It was a function of a policy of abuse and torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the war on terror in every theater of combat, directed and emanating from the will of Dick Cheney via the pen of George W Bush. It is simply impossible to review the evidence and conclude otherwise and no one, outside the Cheney cocoon, has been able to sustain the fiction that Cheney proposes as fact. The attempt to separate this from his own highly controlled, personally directed program of torture and abuse and coercion is a deep and malicious and wilfull lie. It may be what Bush wishes to believe. But Cheney knows otherwise. His speech was therefore not a patriotic defense of what he thinks is best for this country; it was a vile and deliberately divisive attempt to use the politics of fear and false machismo against the stability of the American polity.

He has clearly learned nothing; and will remain a threat to this country's ability to fight terror and defend its values. The president will remain above this, as he should, as Cheney seeks further to divide and destabilize this country in a futile attempt to rescue his reputation. But his reputation is unrescuable, his crimes a matter of record, and his character now indelibly written in history. Our job is to never let him forget it, to never let history be re-written and to remain resolute in bringing both him and those who attacked us to justice. And that is in the presidential oath of office.

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