Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney needs a spanking. Now.
When Dick Cheney's not outing CIA agents, he's fighting for their rights. Their rights to commit torture, that is.
He wants the legislation recently passed by 90 members of the Senate which specifically forbids torture, to exclude the CIA:
The proposal, which two sources said Vice President Cheney handed last Thursday to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the company of CIA Director Porter J. Goss, states that the measure barring inhumane treatment shall not apply to counterterrorism operations conducted abroad or to operations conducted by "an element of the United States government" other than the Defense Department.
And Cheney's no wimp, either, when it comes to fighting for agents' rights to torture:
Cheney's meeting with [Senator John] McCain last week was his third attempt to persuade the lawmaker, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, to accept a less broad legislative bar against inhumane treatment.
Nor has he given up fighting against the original bill forbidding torture:
Other sources said the vice president is also still fighting a second provision of the Senate-passed legislation, which requires that detainees in Defense Department custody anywhere in the world may be subjected only to interrogation techniques approved and listed in the Army's Field Manual.
There are plenty of reasons why Dick Cheney must resign, but this is the most compelling. It's one thing for some yahoo in Texas to go round advocating torture but when the words are written on vice presidential letterhead, the United States has lost any credibility to protest when its own citizens are tortured.
Not only is torture "quaintly" forbidden by the Geneva Convention but information gathered by torture is highly suspect, and acting on this "intelligence" endangers other lives.
John McCain knows this—he learned it when he himself was a prisoner in Vietnam.
Dick Cheney never served in the military, despite a draft that claimed thousands of his contemporaries—he had "other priorities," he's claimed, priorities which including making millions recently from his Halliburton stock.
It's time for him to find new priorities. Now.
Resign, Dick. Your time's up.
