ABSTRACT
Dick Cheney is, by all accounts, probably the oddest—and the most dourly ambitious—duck in the administration’s pond of wing-flapping, sky-diving and prideful birds. He rarely speaks, running things quietly and secretly from behind the White House’s closed doors, where he maintains his own administrative staff. There was always a brooding, Hobbesian Cheney just beneath the misleading openness he learned in his native Wyoming. But this week, the vice president took a turn into the deepest heart of human darkness. Prisoners will tell their tormentors exactly what they want to hear. Among Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, too often, torture has become the “sport” of sociopaths. Cherif Bassiouni then told of the private contractors who operate wholly on their own. He outlined how team after team of interrogators comes in. “America has lost its capacity for being indignant,” Dr. Bassiouni summed up.
