...if the average person would do or say anything to make the immediate treatment stop, it's torture.

That's not a bad working definition. Note the part about saying "anything" to make it stop; people will admit they're the Queen of England if you torture them enough. And that's exactly why it's a lousy interrogation method - you get information, but not necessarily correct information. What you wind up with is whatever information pleases the torturer. Perfect for the tell-me-what-I-want-to-hear administration, but useless when you try to apply it to the actual physical world.

So, if you want proof that suspect A is the second in command of Al Quaeda, and has met personally with Saddam Hussein to plot against the US, well all it takes is a few minutes on the waterboard and he'll confess to it all. Even if he's just a camel herder who was turned over to the US for ransom.

Extracting false confessions out of people is as old as torture itself. Seems to me that we should be smarter than that by now, but obviously I overestimate.

Water boarding is now the policy of the United States of America. The use of this technique has gone from a rare unofficially condoned "Jack Bauer" exception to an actual policy of a our country.

To all the VP/Dubya lovers I ask, is this the kind of legacy you want for this administration?

Mr. White,

And it (like the renditions and other secret service cooperation) was being used as you state, the only difference being that there was a significant increase over normal "peacetime" usage because of the extraordinary circumstances of the last few years.

For your scenario to be possible there has to be a tacit agreement within the agencies and within the political system to let it pass. But this went out the window with respect to the Bush administration from the beginning, as the inter-agency and intra-agency struggles were bitter, and spilled over into politics.

It seems to me that the Democrats and other Bush opponents like Sullivan made this undercover stuff public, made it a political issue, and forced acknowledgements from the administration. There isn't much anyone can do about it now.

Let's be fair here. Most Veeps don't actually get the chance to royally screw things up like Dick - for most it's just funerals, stump speeches, and the occasional tiebreaker vote in the Senate. In the words of John Nance Garner, VP from 1932 to 1940 under FDR, "The vice presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit."

Cheney, OTOH, calls a lot of the shots - not enough to be really in charge, but enough that there's a serious leadership vacuum at the top.

A fair assessment is that he's the most powerful VP ever, directly responsible for the failure of the worst administration in a century.

Mr. White,

The administration did not create it as a political issue. The horses left this barn years ago, it now has to be dealt with as a public matter.

There will always be a faction denouncing the US as worse than the Khmer Rouge.

I didn't say I'd marry the f*r or anything. Besides, saying he's the best Veep is hardly a ringing endorsement, given the competition. :^)

BTW, he was a mediocre corporate officer, for what it's worth.

I always figured the guys who had such visceral negative reactions to Cheney are the ones with the daddy issues.

like when Edwards spoke about his daughter and Dick didn't throw that left hook.

from this backbencher for that one. Well done.

. . .another long-running Tacitus tradition move over here--"comments that would rate a warning or a ban if they were made by a non-troika member."

Looks like he might be trying to say "YES" while saying "no, of course not". Pols are like that. :^)