Former Vice President and War on Terror architect Dick Cheney is dead and gone, but his memory lives on in the personal collection of torture devices belonging to Colonel Erran Morad.
Back in 2018, barely a year into President Donald Trump’s first term, satire master Sacha Baron Cohen set out to interrogate the growing political and cultural divide in America while under cover as various eccentric characters. In the limited series Who is America?, Cohen interviewed some of the biggest names in American politics and embarrassed some of the most powerful conservative figures in the country, with the recently deceased Cheney appearing in one episode to speak to an Israeli military leader about the grand old time he had waging war in the Middle East.
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At one point during the talk, Cohen, dressed as the fictional Col. Morad, applauded Cheney for “changing the sport” of “advanced interrogation” and asked the Vice President to sign a plastic water jug attached to a rag. After Cheney passed away at the age of 84 earlier this week, it’s now time for that waterboarding kit to take its place in our National Museum of American History, next to Abraham Lincoln’s top hat and the Abu Ghraib hoods.
A year after he bamboozled a blissfully unaware Cheney with questions like “What is your favorite war?” and statements such as, “We wanted to get rid of Bush to see more Dick,” Cohen spoke to Don Cheadle for Variety about the surreal experience of playing one of the most powerful warmongers in American history for a fool.
As Cohen revealed, he and the Who is America? writers created the character of Col. Morad specifically to trick Cheney, saying “You have to think, ‘OK, we got Dick Cheney, he’s agreed to do this. How am I going to convince one of the most cynical, suspicious, brilliant minds that I’m real? How am I going to get him to say things he’s ultimately going to regret?’” As it turns out, all Cohen had to do to trick one of the most shrewd and ruthless political operators (formerly) alive was to act like a torture device would make great memorabilia.
And, to be clear, Cohen/Morad was correct – that Cheney-signed waterboarding kit is a valuable artifact that shows America just how ghoulish, violent and oblivious its leaders can be. It’s unclear what, exactly, the Who is America? team did with the jug after Cheney left the set, but hopefully someone saved it for posterity and will donate it to the Smithsonian Institution.
But if Cheney’s waterboarding kit can’t be located, it’s probably just because Cohen and his team burned it following Cheney’s passing out of fear that the late war criminal could use it as a Horcrux.
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