Grand Inquisitor

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

The U.S. Army, senior Republican lawmakers, human rights experts and many experts on the laws of war, however, consider water-boarding cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that's banned by U.S. law and by international treaties that prohibit torture. Some intelligence professionals argue that it often provides false or misleading information because many subjects will tell their interrogators what they think they want to hear to make the water-boarding stop.

A "no-brainer," he says. A technique that dates back to the Inquisition. That we prosecuted as a war crime when Japanese used it against us in WWII. That was used by the North Koreans, North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge not to get actionable intelligence but to extract confesssions for show trials. That we have previously sentenced our own soldiers to years of prison time for using in Vietnam and the Phillipines.

This is what Cheney is happy to use, and to lie about.

"It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president `for torture.' We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in," Cheney replied. "We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth."

Despite Mr. Cheney's facile assertions, it is torture, and has always been torture. And before the Bush/Cheney administration threw away everything this country stood for, our government understood that.

Now we are just Inquisitors.