheney continued to endorse torture.

Here is Dick Cheney courtesy of Think Progress:

Cheney said, “Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all of the al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.”

Host Chris Wallace asked Cheney if he was comfortable with cases where the CIA went beyond their legal authorization, and he said, “I am.”

Here is Liz Cheney courtesy of Media Matters:

Liz Cheney said, “You guys have misstated the standard here for a legal investigation, here, and I would point you to Andy McCarthy’s excellent piece in National Review online which goes through what the standard is that the Justice Department should have applied here which is the notion that you need evidence that you can move beyond the presumption of innocence in a court of law that torture occurred.”

Fellow panelist Sam Donaldson said, “Everyone, except one person, that I know of prominence thinks waterboarding and torture is wrong.” Cheney replied, “Waterboarding isn’t torture and we can go down that path.”

Interestingly the one unnamed person that Donaldson was referring to was Liz’s Daddy former vice president Dick Cheney. Their father/daughter act today once again demonstrated how dangerous the Cheney’s are to the Constitution. Liz Cheney talks about presumption of innocence for torturers, but does not believe that the same presumption applies to detainees, while her dear old dad believes that it is for CIA interrogators to violate the law.

You might be thinking wait a minute detainees don’t have constitutional rights, but running secret programs and withholding information from Congress is a violation of the constitution. Plus if the Cheney’s believe that is constitutional to torture, it is a small step towards claiming that torture for American detainees is also legal.

What the Cheneys did today was engage in Operation Keep Dick Cheney out of Prison. Dick and Liz Cheney are hurting their party every time they go on national television and defend torture. The last thing that the GOP needs is for the American people to be reminded of the previous eight years, but the Cheneys don’t care about the GOP. They are only interesting in saving Dick Cheney’s hide.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association