The Generals Take Off the Gloves

There's a must-read piece on the Miami Herald op-ed page today, written by two retired USMC generals, Charles Krulak and Joseph Hoar about Darth Cheney. It's called Fear Was No Excuse to Condone Torture, and it pulls no punches in its criticism of the former VP:

[W]e never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.
We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America's disastrous trip to "the dark side'' continue to assert -- against all evidence -- that torture "worked'' and that our country is better off for having gone there.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Cheney applauded the "enhanced interrogation techniques'' -- what we used to call "war crimes'' because they violated the Geneva Conventions, which the United States instigated and has followed for 60 years. Cheney insisted the abusive techniques were "absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.'' He claimed they were "directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy . . . It worked very, very well.''
Repeating these assertions doesn't make them true. We now see that the best intelligence, which led to the capture of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was produced by professional interrogations using non-coercive techniques. When the abuse began, prisoners told interrogators whatever they thought would make it stop.
Torture is as likely to produce lies as the truth. And it did.

There's a lot more to this opinion piece, and it's worth reading the whole thing.

So who are these two Bin-Laden-loving Al Qaeda-enabling America-hating cowardly disgraces to their uniforms? Only a former commandant of the Marine Corps and a former commander-in-chief of the US Central Command.

It's going to be interesting to see if Clusterfox News even covers this, and if they do, what tactics they will take to discredit these two highly-decorated general officers, e.g., "Why do the generals hate America so much?"