Senator Invites Cheney To Be Waterboarded (VIDEO)

MSNBC’s Up with Steve Kornacki reports that “A big step forward was taken in the effort to declassify the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on what the Bush administration did in the wake of the September 11th attacks in the name of gathering intelligence.”

During Sunday’s program Senator Angus King (I-ME) was highly critical of former Vice President Cheney’s denial that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were torture.

King suggested that Cheney subject himself to waterboarding after Kornacki played a video from last week of Cheney, once again, making those denials King.

“Frankly, I was stunned to hear that quote from Vice President Cheney just now. If he doesn’t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through, one of them 100-plus-odd times. That’s ridiculous to make that claim. This was torture by anybody’s definition. John McCain said it’s torture and I think he’s in a better position to know that than Vice President Cheney.

“I was shocked at that statement he just made and to say it was carefully managed and carefully – To say it was carefully managed and everybody knew what was going on, that’s absolute nonsense. If you go through the [Senate investigative report], it’s clear that the people doing this weren’t being honest, even with their superiors at the White House, at the upper branches of the CIA, the Office of Legal Counsel, the attorney general, the Congress of the United States, the national security adviser. that’s one of the really bad things about this. what they did was bad, but then to misrepresenting it the way they did throughout a number of years, that’s what’s really the worst thing.”

You can watch the Daily Beast’s Elise Jordan, The New Yorker’s Rick Hertzberg, MSNBC.com’s Adam Serwer and Sen. Angus King discuss the issue of enhanced interrogation techniques and torture, below. The portion cited above begins at 4 minutes, 46 seconds.

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