Cheney: Vader unmasked

Bit by prevaricated bit, reporters for McClatchy, Columbia Journalism Review and Slate pick apart former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech before the American Enterprise Institute:

First up, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel’s piece for McClatchy, in which they remove the shaky supports from Cheney’s defense of U.S. interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists:

[Cheney] quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country.”

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.” …

Cheney said that President Barack Obama’s decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was “flatly contrary” to U.S. national security, and would help al Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.

However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, “strongly supported” Obama’s decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that “we do not need these techniques to keep America safe.

Writing for Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Kaiser aims squarely at the contradictions between Cheney’s professed beliefs and his actions:

Besides bringing his usual beguiling demeanor of a medieval executioner to the podium of the American Enterprise Institute, just about every sentence he uttered managed to encapsulate the exact opposite of the truth.

Let’s parce just one of those sentences: “List all the things that make us a force for good in the world – for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences—and what you end up with is a list of the reasons why the terrorists hate America.”

This from a man who violated the nation’s devotion to liberty by kidnapping suspected terrorists (who often turned out to be innocent bystanders), who made a mockery of human rights by embracing torture methods which are war crimes under treaties we have signed, and whose commitment to the “rational, peaceful resolution of differences” was exemplified by a disastrous war of choice which killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Finally, here’s Slate’s Fred Kaplan on Cheney’s “straw men, red herrings and lies“:

… After justifying “enhanced interrogation methods,” as part of the Bush administration’s “comprehensive strategy” in the wake of 9/11—and noting that the next seven and a half years saw no follow-on attack—he said this:

So we’re left to draw one of two conclusions, and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event … and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort.

This is a blatant evasion. The debate—or one of the debates—is, in fact, over whether or not the war on terror required “tough interrogations,” as Cheney called them. Does he believe—should anyone else believe—that removing one chunk of this strategy would cause the whole edifice to topple? If these interrogations are so essential, why did President Bush stop them in 2004? And why haven’t we been attacked since?

Cheney’s evasiveness is more basic than this. He still refuses to acknowledge what nearly everyone else has: that these interrogations did amount to torture. “Torture was never permitted,” he said, even while conceding the occasional water-boarding. These methods, he noted, “were given careful legal review before they were approved”—ignoring that these legal reviews were conducted by his own aides and have since been discredited almost uniformly. …

… Cheney’s next volley against Obama—for releasing the Bush administration’s legal documents that justified water-boarding and other harsh practices—was where the outright lying began. “President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation, should he deem it appropriate,” Cheney said. Yet, this authority would have little use because, thanks to the release of the documents, “the enemy now knows exactly what interrogation methods to train against.”

This argument might make sense, except that Obama has not reserved the right to use enhanced interrogation. In fact, he has explicitly, repeatedly, and unconditionally banned the practice. In his speech this morning, Obama said there was no security risk in releasing the Bush documents precisely because they no longer reflect U.S. policy.