Thanks, McClatchy. Charlotte News Observer:

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture, and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Good thing it calls for a brain instead of a heart, right, Dick?

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host...

Funny I didn't hear this in the (toothless) NPR interview, eh?

... appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

Surprise! The MCA was an Enabling Act!

There aren't many sane Republicans left--talkin' but you, Chris Shays--but the ones that are sane disagree with Cheney, as do the professionals and the military:

The U.S. Army, senior Republican lawmakers, human rights experts and many experts on the laws of war, however, consider water-boarding cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that is banned by U.S. law and by international treaties that prohibit torture.

Republican Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said that a law Bush signed last month prohibits water-boarding. The three are the sponsors of the Military Commissions Act, which authorized the administration to continue its interrogations of enemy combatants.

So, now it's all out in the open. Cheney didn't even bother to write a signing statement for Bush this time--He's just going to go ahead and violate the law regardless!

All of which means that Bush and Cheney are both guilty of war crimes, since they permitted and encouraged waterboarding on their watch.

"Water-boarding, in my opinion, would cause extreme physical and psychological pain and suffering, and it very much could run afoul of the War Crimes Act," [Republican Lindsay Grahman] said, referring to a 1996 law. "It could very much open people up to prosecution under the War Crimes Act, as well as be a violation of the Detainees Treatment Act."

By now, the Republicans must be desperate to hang onto power just for its own sake, but to avoid trial and jail.

The next two weeks are going to be very, very ugly...

NOTE Cheney's admission:

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaeda suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.