Going into Memorial weekend, the air was taken right out of me, with the atmosphere becoming purely sulfurous, listening Thursday to former Vice President Dick Cheney defend himself and the Bush administration before the American Enterprise Institute. I just about keeled over when he spoke: "There has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent."

Now read what the Senate Armed Services Investigation report on torture, released just a couple of weeks ago, had to say: "The abuse of detainees at Abu Gharib in late 2003 was not simply a result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officers conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody."

What cast of mind, Dick, does it take for leading our young countrymen so far afoul and, then, throwing them under the bus to protect yours and the rest of the Bush administration's yellow belly?

What word for that? Or might it be two words: craven and malevolent?

President Obama, in light of the Senate Arm Services Report, how about those young MPs that have been held accountable for the abuse that took place at Abu Gharib? Why should they be in a separate, punishable category from, to use Dick Cheney's slimy words, "the lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work" of inflicting enhanced interrogation techniques, torture by all legal rendering over the past 110 years up until W's administration put its devilish spin of acceptability to it on our prisoners by the CIA?

What about the 20 suspected homicides of our captured that have taken place under -- just whose hands? Might it have to be the CIA's, given the nature of its so-called honorable, yet singularly gruesome commission? Will that ever be fleshed out? Or, for the sake of maintaining virtual honor and national security, is it best left in the ever murky realms?

Mr. President, don't go jellyfish on us. You can't triangulate the rule of law. Don't undermine equal justice under the law. The law is the law no matter how Dick Cheney and, yes, you, try to "ad hoc" it and slice it.

I can't tell you how disillusioning it is to find you alongside of Dick Cheney protecting the CIA at the expense of our misled grunts. We elected you for having backbone enough for making "change we can believe in," Mr. President.

At least if you're going to give the CIA a pass, then pardon Cheney's so-called malevolent grunts and hold accountable the truly malevolent ones who made the policy and gave the orders.

While you're at it, President Obama, you might want to consider Sgt. Evan Vela's plight. Dick Cheney may have advocated for Scooter Libby's pardon, but you can sure bet that old yellow-belly didn't lift a finger to help Sgt. Evan Vela who was made proxy for accountability in the Iraq War.

Sgt. Evan Vela of Fort Richardson, why, we do remember him, I hope. If not, better Google him.

Tim O'Leary is a longtime Homer resident and observer of the political scene.