These students already knew that Dick Cheney was a war criminal long before the U.K. released a devastating report condemning the Iraq War this week.
Sir John Chilcot delivered his much anticipated report on the 2003 Iraq War and occupation earlier this week, finding that the invasion was launched “before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted” and that “Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
The Executive Summary of the report states that: “The consequences of the invasion […] left families bereaved and many individuals wounded, mentally as well as physically. After harsh deprivation under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iraqi people suffered further years of violence.”
As The Guardian reports, “the war’s disastrous consequences” included the deaths of “at least 150,000 Iraqis – and probably many more – most of them civilians” and “more than a million people displaced”. “The people of Iraq have suffered greatly,” the report concluded.
However, negative sentiment in the USA has been around for years. Video footage from March of 2014 shows students walking out on Dick Cheney while he was speaking at American University, a private research university in Washington, D.C..
Students can been seen in the video, below, protesting Cheney’s foreign policy and calling him a “war criminal” as they left the arena.
As reported by American University’s The Eagle, the former vice-president denied allegations that he was a war criminal, saying that “the accusation are not true.”
Cheney had previously denied using torture in a pre-talk interview with ATV, the student-run television station at American University, saying: “Some people called it torture. It wasn’t torture.”
Cheney told the crowd that during his vice-presidency three people had been waterboarded.
According to Cheney, the enhanced interrogation tactics used do not fall under the scope of the 1949 United Nations Geneva Convention, which outlaws cruel, inhuman or any degrading treatment or punishment because the Geneva Convention does not apply to unlawful combatants.
The Bush administration considered terrorists as unlawful combatants and considered those undergoing enhanced interrogation tactics as terrorists.
“If I would have to do it all over again, I would,” Cheney continued, adding “The results speak for themselves.”
You can watch the video below, contributed by Alejandro Alvarez.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login