"Torture Defense Tour '08"

Techniques beyond waterboarding include use of stress positions, forced nudity, sleep deprivation and exploitation of fears, for example by threatening detainees with vicious dogs. 

Cheney went to great lengths to separate the extreme treatment of nearly three dozen detainees in US custody from the abuses recorded at Abu Ghraib. He essentially rehashed the line the Bush administration has been giving since the scandals first erupted, that abuses were the results of a few low-level bad actors and in no way stemmed from policy decisions at the top. 

Buying into this logic, of course, would require ignoring reams of evidence to the contrary, including a comprehensive, bipartisan Senate report on detainee treatment.

The Committee's investigation found, however, that senior officials in the U.S. government decided to use some of these harsh techniques against detainees based on deeply flawed interpretations of U.S. and international law.

The Committee concluded that the authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials was both a direct cause of detainee abuse and conveyed the message that it was okay to mistreat and degrade detainees in U.S. custody.

And come to the question of morality and ethics, in my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in on January 20th of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  And that's what we've done.  And I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11.  We made the judgment, the President and I and others, that that wasn't going to happen again on our watch. And I feel very good about what we did.  I think it was the right thing to do.  If I was faced with those circumstances again, I'd do exactly the same thing.