Mr. Vice President Cheney: You have just painted a big "guilty" sign and hung it around your neck by going on the road and treating our nation's war crimes as your personal public relations problem. The fact that you are on a PR tour to save your reputation, is proof that you know that you are personally responsible for our policies of torture and the criminal mistreatment of prisoners that you are defending. And there is another thing: you say that our torture actions were needed to save lives and prevent another 9/11-type attack. You know what? The real reason you were authorizing torture was to find a "link" between Al-Qaeda and Iraq and justify a war that had no justification.
(See Rachel Maddow's excellent MSNBC investigation of this attempt to find the Iraq link here.)
Disclosure: I'm the father of a United States Marine who fought in Afghanistan (several times), was deployed to Iraq and completed his five years of service and is now out of the Marines. I have also been a life-long Republican, until I quit in disgust over the Bush policies. To put it very mildly; I'm still very pro-military.
Because of the pro-military writing I have done in both my books and in opinion pieces for the Washington Post and other newspapers, I have many friends in the military family, including a number of generals and admirals and another men and women at all levels of command. Every single one of them tells me that the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib prison killed more of our people -- by becoming recruiting tools for our enemies -- than anything else, with one exception: your policy on torture and the policy you supported for stripping prisoners of legal right in Guantánamo Bay. You, Mr. Vice President, provided our enemies with all the anti-American propaganda they needed and then some. You thereby killed American troops as surely as if you personally set off roadside bombs.
Mr. Vice President, you are an insult to my son, his service and sacrifice and those of the hundreds of thousands of other young men and women who stood up when asked to defend America, only to find that the régime in Washington -- which you and President Bush led -- was indulging exactly the same kind of illegal vicious behavior that my son was asked to defend us against. You made the "good guys" into the bad guys in the eyes of the world. You became the recruiting poster boy for Al-Qaeda.
My suggestion to the Obama administration is this: that you Mr. Vice President Cheney should be arrested for war crimes and prosecuted both in US and international courts. I say this for two reasons. First, that justice might be done; and second, to save American military lives.
President Obama says he wants to save the lives of US military personnel by withholding the release of damaging photographs of torture. (The ACLU is pressuring President Obama to release photographs of Americans mistreating and torturing our prisoners.) The President is resisting this idea on the plausible grounds that the release of these photographs will most certainly inflame Islamic animosity toward the United States. This, as the President knows, will result in the deaths of American military personnel worldwide and perhaps even the deaths of American civilians here in the United States.
But President Obama could more effectively save our military people by using every legal means available to initiate a war crimes trial of you, Mr. Vice President. There is no moral point served by investigating lowly CIA operatives and interrogators, military personnel or even military officers that carried out your policies. It is time to prosecute those truly responsible for besmirching America's reputation.
The real solution to helping to defuse extremists' ability to recruit new suicide bombers and other young people to kill our soldiers worldwide is for you, Mr. Vice President Dick Cheney, to offer an apology to the American people for your role in taking the good name of our country and the honor of young men like my Marine son, and dragging them through the mud.
Mr. Vice President, if you love your country you will write a letter to President Obama telling him that the best thing he could to to save the lives of our troops is to have you arrested and prosecuted. Then the world would know that we are serious about justice. You might also offer to give testimony against former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and of course President Bush. If you care about saving American lives you will do everything you can to see that the three of you end your days behind bars.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. He is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and also author of the forthcoming Patience With God -- Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism)