Cheney did not back simulated drowning: White House

"Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?"

"Well, it's a no-brainer for me," replied Cheney.

I'm sorry. There is just absolutely no other way to interpret "a dunk in water" during an interrogation other than what's known as "water-boarding". Water boarding someone is tying them to a board and inclining the board so that the subject's head is held under water until the subject can no longer hold his or her breath and thinks he or she is going to drown. At the last possibe moment, the subject is raised out of the water. Around this "dunking" is the demand for answers to the interrogators questions.

What would Cheney have us believe? That American interrogators were threatening prisoners with bubble baths?

Cheney, like the President he is, never defends his remarks. His waterboy (pun intended) Bush, of course, jumped right in:"This country doesn't torture. We're not going to torture."

Of course not. Since signing the oddly named Military Commissions Act on the 17th, torture has been approved and acts of torture by Americans have been ruled legal retroactively.

In effect, if we do torture, we don't because we changed the definition of the word and if we tortured before the definition was changed, it's okay because we changed the definition of torture retroactively.

Unfortunatley for America with the Bush cabal at the helm, we will continue to reap the effects of the unintended consequences of their dangerously short-sighted policies.

Even when facing an enemy who was not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and thereby not legally bound to do so, America used to pretty much abide by Geneva, conspicuously, Artcle 3 which prohibits torture. Doing so gave the American government something to fall back upon when our own soldiers were captured and mistreated. Think of the images that flashed across our TV screens of the bruised, cut and puffy faces of our captured pilots during the first Iraq war. America was able to righteously say that the treatment of our pilots by the Iraqis was heinous and against Geneva.

Our soldiers anywhere had better pray hard that they're not captured by the bad guys now. We don't have the luxury of paying lip-service to the Geneva Conventions because the Military Commissions Act lets us out of Article 3 and does not specifically spell out what is torture and what is not.

Cheney, knowing this, was able to repsond with his "no-brainer" remark without fear that water boarding could be proven a torturous act because there is no longer any law of the land against it.

Without Geneva to fall back on, though, and without any explicit law forbidding torture, there is no high ground for the U.S. to stand on when, ultimately, in the words of Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski, "If Iran or Syria detained an American, Cheney is saying that it would be perfectly fine for them to hold that American's head under water until he nearly drowns, if that's what they think they need to do to save Iranian or Syrian lives."