Quentin Tarentino is a Sunday School Teacher

Jack Bauer is a wimp.

There is so much in this article on Cheney it's hard to know where to start. But the announcement, recently, that there were plans to close Gitmo? Depends on who you're talking to:

A year after Bush announced at a news conference that "I'd like to close Guantanamo," plans to expand it are proceeding. Senior officials said Cheney, standing nearly alone, has turned back strong efforts -- by Rice, England, new Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson, among others -- to give the president what he said he wants.

Cheney and his aides "didn't circumvent the process," one participant said. "They were just very effective in using it."

And that information, is put in the context of David Hicks. Remember him? Australian citizen captured in a taxi in Afghanistan bound for Pakistan? He was, the article reports, "Detainee 002" in Gitmo,

arriving on opening day at an asserted no man's land beyond the reach of sovereign law. Interrogators questioned him under guidelines that gave legal cover to the infliction of pain and fear -- and, according to an affidavit filed by British lawyer Steven Grosz, Hicks was subjected to beatings, sodomy with a foreign object, sensory deprivation, disorienting drugs and prolonged shackling in painful positions.

Isn't this illegal? Not according to Dick Cheney:

The U.S. government denied those claims, and before accepting Hicks's guilty plea it required him to affirm that he had "never been illegally treated." But the tribunal's rules, written under principles Cheney advanced, would have allowed the Australian's conviction with evidence obtained entirely by "cruel, inhuman or degrading" techniques.

And why was Mr. Hicks finally released? Dick Cheney went to Australia to meet with John Howard. Howard faced a tough re-election campaign. Cheney returned from Australia, and a few days later, Mr. Hicks was allowed to leave Gitmo.

The deal, negotiated without the knowledge of the chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, was supervised by Susan J. Crawford, the senior authority over military commissions. Crawford received her three previous government jobs from then-Defense Secretary Cheney -- appointed as his special adviser, Pentagon inspector general and then judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Lovely government you've got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it.