Cheney, torture, and secrecy: The ultimate trifecta

From the No Shit department of today's news making headlines - The Washington Post is reporting that former (thank god) Vice President Dick Cheney presided over meetings with senior members of Congress on torture (aka interrogation methods).

The former VP has made no secret about his support of torture during his tenure in office or since. He has justified these behaviors at every turn and has repeatedly stated he regrets nothing and torture makes us safer. So what's new in today's story. There are, in fact, several new revelations from today's story.

1. While his support for these methods/techniques has not been secret, the fact that the VP oversaw meetings with Congressional leaders, at the precise time when support for an investigation and/or elimination of these techniques was building, is something we did not previously know.

2. When the CIA handed over documents to the White House last month that listed every member of Congress who attended these briefings, the VP's name was absent.

3. In the aforementioned documents that the CIA released last month, the CIA was listed as the facilitators of the meetings Cheney apparently presided over. The VP sought to add pressure and convince skeptical members of Congress of the value of torturing enemy combatants; in aligning himself with those from the CIA, he conveyed his personal advocacy in a manner that gave the appearance of the CIA sharing the same view. And then there's the obvious issue - the VP of the US, sworn to uphold the law, once again saw it fit to use his own judgment on what that actually means.

Not that we needed any further evidence of the previous administration's disregard for the law and human rights, but apparently this extended to falsifying official documents. And make no mistake about it, when documents detailing the participants and proceedings of meetings related to anything, let alone issues like the controversy over state-sanctioned torture, omit the presence of the VP, that is falsifying documents.

It is true that Cheney's name was not on a list that named all those not present at the meetings. Therefore, it might be argued that the documents weren't falsified, they simply weren't as comprehensive as they should have been.

A child can rationalize not telling the whole truth as not equating to a lie, and every once in a while many of us probably play that game out in our heads when we're faced with a situation where we know telling the entire story will result in negative consequences. But regardless of the action we decide to take, we know that not telling the truth is tantamount to a lie. Perhaps this childlike view of what is and is not the truth is where the problem lies.

It is possible that the root of all of the immoral and irresponsible behaviors that the President, Vice President, and other key members of the previous administration engaged in is an underdeveloped sense of morality. Perhaps these individuals really do think what they did was right, even though the evidence tells us all how very wrong they were. Maybe they're not liars or lacking any sense of what is right and what is wrong. Maybe they're just adults whose capacity to understand morality and reason stopped developing when they were children.

Either that or Jesus told them to do it. I'm not sure which is more plausible.