Is Dick Cheney a foreign agent?

I mean, what other conclusion can you come to when the lunatic, isolated even within his own administration, is pushing for a CIA torture exemption designed perfectly to further erode world opinion about the U.S., when even the Director of Intelligence doesn't want such an exemption?

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA was eager to whisk captured terrorists off to secret locations around the world where its operatives could interrogate them out of the reach of the U.S. legal system and human-rights organizations. But four years later, with about three dozen of al-Qaeda's most hard-core agents in CIA custody, America's new spy chief seems less enthusiastic about the leeway his operatives have had. At a secret briefing for U.S. Senators on Oct. 26, a senior U.S. intelligence official tells TIME, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was pointedly neutral on Vice President Dick Cheney's Capitol Hill lobbying to have the CIA exempted from legislation banning mistreatment of detainees. "It's above my pay grade," the spymaster said, then artfully dodged another question about whether the harsher interrogation tactics Cheney wants the agency to be free to use actually produce valuable intelligence.

That's because agents on the ground know that it doesn't produce valuable intelligence.