We are relieved no end that there are still a few articulate conservatives with the willingness to stand up for what's right and speak out.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney:  " It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation.  You've heard endlessly about water boarding.  It happened to three terrorists.  One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl.  We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country, things we didn't know about Al-Qaeda.  We didn't know about Al-Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others did know.  And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we did not think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all."

If you followed the rabid media hysteria on the subject of waterboarding terrorists, you would have walked away from the TV thinking, as we did, that waterboarding was part of the in-process at Gitmo - like rectal exam strip searches are done to new prisoners in American jails.  As it turns out all this hub-bub, all this outrage and horror over this effective technique of cracking the most depraved of the terrorists occurred on just three occasions, to three terrorists who declined to cooperate when asked nicely.

Not one,

or two,

but three. 

Three terrorists got 'the plank'.   Out of all those terrorists - only three were waterboarded.  And the media wants you to think that half of Afghanistan was waterboarded.

Cheney goes on to say:  "We hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative.  In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.  People who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about values.  Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11.  We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance.  Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings.  They were trying to prevent future killings.  To call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.  What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme.  It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe."

Indeed he is right as rain on this point.

We haven't forgotten that Dick Cheney wound up on the wrong side of the Iraq war - namely that he participated in the rush to war and played a key role in committing America to battle.  We've said before that we do not disagree with taking out Iraq, but even so, the right war for the wrong reasons is impossible to live down.

Nonetheless, Dick Cheney is spot on regarding terrorists and the urgency to extract all that they know in order to prevent future acts of mass murder, if not attempted genocide.   Waterboarding doesn't diminish "American values", of which, the protection of innocent life is paramount.

And while we are on the subject of this false righteousness of Obama and his leftist cabal, try to reconcile this:  Obama claims it is horrific to waterboard three depraved killers bent on mass murder, but it's OK to abort a fetus for almost any reason, at anytime.  We are kinder, and gentler to the most wretched human forms alive than we are to unborn life.  And supposedly, those are "American Values" . 

Think about that.