Cheney's Torture Logic
The one good thing about having Vice President Dick Cheney in office is you didn't hear from him very often. But now that he is a civilian he just can't stop talking. It is especially surprising because there is nothing much good to say about his administration's past eight years. Record government deficits, a failed financial system, a collapsed housing market, the war in Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction and an increase in global terrorism.
Unlike his former boss, and most of his predecessors, Cheney can't seem to move on with his life. Now he has taken the offensive. Cheney has one self-proclaimed accomplishment to hang on to: there has been no terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. So he has been criticizing President Barack Obama for making America less safe from a terrorist attack by ending surveillance and other intelligence procedures implemented under President Bush. Further, he has emphatically and unabashedly defended the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Let's face it, Vice President Dick Cheney didn't just have the President's ear, it is pretty clear he had President Bush by the ear. Take this exchange with CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation this past Sunday about enhanced interrogation techniques:
Schieffer: "You approved this?"
Cheney: "Right."
Schieffer: "Did President Bush know everything you knew?
Cheney: "I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew -- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it."
He "basically authorized it?" It sounds like back then Cheney said, "Just sign here George and don't worry, I got your back." Only now it is clear Cheney is saying, "If you go after me, you got to go after Bush too!"
One of Cheney's central arguments is that the enhanced interrogation techniques used were legal. "We had pursued interrogation in a normal way. We decided that we needed some enhanced techniques. So we went to the Justice Department," Cheney said to Schieffer. "What we got from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) were legal memos that laid out what is appropriate and what's not appropriate," he continued. "If we had been about torture, we wouldn't have wasted our time going to the Justice Department."
The United Nations Convention Against Torture, of which America is a signatory, says, "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession" is torture. Further, torture is illegal under U.S. law, and "The Army Field Manual" specifies that waterboarding is prohibited.
Clearly the OLC was instructed by the White House to manufacture guidelines under which waterboarding would not be torture. In other words, harsh enough to have an impact but gentle enough so as not to cause pain. Journalist Christopher Hitchens underwent waterboarding for a Vanity Fair article last August and his conclusion was, "If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture." So much for legality.
Whether waterboarding worked or not appears to be, at best, a jump ball. Most experts believe that torture does not work because prisoners lie. But Dick Cheney is emphatic that waterboarding did work, and he says four former directors of the CIA agree. As Cheney told Schieffer, "No regrets. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. I'm convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives."
Now Cheney has asked the Obama administration to release all the classified memos pertaining to the enhanced interrogations. "Release the memos. And we can look and see for yourself what was produced," Cheney said. This actually makes a lot of sense. The Obama administration should call Cheney on his bluff and release all the memos. There should also be a bipartisan special commission investigation into the use of enhanced interrogations and the role of the OLC. This will strengthen our Democracy by shining light on how government was twisted in order to get around the law.
In the end the Bush administration abandoned American values and played with the truth. Illegal acts are rewritten as legal through tortured logic. That will be the Bush/Cheney legacy here. And Dick Cheney doesn't care what anyone thinks.
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wicked as he is, the man has balls..lot
Oh man. Where to start.
1) Bush "basically knew" about torture. Translation: Bush didn't have a shred of an idea what was going on. Reminds me of those episodes on M*A*S*H when Radar would give Col. Blake a stack of papers to sign, and he'd sign them without looking, yakking about his wife or fishing or something.
2) Every single thing that Cheney utters is a lie. Every word.
3) Imagine what our great past presidents would think of Dick Cheney. What would Roosevelt think? What would George Washington think of this man?
4) Republicans are no longer the party of Lincoln; they are the party of Mussolini. Every definition of Fascism (here's one by Lawrence Brit - http://www
3) Not to mention -- What would Republican Eisenhower think? That former general warned about the military industrial complex. Chicken-hawk "I had more important things to do" Cheney sold them the government.
The fact that they had the Justice department write up the 'torture' memos appears to prove that they actually knew that what they were doing was wrong. They assigned their lackeys in DoJ to come up with a rationalization of torture, which does not appear to be based on known facts about waterboarding or laws governing such acts at the national or international level. Where is the America that prosecuted acts of torture, like waterboarding, after World War II?
He keeps talking about how America wasn't attacked after 9/11. Can someone in the media please remind him (and the American public) that 9/11 happened on their watch. How exactly were we safer under Bush/Cheney?
And, trisha08, America was not attacked BEFORE Sept 11, 2001 either. So, what is Dick Cheney's point?
At best, America was lucky in that a whole new department had to be created to keep America safe after Sept 11, 2001.
Are we to believe that after all the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on security and military defence before Sept 11, 2001 were NOT keeping the country safe??
What were all those departments doing? Were they just coming to work, collecting their paychecks and going home?
Just how stupid does Dick Cheney think the American public is??
Who did the anthrax attacks? We will never know. Makes you wonder if they were just another ruse to scare the sh*t out of the American people, to get us to back the war....sam
It is as clear as The Articles Against Torture are written. Bush and Cheney Conspired to Use Torture as a Means of Information gathering, from Our Captives taken from various Waring and Non Waring Regions.
This is against The Geneva Conventions; It is against the Law in The United States and These two Primates should be arrested and put on Trial for War Crimes. If We allow these two to go without redress for the crimes They commited, Their Criminal Playbook will be used again and the Extremists opposite these 2 will have Their Recruitment Slogan all wrapped Up, nice and neat.
Bush and Cheney not only commited Crimes against Humanity. Bush and Cheney helped the groups like Al Qaida and the Taliban recruit Thousands and Thousands more because of Their Torture Policys. And TopLevel CIA have repeated over and over,"Torture does not Work, and usually ends up working against Our Goals of Information Gathering".
Please, would everyone stop encouraging FORMER vp cheney? 1. don't call him vice president - he is NOT!!! 2. as several have commented, he is trying to deflect the scrutiny he so much deserves.
What an angry, arogant person. Please send him home and stop giving him time on network shows - we really don't care and what he has to say is mostly spiteful CYA stuff!!!
Thank you, Joe, for this post and bringing tortured logic to our attention!
It is interesting that most people advocate torture on the basis of its 'effective
But in this cost-benefit analysis, when the assumption that torture works comes into question, Cheney's argument fails. If the intelligence gathered through torture cannot be made transparent for the sake of national security, if there is no sufficient evidence to hold these dangerous criminals accountable in the courts of law, as to me, it means that there is no way to assess either validity or value of testimonies gathered through torture. At this point, it becomes natural to question whether it is worth violating and manipulating international laws and American norms in order to allegedly achieve results that we cannot even somehow evaluate.
During one of our classroom discussions, two beautiful young women were giving a presentation advocating torture, with their central argument the same as Cheney's: it has worked for centuries. But slavery worked for centuries too. And if everyone agreed that it is acceptable because of the benefits it brings to a large number of people, it would still exist today.
I think it's pretty simple, really--Cheney knows he and his assistant in the Oval Office were GUILTY of negligence in allowing the 9/11 attack--EVEN WHEN SPECIFICALLY WARNED OF AN IMMMINENT ATTCK--and he has been blowing smoke ever since to distract the world from his guilt.
He "kept us safe from another attack for 7 1/2 years" indeed! It just so happened that he was responsible for--guilty of--the time when 3 thousand Americans were murdered by people Cheney was WARNED TO EXPECT.
He doesn't want that to be remembered, so he blows smoke.
Question for Cheney. If torture worked and you "knew where the weapons where" then are we to believe that no one thought to ask these people you tortured where they are now? If it worked we would have found the WMD"s right?
No, it prevented some "Classified" attack that you can not talk about, just like you could not talk about the "classified" information that you assured us that you new where the nonexistent WMD's where? You already used this trick, you already lied, in the exact same way, how can anyone trust you now?
Whether or not torture is a good way to get info or not is a pointless debate...
Torture, on a whole, makes us FAR LESS SAFE.
What if instead of waterboarding the key guy at the last minute to save us a la Jack Bauer...wh
If torture makes 6% of young Muslim men open to radicalization instead of 2 % then we are FAR LESS SAFE.
I agree! Check out what else has been done in our names!
http://the
And then we wonder why they hate us so intensely!!
Its very obvious George W. Bush was President of the United States, but Cheney was dictator in charge.
THE RETURN OF PAPER TIGER AMERICA
Bush and Cheney simply shared the same outlook on homeland security matters. Thank God they radically broke with the policies of the Clinton Administration, the policies that turned America into a paper tiger, that embolded our enemies to action and lead to 9/11- the policies that Obama in his staggering incomprehensible stupidity is now returning to.
"Only now it is clear Cheney is saying, "If you go after me, you got to go after Bush too!"
Fine with me. Let's do it.
Cheney's puffing himself up and bluff-charging those who would bring charges against the Bush Adm. He's wisely (from his POV) playing offense-as
They're running scared, and well they should be.
sorry guys,,, Clinton and Carter by their silence , and Pelosi by her knowledge , do not acknowledge these techniques as torture , and they do acknowledge that they were effective
Sorry, but while they may (by their silence) be claiming (not acknowledg
This is NOT about Clinton, Carter OR Pelosi. This is about the 2 men who were completely in charge of EVERYTHING, and who had the ultimate power and say so.
Your assumptions are nothing more than assumptions. You should not attempt to present your opinion of what someone else’s opinion is. Lets stick to the facts. There are a lot more likely reasons for their silence.
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