A Newsweek article, detailing the legacy that Dick Cheney is leaving for the incoming Obama administration, contains a description of a scene that I think may be steeped in apocrypha:
At a retirement ceremony recently for a top-level intelligence official, the senior spooks in the room gave each other high-fives. They were celebrating the fact that terrorists have not attacked the United States since 9/11. In the view of many intelligence professionals, the get-tough measures encouraged or permitted by George W. Bush's administration--including "waterboarding" self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--kept America safe. Cheney himself has been underscoring the point in a round of farewell interviews. "If I had advice to give it would be, before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric, you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it, because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead," he told CBS Radio.
I have to imagine that if you were to shake the hand of a "senior spook," it would be heavily callused from high-fives, seeing that terrorist attacks on the United States are, by any estimation, far rarer than retirement parties. The authors are willing to admit that the outgoing administration did a lot of "flaunting executive power, ignoring Congress, [and] showing scorn for anyone who waved the banner of civil liberties." But they seem to think that the Obama administration, despite having promised to dial back the Bush/Cheney legacy of transforming the Executive Branch into an unchecked ranch of authoritarianism, will have a difficult time in the undoing of that, making it unlikely that "he will wildly overcorrect for the Bush administration's abuses."
That would be a shame, and not just because Obama promised otherwise. The Bush administration takes it as an article of faith that they will receive some sort of credit for having prevented attacks on the United States. But, again, a historical comparison makes this a pretty slim accomplishment among presidents. I'll remember the Bush administration as one that failed to avail themselves of the means at their disposal to keep us safe. Let's recall, for auld lang syne, that ancient and forgotten Presidential Daily Brief. Also, 9/11 -- aren't we supposed to be "never forgetting?" Let's just say that if there's a club, in this life or the next, of Presidents who give each other high-fives for preventing terrorist attacks on the United States, George W. Bush will not be a member.
But, more to the point: Dick Cheney wants us to believe that it was their willingness to use torture and the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that has significantly moved the needle of "victory" in our favor. This is poorly reasoned. A lack of attacks on the U.S. does not account for the spectacular job al Qaeda has done getting away with the one it did. Whatever intelligence was gained from torture hasn't rooted al Qaeda from its safe perch or significantly thrown their operational ability into disarray. And the simple fact of the matter is that Bush and Cheney glibly elide over the reality of what happens when we remove our moral ballast from the equation and denigrate our democratic values by torturing others. If I could leave you with one thought here in the last days of the Bush administration, let it be this: our policy of torture may never come to be known as the means by which attacks were prevented, but it will inevitably serve as the inspiration for the next one that succeeds.