Five years ago, I described Dick Cheney's strident defense of detainee torture as a strategy of "mutual assured destruction." The former Vice President's gambit was a simple one. In 2009, Cheney dared President Obama to either prosecute him and other Bush administration officials over their program of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (in which case massive Republican retaliation would bring Washington to a halt during a financial crisis) or to back down (and thus vindicate the Bush White House's criminality). With the United States on the brink of economic calamity, Cheney confidently bet that President Obama would decide to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards."
But with the looming release of a declassified version of the report by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Americans will learn once again that the work of the Bush torture team wasn't legal, wasn't moral, wasn't effective and wasn't necessary. All of which means Vice President Cheney and his spawn will be back on your television to decry President Obama's "disgusting" and "despicable" remarks that "we tortured some folks." And in Dick Cheney's telling, he's doing it all for "the little guys."
As he put it in a May 2009 Weekly Standard interview with his biographer and 9/11 fabulist Stephen Hayes:

I went through the Iran-contra hearings and watched the way administration officials ran for cover and left the little guys out to dry. And I was bound and determined that wasn't going to happen this time. I think to George Tenet's credit--I don't agree with George on a lot of stuff--but I think he was of the same view and that's why we had all of these requests coming through for policy guidance and for legal opinions. And this time around I'll do my damndest to defend anybody out there--be they in the agency carrying out the orders or the lawyers who wrote the opinions. I don't know whether anybody else will, but I sure as hell will.

Looking back on then-Representative Dick Cheney's hand in the 1987 Congressional Iran-Contra Committee minority report, one could be excused for performing a mental copy and paste. Substitute Bush for Reagan and torture for Iran-Contra, and you'd think you were reading an excerpt of Cheney's memoir:

"The bottom line, however, is that the mistakes of the Iran-contra affair were just that - mistakes in judgment, and nothing more. There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for ''the rule of law,'' no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or coverup. In fact, the evidence will not support any of the more hysterical conclusions the committees' report tries to reach."

Fast forward to February 2010 and Cheney's boast to Jonathan Karl of ABC News that "I was a big supporter of waterboarding" and "a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques." In that interview, Cheney explained why he was daring Attorney General Eric Holder to either charge him or through inaction essentially bless a torture program conducted by the United States of America:

"The reason I've been outspoken is because there were some things being said, especially after we left office, about prosecuting CIA personnel that had carried out our counterterrorism policy or disbarring lawyers in the Justice Department who had -- had helped us put those policies together, and I was deeply offended by that, and I thought it was important that some senior person in the administration stand up and defend those people who'd done what we asked them to do."

Step up and defend, that is, the little guys.