Liberty Minute April 9 2014

After former Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated his claim that waterboarding isn?t torture, Independent Senator Angus Young of Vermont offered a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

Speaking in an interview with MSNBC, Senator King exclaimed: ?If [Cheney] doesn?t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through?. That was torture by anybody?s definition. John McCain said it?s torture, and I think he?s in a better position to know that than Vice President Cheney.?

Senator McCain, who was shot down over North Vietnam, was tortured by his captors. The North Vietnamese contended that the US war was one of aggression, and claimed that this meant all American POWs were unlawful enemy combatants deprived of protection under the Geneva Conventions.

Decades later, the Bush administration ? headed by two men who avoided combat in Vietnam ? appropriated essentially the same argument made by the North Vietnamese Communists and applied it to terrorism suspects who were subjected to waterboarding, a torture method later used by the Communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Edmund Burke warned that ?Criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.? Unless the criminals who tortured in our name are punished, the evil they did will continue to metastasize.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.