Cheney defends US 'torture' policy
Al Jazeera | May 22, 09
Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president, has defended the interrogation methods used by the Bush administration which have been widely condemned as torture, calling them "justified" and "essential". Speaking minutes after Barack Obama, the US president, denounced the methods as being based on fear, he said: "They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do." "I was, and remain, a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation programme," he told the American Enterprise Institute, of which he is a trustee, in Washington DC on Thursday. "In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralising as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists," he said. He also defended the detention of "enemy combatants" in the Guantanamo Bay US prison camp in Cuba, and the use of harsh interrogation methods such as "waterboarding". He said that the measures were driven by a need to prevent the 2001 September 11 attacks on the US by al-Qaeda, in which more than 3,000 people died, from becoming a prelude to even worse attacks. 'Danger and regret' "The [Obama] administration has found that it's easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantánamo ... but it's tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America's national security," he said. Cheney's speech came moments after Obama defended his policy decisions since taking power, including the promise to close the Guantanamo Bay camp by January 2010. Cheney criticised the decision as one made with "little deliberation and no plan", adding that the policy to bring the "worst terrorists" from the camp onto US soil would be a "cause for great danger and regret". He called the move by Obama to end the Bush administration interrogation techniques "recklessness cloaked in righteousness." James Boys, a professor of international political studies at the American International University in London, told Al Jazeera: "You have ... Dick Cheney talking about, and I quote him, 'a truthful re-telling of history'. "Yet he went on to talk in a sentimental manner about the events of 9/11 as an attempt to justify all the events which occurred afterwards - talking about how, in the aftermath of the event ... the rest of the world was there supporting America. "Where America's support suddenly fell away was not in the prosecution of a 'war on terror', but when those events of 9/11 were used to justify a pre-existing policy to forge regime change in Iraq."
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Any Fucking Day Obama when you wanna start showing the People you have some resemblance of respect for the rule of law! 
