GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney talked about the United States’ “proud history of strong, confident, principled global leadership” in his foreign policy speech last Monday.
Yet Romney’s foreign policy advisers have written a private memo recommending that the U.S. resume “enhanced interrogation techniques,” according to The New York Times. What these GOP advisers are saying is the U.S. should return to what former Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” — using torture to interrogate suspected terrorists.
Cheney still defends his support of techniques such as waterboarding, painful stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, slamming detainees into a wall, sexual humiliation and mortal threats. So does his daughter, Liz Cheney — now a Romney adviser.
The Romney memo recommends that, if he wins, he should explicitly authorize use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which the Army Field Manual does not permit.
The Romney advisers’ memo doesn’t even present that strong a case for this policy. “It is difficult to argue conclusively,” the memo states, “that enhanced interrogation techniques would have generated more information than the techniques in the Army Field Manual.”
