Dear Ms. Cheney,
I don%u2019t know if you saw %u2018Meet The Press%u2019 this morning, but a general you may have heard of named David Petraeus %u2014 he%u2019s the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia and is the most distinguished Army general since Colin Powell %u2014 graced your television. He was asked about whether the U.S. ought to torture Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy commander of the Taliban, recently captured in Pakistan. %u201CI have always been on record, in fact since 2003, with the concept of living our values,%u201D Petraeus replied. Every time the U.S. took what he called %u201Cexpedient measures%u201D around the Geneva Conventions, those deviations just %u201Cturned around and bitten us on our backside.%u201D The effect of torture at Abu Ghraib is %u201Cnon-biodegradable,%u201D he continued, and boasted that as commander of the 101st Airborne in Iraq, he ordered his men to ignore any instruction to use techniques outside the Army Field Manual on Interrogations. Besides, the non-torture techniques that manual has long instructed? %u201CThat works,%u201D he said. %u201CThat is our experience.%u201D
But hey. You%u2019re a former deputy assistant secretary of state! You obviously know better than the man who implemented the surge in Iraq. Why don%u2019t you enlighten Gen. Petraeus about all the glories of torture? And since you consider %u201Cenhanced interrogation%u201D so necessary to secure the country, perhaps there%u2019s a full-page ad you%u2019ll take out in a major newspaper?
Cordially,
Spencer