Depends on what the meaning of is is - Part II

It’s not torture if we say it isn’t – even if we say it is - and we don’t do torture even though we do a lot of it because we say it isn’t and besides, it’s necessary.

Make sense? It does if you’re Dick Cheney, or at least he wants you to think it makes sense to him. Personally I think his pacemaker is connected to his brain as well as his heart. The mechanical regularity of both of those impaired organs is disturbing.

According to the Washington Bureau, the Vice president has confirmed that US “interrogators” used waterboarding to extract information from suspects and that

"enormously valuable information about how many there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth. We've learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that."

Give the notoriously unreliable nature of this kind of information – in fact given the disastrously unreliable nature of all the intelligence used to promote the Bush Crusade, I wonder about that. Certainly no progress has been made that could be attributed to this information bonanza, but that’s another story.

So even though they torture people, it isn’t torture because Republican Senators John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said that a law Bush signed last month prohibits water-boarding and of course the President, being the law, can’t break the law and even if he does break it and admits it, can't be tried for it. Thanks Military Commissions Act! How did we ever survive for 130 years without it?

Cheney, in another one of those right wing radio ping-pong matches with “conservative commentator” Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo, ND said this whole thing was a “no-brainer” and of course I agree. Neither Cheney or his dwindling base of support have functional brains, or any sense of decency or morality for that matter.

So Cheney admits that we torture but that the torture isn’t torture and Lee Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, insists that while Dick admitted waterboarding, he didn’t actually admit waterboarding and besides that isn’t torture anyway. Is this starting to make sense?

CIA spokeswoman Michelle Neff said,

"While we do not discuss specific interrogation methods, the techniques we use have been reviewed by the Department of Justice and are in keeping with our laws and treaty obligations. We neither conduct nor condone torture."

Except that the law forbids it because it is in fact torture, so we have to say it isn’t even though it is and that makes it not. Surely you catch on by now?

Anyway that’s all the explanation I can stand and if you think I’m biased or a lyin' Liberal or making it all up, read the entire transcript at the White House web site.