Obviously it's the same thing the Bush adminstration was hiding.

Which raises the issue, might this issue be more grey than we imagine.

If this is a canardand the memos reveal nothing, then what could be in them that is any worse than the memos already released?

What this entire enterprise proves is that the shoe is uncomfortable on anyone's other foot, wheather you are the ardent daylighter currently charged with things more important than your petty vindication, or the former shadowmaster now seeking redemption from items he once hid.

On the surface, Cheney's calling for declassification. Behind the scenes, if he's got one last string to pull, he's asking them to deny his request. Or at least hoping they will. Because we all know there wasn't much of a there, there. Now, he can go on claiming the effectiveness of "his" interrogation methods (though, as Lawrence Wilkerson points out on TPM, those methods stopped before the second Bush term, leaving us defenseless, Obama-style, for more than four years of Bush/Cheney) and using as his "proof" the memos they won't let us see.

Nice work, Dick.

Regardless whether or not the torture we committed was effective- it's still fucking ILLEGAL!!!

And it's still TORTURE. Ask yourself: WHO TORTURES?

I guess it's a success that Cheney and his hench-creatures have managed to shift the dialogue from torture being the historically monstrous signature of sexually-sick creatures that we -- I certainly hope -- do NOT wish to become --

to

"Does it Work? If there were a ticking bomb... If Jack Bauer were a real person, you'd have to agree."

This is the new form of the unbelievably same old tired the boot camp question asked back during draft years:

"Private -- what if a battalion of Red Chinese were raping your mother? Would you have an ethical problem THEN?"

It's been a long time, but that's pretty close to verbatim, the question I was asked back then.

(The fact that the base chaplain's actual Sunday sermon was "Why Jesus would have been a Marine," may be irrelevant other than to provide new scripts for Superman's Bizarro-World comics.)

And yet, like Charlie Brown and the football we fall for it every time.

Excuse the profanity, but the quote that best summed it up was from Charles Bukowski:

"Wars, politics, causes -- for thousands of years we've ended up with a sack of shit. It's time we learned to think."

But of course the concerted onslaught of politics and media and entertainment all seems to have the effect to interfere with the ability to think. "But what if Jack Bauer were a REAL person? What smartass kind of remark would you make THEN?"

Yeah, but he isn't. And -- to some extent -- neither are the people who ask that question.

They are disloyal and profoundly un-American.

...it proves that torture is a totally legitimate and acceptable practice for the leaders of the free world, and whenever we suspect that someone has information that can save lives, we should just go ahead and torture the pants off of the untried secret-prison detainee in question.

Great precedent to set, Dick. Once again, Dick Cheney makes the world a much, much more terrifying place to live in.

When Cheney first requested that these two memos be released, some of the salonistas claimed that it was a bogus request, the memos didn't even exist.

That theory is now debunked. The CIA said the memos exist, we just can't see them. . . and I think we all know why.

So now a new stupider theory is offered, Cheney foresaw the lame excuse that the CIA used to deny his request, and Cheney really didn't want the request honored.

HA! . . . they'll come out, one way or another, sooner or later.

When Cheney first requested that these two memos be released, some of the salonistas claimed that it was a bogus request, the memos didn't even exist.

I don't think anyone here said with any certainty that the memos didn't exist. Rather, I personally said it was prudent to assume that either the memos didn't exist, or had been profoundly mischaracterized by Cheney. This prudence was supported by the many, many, many past claims made by Cheney that have since proven to be lies. So, it sounds like the memos do indeed exist. What they say is still completely unknown.

However, the least honest, most weak-minded among us do not understand that they don't know, and are now pretending otherwise.

The CIA said the memos exist, we just can't see them. . . and I think we all know why.

Oh yeah, we all know why. I remember the bodies the cops were finding that PROVED, dammit, that Ted Bundy did not commit the crimes he was accused of. Oh, and OJ has still been out looking for Nicole and Ron's killers.

HA! . . . they'll come out, one way or another, sooner or later.

That's quite likely, yes. The day they come out is the day when your torture-justifying fantasies come to an end. That's when they will very likely uphold the current, consistent findings about torture. For the slow kids in the back, these are as follows:

• Torture does not provide good intel
• There are much more effective means of providing good intel, which were used to much greater effect than torture
• The treaty signed by Reagan explicitly explains that there is no justification for torture, and preemptively dismisses each and every excuse offered up by the BushCo torturers

These points have already been proven over and over. However, NOB, I see that you're still clinging to Cheney's memos that you hope will turn the whole thing around, and fully legitimize the American torture program. It ain't likely to happen. Enjoy your delusions in the meantime.

Let's re-classify Dickie! The less we know about him the better. He needs permanent pixelation of his face.

So what if doing something immoral achieves a goal sometimes? Stealing acquires property. Murder eliminates enemies. Dropping enough nukes to make any country we don't like uninhabitable might serve our security interests, but it would be genocide. We don't do that. Right?

Ronald Reagan and the Senate, in their time, had the courage to sign and ratify a treaty that explicitly banned torture in absolutely any circumstance. There seem to be a lot of people today who completely disagree with that. It's not that they think it's an impractical ideal, it's that they don't agree with the ideal. They affirmatively want America to treat non-Americans as less than human if they get in our way.

I worry that Americans who are truly moral and believe in rule of law in all circumstances, who have integrity that does not bend to fear or convenience, are in the minority.