Liz Cheney Conducts Clinic on the Destruction of Liberal Arguments

From the Institute of Conservative Thought...

Liz Cheney Puts on a Clinic....

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell (frothing at the mouth about waterboarding)...
"It is torture. This government's prosecuted people in the past for doing exactly this, but Dick Cheney believes it's not torture and that's essential to his position. If it was effective, why didn't they use it on the 500 people that Bush-Cheney released from Guantanamo, 75 of whom we know now have gone back into the terrorism business. That was a failure of the Bush-Cheney administration to keep America safe by processing people correctly at Guantanamo. Is that accurate?"


LIZ CHENEY: Let me go through all of the inaccuracies in what you've just said. First of all the question of whether or not enhanced interrogation is "torture" has been answered and it's been answered legally and it's not that Cheney or President Bush or anybody else "believed" it to be torture. The justice department of the United States --
O'DONNELL: (interrupting)
LIZ: Lawrence, I let you go.
O'DONNELL: Are you afraid of waterboarding, Liz?
LIZ: No. Waterboarding is not torture.

O'DONNELL: (pompous laugh)

LIZ: You know what, though? I would refer you to Attorney General Holder's testimony --

O'DONNELL: Why has this country prosecuted people for waterboarding?
LIZ: Lawrence?
O'DONNELL: Why did we do that?
LIZ: Because they did a number of other things in addition to waterboarding. Attorney General Holder had a hard time explaining exactly what the legal definition is of waterboarding that would make it torture. We've done it to our own people. Secondly, your argument about why didn't we do it to 500 other people proves our point. It was used in three cases when we had terrorists who had information about potential attacks on the United States of America. So the notion that somehow, you know, we should have waterboarded everybody? I'm surprised that that's a position you've taken.

Let's move on to MSNBC to Scarborough's show today, and they have a discussion of "torture." This was Liz Cheney with CNBC's Donny Deutsch, who came to broadcasting from the world of advertising. And Donny Deutsch, in typical uninformed, ignorant liberal arrogance, says, "Either your dad's lying or the president's lying. Who's lying?"
LIZ: Well, the president could, you know, resolve this this morning and --
DEUTSCH: No! No! No! No! But he came out and he said, "I have looked at those intelligence reports."
LIZ: Well, I think actually what he said was I've seen "the" intelligence reports. So it's not clear to me he was actually referring to the same things my dad was but -- DEUTSCH: Don't you think at this point --
LIZ: -- let me finish the answer on this, Donny.
DEUTSCH: -- he would have seen...?

LIZ: No, no.
DEUTSCH: This is a critical report!
LIZ: I'm sure --
DEUTSCH: He would have seen one way or the other?

LIZ: I'm sure he has at this point.
DEUTSCH: Yeah!
LIZ: If you release the memos, then you and I don't have to have this argument about who's telling the truth. We could all look at it for ourselves, and that's where I think, you know, the administration's got a real problem. Because they haven't been able to explain to the American people why they're willing to release information that talks about how people were interrogated without putting out the information that shows what we gained from those interrogations.
Two more.
Last night on Anderson Cooper 180, he said, "There are techniques which have been around. The Nazis used them, the Khmer Rouge used them, the North Koreans used them. So it's not as if terrorists were unfamiliar with these techniques. If they wanted to train for them -- and I'm not sure you really can train for torture or enhanced interrogation..."
LIZ: "I would question the premise here. The legal memos are very clear, and this was a very carefully designed program, and it was a program that the CIA designed, that they had the lawyers look at to make sure that the line that divided sort of rough treatment from torture wouldn't be crossed. What the president has done is ensure that no future president can use any of these techniques. So that's a big step, and that's a step that I think really does endanger the country -- and, frankly, if the president himself in the future is faced with a ticking time bomb scenario, it's not clear to me, you know, what exactly he will do even these reserved to himself the light to take action like these."
Anderson Cooper: "More than 100 people are known to have died in US custody, some that were ruled a homicide. If these were tightly controlled things, how come so many people are murdered in US custody?"
LIZ: Anderson, I think that your question is highly irresponsible.
COOPER: Why?

LIZ: Because you are contemplating things that aren't conflated. When somebody dies or is "murdered" in US custody then we are a great nation and we take the people who are responsible and we put them on trial as you've seen happen throughout the last eight years. That is not the enhanced interrogation program, and to somehow suggest that those two things are the same I think willfully conflates something and ends up in a situation where we aren't able to take a truthful look at the last eight years as we go forward, because we are muddying the waters about what really happened.