Journalist Glenn Greenwald did not mince words on Thursday when asked to respond to comments made by former vice president Dick Cheney when he appeared on NBC's Meet The Press last Sunday.
"The reason why Dick Cheney is able to go on 'Meet The Press' instead of being where he should be—which is in the dock at The Hague or in a federal prison—is because President Obama and his administration made the decision not to prosecute any of the people who implemented this torture regime despite the fact that it was illegal and criminal," Greenwald said in an interview with HuffPost Live's Alyona Minkovski.
In Sunday's interview with host Chuck Todd, Cheney claimed that CIA torture "worked" and announced he would "do it again in a minute" if given the opportunity.
As human rights advocates and international law experts have renewed their call for prosecutions against former Bush administration officials who ordered the CIA to torture detained terrorism suspects in the aftermath of 9/11, Greenwald said that whether tortured "worked" is irrelevant—"nobody should be interested in that"—and argued that much of the blame for the fact that Cheney still has the liberty to go on national television and brag about violating domestic and international laws should be placed at the feet of President Obama.
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"When you send the signal, as the Obama administration did, that torture is not a crime that ought to be punished, it's just a policy dispute that you argue about on Sunday shows, of course it emboldens torturers like Dick Cheney to go around and say, 'What I did was absolutely right,'" Greenwald said.
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