America’s former Vice President Dick Cheney was unrepentant in a televised interview about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) use of torture to extract information out of suspected terrorists in a network of secret dungeons in what amounts to a gulag archipelago in countries scattered through Eastern Europe and South Asia. 

The torture occurred under the Bush-Cheney administration that left power in January 2009, and was detailed in a bombshell 600-page report released by the US Senate last week.  Despite the worldwide revulsion, Cheney said he’d “do it again”.

Appearing on the US TV network NBC’s “Meet The Press”, an unusually combative host Chuck Todd asked Cheney to account for the death of a detainee who was innocent, but was “chained to the wall of a cell, doused with water, froze to death in CIA custody.”

“And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity,” Todd said.

“I’m more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that in fact were innocent,” Cheney replied, spitting in the face of American founding father John Adams, the first Vice President and second President of the United States.  In 1770, Adams wrote:

“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.  

But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, ‘whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,’ and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”

Adams was echoed by his fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin (the guy on the US$100 Bill) who increased it tenfold by saying, “It is better 100 guilty persons should escape, than that one innocent person should suffer.”

Adams and Franklin were smart guys, but they didn’t just pull this out of the air.  It’s the basis of Blackstone’s Ratio, the Anglo legal principle that says, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” a school of thought that goes all the way back to the Old Testament (Genesis 19:27-29, Exodus 23:7).  Old school.

Cheney’s rejection of this basic principle removes him from the fellowship of America’s Founding Fathers and puts him in league with Cambodia’s genocidal tyrant Pol Pot, who wrote in his version of the “little red book” that it is perfectly acceptable to make innocent people suffer injustice and die to avoid freeing the guilty.

NBC’s Todd reminded Cheney that a quarter of those people subjected to CIA torture were innocent.

“I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States,” Cheney responded.

BTW, America “got” the guy who “did 9/11” when President Barack Obama okayed the US Navy SEAL Team mission that ended in the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011 – Two years and four months after the Bush-Cheney regime was out of power.

Cheney also defended the bizarre practive of so-called “rectal feeding” of terror suspects – in which CIA agents took pureed food in forced feeding bags, and shoved it up the butts of the people they interrogated – claiming it was done for “medical reasons”.