This morning Dick Cheney was on the major talk shows this morning. According to the Wall Street Journal's account, he said the following:
Mr. Cheney said interrogators should have had the option to use the "enhanced interrogation techniques" his administration approved—including the use of simulated drowning, or "water-boarding." He called himself "a big supporter of water-boarding," which critics say amounts to torture.
"Now, President Obama has taken [those techniques] off the table," Mr. Cheney said. "He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake."
The quote immediately brought to mind the following picture of a device that was set-up to facilitate water boarding:
For a bigger picture here
This device is in a place called S-21, or Toul Sleng. It is almost certain that S-21 is the worse place to have existed between the end of World War II to the present day, and it's description makes one think of nothing but the "Ministry of Love" in the Novel 1984 by George Orwell.
S-21 was the central torture facility in the Cambodia of Pol Pot. At least 14,000 people were sent to s-21 according to the New York Times, and only 14 survived. Wikipedia has a good page on the place, but I will warn you, reading about Toul Sleng is disturbing, and brings to to my mind the single most haunting sentence in literature. That line is from the book 1984 when the protagonist is told"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."
So Cheney has something in common with Pol Pot and Kaing Geuk Eav (aka "Duch"), the notorious person who ran S-21. They both were enthusiastic believers in water boarding (though Duch has since claimed that water boarding was too dangerous to be used, I wouldn't trust anything out of his mouth).
I will never forgive Cheney for water boarding. I will never forgive him for staining the good name of my country, and I will never forgive him for putting the United States in the same sentence as one of the most evil governments in human history. My hope is history will never forgive hom either.
There are, of course, differences. The most obvious of these differences is the simple fact that virtually no one left S-21 alive, and there were more abusive tortures conducted at S-21 than water boarding.
But then there SHOULD be differences. The fact that you can even form the same sentence and use the names Cheney and Pol Pot should be more than enough to make one realize just how wrong Dick Cheney is.