https://youtube.com/watch?v=zMf327j2AdY
Former vice president Dick Cheney slammed those trying to draw a moral equivalency between the United States and its enemies in the wake of a Senate report accusing the CIA of torture, calling it a “cheap shot” to compare U.S. intelligence officers to Japanese soldiers prosecuted for war crimes or members of the Islamic State.
“If you say waterboarding is not torture, then why did we prosecute Japanese soldiers for waterboarding?” NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Cheney on Sunday.
“Not for waterboarding, they did a lot of other stuff,” the former vice president scoffed. “To draw some kind of moral equivalent between waterboarding — judged by our Justice Department not to be torture — and what the Japanese did with the Bataan Death March and the slaughter of thousands of Americans, with the Rape of Nanking, and all of the other crimes they committed — that’s an outrage . . . it’s a really cheap shot to even draw a parallel.”
But Todd kept up the line of questioning. “If an American soldier is waterboarded by ISIS, are we going to try to prosecute ISIS for war crimes?” he asked.
“He’s not likely to be waterboarded, he’s likely to have his head cut off!” Cheney responded. “You’re trying to come up with hypothetical situations. Waterboarding, the way we did it, is not torture. Now, when you’re dealing with terrorists, the likes of al-Qaeda or the likes of ISIS, I haven’t seen them waterboard anybody. What they do is cut their heads off!”