The media treats Dick Cheney like the royals on vacation. He should be in jail

by Trevor Timm

It’s been less than one week since the US Senate released its devastating report on CIA torture and criminality, but if you turned on the television Sunday morning, it looked frighteningly like the year 2002. Virtually all the Sunday talk shows led off not with those who documented the CIA’s depravity, or the victims of such abuse, or those who objected to torture when it wasn’t fashionable to do so. Instead, they instead continued to pump up the former Bush administration architects of this illegal program, so they could once be given a platform to defend it.

The US news media has treated Dick Cheney and Michael Hayden better in interviews this week than they treat British royalty on an American vacation.

It was rather fitting that it was NBC’s Meet the Press giving Cheney so much time to defend the US government’s torturing of innocent people on Sunday. This is, after all, the same hour of television during which Cheney first announced the Bush administration would work from “the dark side” after 9/11, foreshadowing the CIA’s torture regime that was exposed in all its depraved detail last week. This is the same venerated news show on which Cheney originally pushed the fake al-Qaida link to Saddam Hussein that led to the Iraq war, based on false evidence that the Senate confirmed last week was partly extracted through torture.

But Cheney, whose former communications director once openly admitted that Meet the Press was the go-to PR platform for his most brazen lies, really outdid himself this Sunday. Saying that Dick Cheney is unrepentant for torture would be the understatement of the week – but, hey, it’s only Monday morning.

Beyond saying he’d do it all over again, the former vice-president was asked about the almost 25% of the detainees in the CIA torture program who were later declared innocent.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/15/media-dick-cheney-torture-architects