On MSNBC today, Norah O'Donnell got into a heated debate with Liz Cheney over the torture memos and what role her father had in pushing torture through. The two started shouting down one another, but Norah wouldn't back down from the bullying tactics Republicans for the most part successfully use on cable shows.

Norah brings up the timeline and points out that it was her father who signed on to it earlier than most and wonders if he pushed the OLC to approve these measure. Liz Cheney tries to use the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape as a justification that "enhanced methods" aren't really torture because our troops were trained in this manner and it's denigrating to them to say otherwise. Huh? Now, we're against the troops again?

She also uses the yet-to-be-substantiated Republican Talking Point that we got a lot of useful intel from torturing. E-mailer Margaret writes in:

In the first place, how does Liz Cheney know we got valuable information? Did she have the same clearance as the Pres and the VP? Beyond that, her rationale for torture, not being torture, because what we do to our own service people isn't torture, is making my head

L. CHENEY: (W)hat you're doing is reading headlines and talking about direction of lawyers, which is a very different thing. And there's no assertion that that's what went on. The lawyers' opinions were sought in order to make sure that the program that the CIA ran stayed within the law. And the lawyers did a very responsible and professional job of laying out exactly what were the limits of how far we could go. And that is precisely what makes it so damaging that these memos have now been released.

O'DONNELL: Listen to yourself – listen to yourself, Liz, "how far we could go."

L. CHENEY: That's right.

O'DONNELL: How far could we go with detainees? I mean, how far could we... Torture them in order to get information?

L. CHENEY: How far – no. For how many minutes you could ask them certain kind of questions. How many...

(CROSSTALK)

L. CHENEY: I'm sorry, it's very, very important point.

O'DONNELL: It's a very important point.

L. CHENEY: It is a very important point.

O'DONNELL: The Geneva Convention were established...

L. CHENEY: Norah, there is nothing...

O'DONNELL: ... to protect our men and women in the military. So that America would be a beacon in the world so when our men and women are captured overseas that they would not be tortured. We would never want our people to...

L. CHENEY: Norah, are you going to give me a chance to answer your question?

O'DONNELL: Let me finish my point.

L. CHENEY: I get your point, Norah, but the point is – no, Norah, wait a second...

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: ... America no longer cares about torture?

L. CHENEY: That's not what the world is hearing, Norah. First of all...

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: .. and if gets valuable information, then OK, we're for it. Is that the message they send?

L. CHENEY: Norah, that may be what you're saying, but that's not what I'm saying.

O'DONNELL: OK.

L. CHENEY: What I'm saying that is there were a series of tactics, a series of techniques that had all been done to our own people. We did not torture our own people, these techniques are not torture. The memos laid out...

O'DONNELL: Did we torture other people?

L. CHENEY: No.

O'DONNELL: You just said, we did not torture our own people.

L. CHENEY: Therefore, the tactics are not torture. We did not torture. The memos laid out the extent of exactly how far we could go before it would become torture, because it was important we not cross that line into torture.

Cheney just wanted to be like Pol Pot, I guess:

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

And as Digby writes:

It shouldn't have taken any warnings. You don't have to be an expert to know that there is a huge difference between having your own people train you to withstand these techniques and using them on prisoners.

And you don't have to be a historian to figure out that malevolent torture techniques have been considered poisonous and evil by civilized people for quite some time now. (That nobody even bothered to find out where these techniques came from is just another example of the "Brownification" of the US Government under the idiot Republicans.) It was bloodlust, plain and simple. They gave themselves permission to become barbarians.

That we now have even more proof they consciously sent these SERE techniques to Iraq to "Gitmoize" it --- a country which we invaded under false pretenses and which had not attacked us first --- takes these crimes to yet another level. If nothing else, allowing a bunch of low level grunts to pay the price while the men and women who gave the orders publicly pretended they were appalled at the behavior they themselves had sanctioned, makes all arguments that these leaders shouldn't be held accountable completely untenable.

Marcy gives the shorter Liz Cheney: "I'm proud my daddy is the prime mover of torture." Full transcript below the fold:

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