Paris, December 18, 2008 -- Vice President Richard Cheney was on American television last weekend to say that he directly approved CIA torture of American prisoners, and that he favors keeping the Guantanamo prison camp open until “the end of the war on terror,” a date which “nobody can specify”.

Those of Cheney’s persuasion are trying to convince Barack Obama that “realism” requires continued torture and the offshore prison system by which, under George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, the United States took up the precedent and practices of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and other criminal regimes that gave the 20th century its reputation for moral depravity.

Pleas are beginning to appear in the American press in support of torture. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer now with the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies, writes (in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune) that such practices …