"The law ought to be King and there ought to be no other" Thomas Paine

If you will remember, Gonzales would not answer the question at his confirmation on whether or not he thought 'Waterboarding' was torture, nor was he made to answer that question. There was a good reason why he wouldn't respond to that simple question. Will the new AG be asked the same question and what will his answer be?

With Dick Cheney's admission on National TV to being a war criminal, can we afford to turn the other way and pretent his admission was not heard? That is the decision that the Obama Administration will have to make.

When asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl whether he approved of interrogation tactics used against a so-called "high value prisoner" at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, Mr. Cheney, in a break from his history of being press-shy, admitted to giving official sanctioning of torture.

"I supported it," he said regarding the practice known as "water-boarding," a form of simulated drowning. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes in US courts for water-boarding, a practice which the outgoing Bush administration attempted to enshrine in policy.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it." He added: "It's been a remarkably successful effort, and I think the results speak for themselves."

ABC asked him if in hindsight he thought the tactics went too far. "I don't," he said.

The exercise of a presidential pardon to protect war criminals would violate international law and would not be respected outside the territory of the United States. Under the Constitution, however, Bush’s pardon power is nonetheless nearly absolute. Those advocating a pardon hope that it would put an end to questions about criminal conduct, but historical experience suggests that a pardon might have just the opposite effect. It would implicitly concede that serious crimes were in fact committed, (leaving the US no choice but to prosecute.)

If the United States wishes to demonstrate to the world, and to itself,
that its abdication of human-rights principles was an anomaly, it will have to do so under its own auspices. Until such time, we have lost our right to single out and condemn any country for the practice of torture and human rights violations.

There's more below!

No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly
lawless. Yet it is no simple matter to prosecute a former president or his senior officers. There is no precedent for such a prosecution, and even if there was, the very breadth and audacity of the administration’s activities would make the process so complex as to defy systems of justice far less fragmented than our own. But that only means choices must be made. Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the administration’s transgressions against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime that calls most clearly for prosecution, but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. That crime is torture.

There can be no doubt that torture is illegal. There is no wartime exception for torture, nor is there an exception for prisoners or “enemy combatants,” nor is there an exception for “enhanced” methods. The authors of the Constitution forbade “cruel and unusual punishment,” the details of that prohibition were made explicit in the Geneva Conventions (“No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever”), and that definition has in turn become subject to U.S. enforcement through the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the U.S. Criminal Code, and several acts of Congress.

In addition to being illegal, torture is profoundly un-American. The central premise of the American experiment is the belief, informed by Enlightenment principles, that the dignity and worth of the individual is at least as important as that of the state. Nor can there be any doubt that this administration conspired to commit torture: Waterboarding. Hypothermia. Psychotropic drugs. Sexual humiliation. Secretly transporting prisoners to other countries that use even more brutal techniques. The administration has carefully documented these actions and, in many cases, proudly proclaimed them.