Senator Saxby Chambliss is the latest Republican to demonstrate that he’s not really opposed to torture — he just doesn’t want to call it that: Top Republican: Forthcoming Report on CIA Torture Is “Wrong”.

He said the term “torture” is only used by critics of the program and said he believed it would be disputed.

On the subject of waterboarding, Chambliss said it was “one of the specific issues that was investigated by the Department of Justice from the standpoint of, does it comply with the Geneva convention, and they made a determination that it is authorized, that it is not torture.”

And noted political daughter Liz Cheney also weighed in on the subject, calling President Obama “an utter disgrace” for using the word “torture.”

“This president is an utter disgrace. He’s got a situation where, as your last two reports showed, you’ve got crises erupting around the world. And he is expending more time, more energy, more passion, more aggressive activity in targeting and going after patriots, heroes, CIA officers and others who kept us safe after 9/11,” Cheney said on Fox News’ Hannity.

“He’s lying about what they did, he’s slandering them, he went to Cairo and did it in 2009. Today he did it from the podium of the Oval Office. It’s a disgrace. It’s despicable,” Cheney continued.

That’s right, in Cheney’s strange confused moral universe, not only is there nothing wrong with torture, the torturers themselves are “patriots and heroes.”

The utter disgrace is that after all these years and all the evidence that the US government turned its back on our most fundamental values and used torture against helpless prisoners, for absolutely no benefit, we still have Republicans denying and defending it. Shame on these people.