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..
Hayden, the loquacious and increasingly outrageous former CIA director, appeared on ABC’s This Week around the same time as Cheney, and while his answers may have been delivered with a smile rather than a scowl, his words were just as infuriating. “They were successful. That’s historical fact,” Hayden said of the CIA’s torture sessions, ignoring the mountains of evidence to the contrary produced by the Senate.
Hayden somehow continues to be the American mainstream media’s darling, despite the the torture report’s last 30 pages, which consist almost exclusively of testimony Hayden gave to the the Senate, right next to proof that what he said was misleading or outright false. As Andrew Sullivan wrote last week:
How does any media institution justify having this person comment on this report? He has lied so brazenly and so often, anything he says must be treated with instant suspicion.
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