Sean Hannity is still insisting that waterboarding isn’t torture, just days after ThinkProgress confronted him about his 2009 pledge to be waterboarded for charity, a promise the Fox News host has yet to follow through with.

When ThinkProgress’s Scott Keyes asked about the 2009 pledge on his radio show last week, Hannity got a little agitated. “Here I am bringing you on the program and give you an opportunity to give your pretty radical left-wing point of view, that’s kind of the way you treat me,” Hannity said, later calling Keyes on the telephone to complain about the question.

But Hannity isn’t backing down, at least from his contention that waterboarding isn’t torture. The issue came up during an interview on Thursday with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC):

HANNITY: Last question, you’re against enhanced interrogation and you and I had a disagreement on that.

GRAHAM: I’m against torture.

HANNITY: I don’t believe the three people water-boarded were torture, not to digress.

GRAHAM: OK.

Watch the clip:

There’s bipartisan consensus that waterboarding is torture. A large majority of Americans think it’s torture. The U.S. military has no use for waterboarding and the practice is illegal under international law.

But if Hannity continues to insist waterboarding isn’t torture, why won’t he follow through on his pledge to be waterboarded for charity?

This evening, former Vice President Dick Cheney will host a fundraiser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

A GOP operative told Reuters that Romney’s “instinct is to call the Cheney-ites” on foreign policy issues, and indeed, Romney reportedly turned to a former Cheney aide to guide his hard line on China. Romney’s Cheney-esque foreign policy raising questions about how much a Romney presidency would resemble the disastrous Bush-Cheney administration.

The questions are more than reasonable: Romney and Cheney already share controversial positions on matters like ending the Iraq war and whether the U.S. should torture terror suspects. Here’s a quick rundown of their positions on some top issues:

	CHENEY	ROMNEY
TORTURE	Cheney said he was a “big supporter of waterboarding,” an interrogation method that is considered torture. “I would strongly recommend we continue it,” he has said.	Romney agrees. His aides have said he does not believe waterboarding is torture,” and refused to rule out the technique’s use by a potential Romney administration.
IRAQ	Cheney supported starting, continues to defend, and opposed ending the Iraq war. He said ending the costly war “would be a real tragedy.” When the war was winding down over his objections, Cheney said the U.S. should “negotiate with the Iraqis on some stay-behind forces.” But Cheney and his comrades seem not to care at all about what Iraq’s democratically-elected government had to say about it.	Romney also said withdrawing from Iraq was “more than unfortunate. I think it’s tragic.” Like Cheney, Romney called for the U.S. to maintain “an ongoing force, somewhere between 10 and 20 and 30,000 [troops] there,” without ever raising what Iraqis might think about it.
IRAN	Cheney said in 2009 that he wanted the United States to attack Iran in the waning days of the Bush administration. “I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues,” Cheney said.	While Romney tries to keep quiet on Iran during the campaign, his top foreign policy advisers don’t. John Bolton, who regularly calls for war with Iran, said recently that he hopes negotiations fail. And a host of Romney advisers — many of whom helped bring about the Iraq war — also advocate for war with Iran.

With their closely mirrored language on these controversial issues, it’s no surprise that Romney said last year that Cheney was a “man of wisdom and judgment.” For good measure, Romney added: “That’s the kind of person I’d like to have [as vice president] — a person of wisdom and judgment.”

That sort of lavish praise and the fundraising relationship could portend more war and strife for the U.S. in a potential Romney administration. Cheney is the second Romney fundraiser host this week who has been intimately involved with advocating for an attack on Iran.

Lawyers for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) revealed yesterday, the U.N.’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, that they had written to the U.N. special rapporteur on torture asking the world body to investigate KSM’s alleged torture at Guantanamo Bay. Agence-France Presse reports:

The letter asks that the special UN rapporteur “initiate a full, fair and impartial inquiry” into both US conduct and that of “any other potentially complicit state party to the Convention (against Torture).”

“After subjecting Mr. Mohammed to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment following his capture on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the US government has silenced him,” reads the letter, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. [...]

“The US government seeks to close this painful and dark chapter in our Nation’s history by killing Mr. Mohammed after a show trial,” it claims.

Army Capt. Jason Wright, one of Mohammad’s lawyers, said: “No human being should be tortured. In the period since 9/11, the US has misplaced its moral compass. Through accountability, we can hopefully find our way again, and pursue a path of rediscovery and redemption.”

Yesterday, the ACLU released a “Torture Database” making over 100,000 pages of government Bush-era interrogation and rendition documents searchable by the general public.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today released their “Torture Database” website, making over 100,000 pages of government documents on the George W. Bush administration’s interrogation policies, primarily obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU, searchable by the general public.

Alexander Abdo, a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, announced the new database in a Guardian column today. Abdo wrote:

…[T]the government has yet to create a single, official report documenting the post 9/11 abuses. There is hope that the Senate Intelligence Committee will fill the void when it completes its long-expected report on the CIA’s program later this year. In the meantime, the ACLU today is launching the Torture Database to help fill the transparency gap. Our database allows researchers and the public to conduct sophisticated searches of thousands of documents relating to the Bush administration’s policies on rendition, detention, and interrogation.

Abdo and the ACLU hope the database will put pressure on the Obama administration to release more information about torture and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) authorized during the Bush administration. “[The Obama administration] continues to withhold hundreds of CIA cables describing the use of waterboarding and other harsh techniques, hundreds of photographs of detainee abuse throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, and the presidential memorandum that authorized the CIA to establish its secret prisons overseas,” writes Abdo.

The database includes: Justice Department legal memos authorizing torture; autopsy reports completed by Army medical examiners after detainees died in U.S. custody; reports documenting and evaluating the interrogation practices of the military and CIA; and a series of email and correspondences “linking the CIA’s and military’s interrogation policies to officials at the highest levels of our government.”

While much of the database is dedicated to documents outlining torture and EITs, the ACLU emphasizes that the site also offers “inspiring and heroic stories” in the form of written dissents from soldiers, lawyers, officials and others as they resisted the interrogation policies approved by senior political leaders.

In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Central Intelligence Agency clandestine operations chief Jose Rodriguez defended his department’s use of torture methods when questioning terrorist suspects.

Rodriguez, who had tapes of the interrogations destroyed, was unapologetic. He told 60 Minutes:

We made some al Qaeda terrorists with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days. But we did the right thing for the right reason. And the right reason was to protect the homeland and to protect American lives. So yes, I had no qualms. [...]

If there was going to be another attack against the U.S., we would have blood on our hands because we would not have been able to extract that information from [a terrorist suspect]. So we started to talk about an alternative set of interrogation procedures.

Watch a clip:

Rodriguez compared so-called stress positions — such as making detainees hold their hands above their heads — and sleep-deprivation to going to the gym and having jetlag, respectively. He cited the interrogations of alleged Al Qaeda terrorists Abu Zubaydeh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. “This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us,” he said.

But others — including military and law enforcement officials and politicians — have said that interrogations are most effective when interrogators stick to the script laid out on interrogations in the Army Field Manual, which is informed by decades of military experience. Anti-torture advocates note that the interrogation techniques employed during the Bush administration go against American values, endanger U.S. troops who might facing reciprocal treatment, and often lead to false information because subjects of harsh interrogations will say anything to get the sessions to end.

When confronted by CBS’s Leslie Stahl with the FBI’s contention that Abu Zubaydeh gave up his most useful information before harsh interrogations, Rodriguez said, “It’s not true.” Asked about a CIA inspector general’s report stating that the guidelines — or lack thereof — led to “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” techniques, Rodriguez said, “Well our own inspector general in many cases did very sloppy work. That report is flawed in many different ways.” Told by Stahl that she’d heard information gained from Abu Zubayded through waterboarding led the U.S. on wild goose chases, Rodriguez fired back, “Bullshit. He gave us a road map that allowed us to capture a bunch of Al Qaeda senior leaders.” Still-secret documentation of the claims makes sorting out the disputes difficult.

But former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan said in an interview with CNN that “the examples that they are mentioning as the successes of EITs absolutely were not produced by EITs.” He said the information gleaned from Abu Zubaydeh that pointed to Khalid Sheik Muhammad’s central role in the 9/11 attacks came before waterboarding on Abu Zubaydeh began.

When the debate over harsh interrogations reignited after Osama Bin Laden’s killing, numerous former interrogators, officials who oversaw interrogations, military officials, and national security experts stated that the techniques were not as effective as traditional interrogation techniques and, furthermore, hurt U.S. interests by putting a bad face forward.

Even sometime Bush administration ally Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) wrote, “Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.”

In a new book, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) operations wing discussed publicly for the first time his role in destroying videos of interrogations that involved torture — including 92 videos of the waterboarding of suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah. The former official, Jose Rodriguez, reportedly laces his book with scathing criticisms of President Obama and his administration’s anti-torture policies. “I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled ‘torturers’ by the president of the United States,” he writes in “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,” due out next week. Rodrigues was referring to “waterboarding,” which the American people, international law, and even some Republicans consider to be torture.

But for some reviewers, the most eye-catching revelation has focused on Rodriguez’s role in destroying the interrogation tapes that included waterboarding. Upon the closing of one of the CIA’s “black sites” — secret detention centers used to keep so-called “high-level detainees” off the grid and outside even U.S. law — Rodriguez was asked about destroying the tapes, and leaned toward the affirmative. But a memo from his superiors told him to hold off. After his superiors’ wavering between allowing the tapes’ destruction and then backing off, it was finally the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that pushed Rodriguez to order the videos destroyed. According to a review in the Washington Post, Rodriguez wrote:

We knew that if the photos of CIA officers conducting authorized EIT [enhanced interrogation techniques] ever got out, the difference between a legal, authorized, necessary, and safe program and the mindless actions of some MPs [military police] would be buried by the impact of the images.

The propaganda damage to the image of America would be immense. But the main concern then, and always, was for the safety of my officers.

…I was not depriving anyone of information about what was done or what was said. I was just getting rid of some ugly visuals that could put the lives of my people at risk.

Dana Priest, the Post reviewer who had her own run-in with Rodriguez when in the process of exposing the “black sites,” commented on the ex-spy’s motivations for destroying the videos:

In this case, a loyal civil servant — and the decision-makers above him who blessed these programs — were not thinking about the larger, longer-lasting damage to the core values of the United States that disclosure of these secrets might cause. They were thinking about the near term. About efficiency. About the safety of friends and colleagues. In their minds, they were thinking, too, about the safety of the country.

Rodriguez also contends in his book that it was the Bush administration’s torture program that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden — a common theme among proponents of torture:

I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques… shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture and killing of Usama bin Ladin.

That view is at odds with former interrogators and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein. Amid an extensive investigation of the techniques, Feinsten was asked if the harsh methods played a role in finding and killing Osama bin Laden. “To date, the answer to your question is no,” she replied.

Back in 2009, when the public debate on torture ramped up after President Obama released the Bush-era memos authorizing torture techniques on terror suspects, a Fox News host asked Newt Gingrich if he thought waterboarding is torture. “I can’t tell you,” the former House Speaker said, “I honestly don’t know.”

Now that Gingrich has had some time to think about it (while being influenced by some of his fellow GOP presidential candidates), he seems to have made a decision. Today at a town hall event at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, an audience member asked Gingrich where he stood on waterboarding. “Waterboarding is, by every technical rule, not torture,” the former House Speaker said, to which the crowd applauded. Gingrich seemed to justify his position claiming that the technique is legal under international law:

GINGRICH: Waterboarding is by every technical rule not torture. [Applause] Waterboarding is actually something we’ve done with our own pilots in order to get them used to the idea to what interrogation is like. It’s not — I’m not saying it’s not bad, and it’s not difficult, it’s not frightening. I’m just saying that under the normal rules internationally it’s not torture.

I think the right balance is that a prisoner can only be waterboarded at the direction of the president in a circumstance which the information was of such great importance that we thought it was worth the risk of doing it and I do that frankly only out of concern for world opinion. But we do not want to be known as a country that capriciously mistreats human beings.

Watch the clip:

Not only is the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario Gingrich refers to a red herring, waterboarding actually is illegal under international law because it is considered a torture technique. Last year, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez said waterboarding is “immoral and illegal,” and his predecessor agrees.

The U.S. military doesn’t have much use for waterboarding either, considering the Army Field Manual bans it. And Gingrich, or any other of the Republicans running for president who support waterboarding and other torture techniques, might have a hard time getting it to happen as the CIA said it is unlikely to go down that road again. “When you have years-long investigations into past practices, it’s unlikely that you want to spend a minute engaged in them,” one CIA official said recently.

“Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tweeted earlier this month. “Waterboarding is torture.”