Do not let Former Vice President Cheney confuse you on the issue of torture. Learn what one of our most successful interrogators says about the techniques that work. Why listen to Cheney about interrogation? Cheney is someone who has never interrogated a prisoner and has never spoken directly to a prisoner about what motivates him or her?

Be fully armed to stave off the propaganda campaign that the former Vice President is waging to save himself from prosecution, conviction, and possible punishment.

If you ever have any trouble making a moral decision, it doesn’t hurt to ask yourself whether or not your descendants will be proud of the choice that you made.  I use that technique,  myself.

You don’t want your descendants asking, “Why did they let their leaders torture?  Why didn’t they speak out as soon as they heard the details of what was being done by their government?”

Follow this link to the Huffington Post article about this video.  There you will also see links to other related articles and readers’ comments.

Lawrence Wilkerson is the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

This is a devastating indictment of former Vice President Cheney.

Follow this link to see the reaction to the above video on Huffington Post.

Follow this link to hear what Colin Powell had to say about Cheney on Face The Nation.

Click on the above image to see the MSNBC complete video of Obama’s speech about national security.  The speech was presented at the National Archives. This may be the most important Presidential speech that has been given in my lifetime.

It is worth spending 50 minutes to hear Obama explain the issues as nobody else seems to be able to do in this age.

Follow this link to Dick Cheney’s response.

Follow this link to yet another letter to the editor that  the Worcester Telegram & Gazette has published in support of torture.

In the comments section on the letter, I wrote the following response:

It is becoming apparent to me that no simple discussion of the facts will convince these torture apologists that their position is unsupportable.

The only way that these people will be convinced that they are on the losing side of this argument is to bring the authors of this illegal and immoral policy to trial in a court of law. When they are convicted of war crimes, then everyone will know that no matter what your personal belief is about torture, the civilized world holds it to be a crime of the highest order.

If we cannot convince people that torture is wrong, we can at least convince them that they will be tried, convicted, and punished for it.

Follow this link to the column by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who is former chief of staff of the Department of State during the term of Secretary of State Colin Powell. I think he does a pretty good job of demolishing all of Cheney’s self justifications for insisting that our government should use torture.

I just had the following experience:

I was reading a 30 page PDF report on my computer screen.  At page 9, I decided that I wanted to finish reading this report somewhere else other than in front of my computer screen and possibly at a later time.  I decided the best thing to do was to print out the report, so I could take it with me and also note that I was in the middle of page 9.

Not counting the time I spent printing it and stapling it together, the cost at about 5 to 10 cents per page for the printer, the paper, and the ink was a total of $1.50 to $3.00.

If you add these instances up over a year, how much would it be worth for me to have a device that would allow me to avoid the printing cost and wait time yet allow me to take the article and read it at a place and a time of my choosing.

At some point in the future that I cannot predict, the price of the device will drop below how much it would be worth to me.  At that point, I will be a grateful customer of the company that sells the device at a cost below its worth to me.

Follow this link to the above musing that I posted as a comment to an article about Amazon’s Kindle epaper device.

By the way, the 30 page report was the one discussed in my blog post Is Stenographer the Right Role For The Press?

Follow this link to a discussion on a report that said “The Media’s Decision to Play the Stenographer Helped Opponents of Climate Action Stifle Progress”

Follow this link to the actual report by Eric Pooley titled How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change.

Follow this link to the comment that I made about the old saw that you should always believe the people who disagree with the consensus view because once in a blue moon they are right.