“Painfully Obscene”: Dick Cheney’s Tortured Appearance On ‘Meet The Press’ Should Be His Public Swan Song
It pretty much goes without saying that any pundit or political writer coming from the left side of center can be expected to presume Vice President Dick Cheney to be nothing less than the political equivalent of Darth Vader.
However, there has remained a small cadre of left leaning pundits and commentators willing to give a fair hearing to the man who was arguably the most powerful Vice-President in the nation’s history—a group I previously would have included myself to be among.
After Mr. Cheney’s appearance on Sunday’s “Meet The Press”—where he employed twisted rationales coupled with outright, provable and painful lies to support his position on torture—finding a commentator from either side of the aisle willing to give credibility to Cheney, let alone those from the left, should prove exponentially harder if not completely impossible.
While there was nothing particularly surprising or odd about Cheney highlighting the politics that may have played a role in last week’s release of the Senate torture report, even the most ardent Cheney supporter had to question the logic of the Vice President’s answers—which are better characterized as retorts—most notably Mr. Cheney’s constant deflection of a question asking for his definition of illegal treatment of detainees.
Cheney’s response?
Torture is “an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11.”
Cheney would be right were he to pose this as an example rather than the defining metric when seeking to determine an act of torture. The horrendous, unthinkable experience referred to by Cheney is, unquestionably, one example of inflicting torture—and a pretty good example of horrific torture at that—but hardly the sole method that Cheney insisted on pretending to be the case.
Yet, each time Cheney was asked for a more realistic and more encompassing definition of torture that would rationally go beyond any one particular example, he continuously returned to the experiences of our lost countrymen on 9-11. This seemed, in the mind of Dick Cheney, to be the only standard to be applied when determining if our interrogation methods may have exceeded the legal bounds imposed by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of detainees.
At a point, it became more than clear that Cheney had pre-planned this “non-answer” for his appearance, thinking it to be very clever.
By pretending that only a horrible infliction of agony similar to what was heaped on the victims of 9-11 would rise to a level that could be termed torture, the Vice-President was simply sending a coded message to his supporters to remind them that, given what the bad guys did to us, there was nothing too horrible that we could do to them—Geneva Convention be damned.
Of course, that includes waterboarding, a practice that Cheney continued to argue is not an interrogation method that constitutes torture or a violation of international law.
I can appreciate that there are a great many Americans who agree that torture should be employed in the circumstances we have faced in our battle with terrorists. Indeed, a CBS News poll out today reveals that while more than half of all Americans believe that waterboarding is torture, just a bit less than half of the American public believes that the use of torture is sometimes appropriate .
If Cheney had shown up on “Meet The Press” and argued that what we did was torture but that, in his estimation, it was completely appropriate to engage in such torture under the circumstances, a far more meaningful discussion could have ensured.
Instead, Cheney played a game of saying that what we did was not torture while winking to his loyal supporters in the audience in an effort to say that what we did certainly was torture…but you know you loved it.
In what might have otherwise been amusing, had the entire performance not been so painfully obscene, Cheney actually went on to admit that there did exist actions that constitute torture, separate and apart from the one and only criteria he was willing to subscribe to involving 9-11 victims.
When Chuck Todd reminded the Vice-President that the United States prosecuted and hung Japanese soldiers following WWII for engaging in the waterboarding of American soldiers, Cheney answered that this was not the reason we hung offending Japanese soldiers. According to Cheney, we prosecuted these people, “For a lot of stuff, not for waterboarding… and they did a lot of other stuff.”
By: Rick Ungar, Forbes, December 15, 2014
“Make This Monster Pay A Price”: Why We Needed To Hear From Dick Cheney One Last Time
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s time is about up, in many senses. For a Republican Party trying to look forward, he shouldn’t be a go-to voice for the media on national security policy. His sneering attacks on President Obama aren’t news anymore. The man who famously said, “It’s my new heart, not someone else’s old heart,” about the donor to his taxpayer-funded heart transplant should have lost the power to shock us by now. Unless he has a sudden attack of conscience, and apologizes for his career, he has nothing to say worth hearing.
Except on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. There’s been some anger on the left that Cheney took his seat yet again on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, but I think he belonged there, one last time. Let the American people hear from the man who claims that interrogation methods we prosecuted after World War II, as well as others even more depraved, aren’t actually torture.
Cheney is such a monster that he couldn’t even keep himself from defending “rectal feeding.” While he acknowledged that it “was not one of the techniques that was approved,” he sanctioned it nonetheless. “I believe it was done for medical reasons. … It wasn’t torture in terms of it wasn’t part of the program.”
That would seem to imply that anything that was “part of the program” was torture, which of course Cheney denies.
Ironically, earlier on Fox News Cheney said, “I don’t know anything about” rectal feeding or rectal rehydration (he may well have been lying). But by the time he got to “MTP,” he wasn’t willing to let any torture method go undefended. And even host Chuck Todd noting that “the medical community has said there is no medical reason to do this” didn’t shame him.
Todd asked Cheney some tough questions about U.S. prosecution of Japanese officials who waterboarded Americans, about the fact that at least a quarter of the detainees were innocent and, of course, about rectal feeding. Unfortunately, Cheney either dodged or lied.
Their exchange about innocent detainees showed Cheney at his most sociopathic:
TODD: Twenty-five percent of the detainees, though, twenty-five percent turned out to be innocent. They were released.
CHENEY: Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are –
TODD: Well, I’m asking you.
CHENEY: — you going to know?
(CROSSTALK)
TODD: Is that too high? You’re okay with that margin for error?
CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States. I was prepared and we did. We got the authorization from the president and authorization from the Justice Department to go forward with the program. It worked. It worked now for 13 years.
“I have no problem” if 25 percent of the people we detained and potentially tortured were innocent. Take that in. It’s the same mentality that leads to police shooting unarmed black men in the name of public safety. But it squares with Cheney’s famous “one percent doctrine” that governed the aftermath to 9/11: If there’s even 1 percent chance that terrorists might have a weapon of mass destruction, the U.S. should act as if it’s a certainty, and do whatever it takes to stop them.
It also squares with Cheney telling Larry King, about his lifesaving heart donor, “I don’t spend time wondering who had it, what they’d done, what kind of person.”
America’s torture architect got a new heart, but he can never get a soul. Americans needed to see that display of authoritarian arrogance on Sunday. But now let’s hope he goes away.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 15, 2014
“Crossed The Line”: Even John Yoo Has His Limits
John Yoo’s reputation is well deserved. The conservative law professor at UC Berkeley is perhaps best known as the principal author of the Bush/Cheney “torture memos” – defending the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” – during Yoo’s tenure at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
And when it came to torture and national security, the conservative lawyer was largely in the “anything goes” category. But apparently, even Yoo has his limits.
As former Vice President Dick Cheney argued on Sunday that the CIA’s aggressive interrogation of terrorism suspects did not amount to torture, the man who provided the legal rationale for the program said that in some cases it had perhaps gone too far.
Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo said the sleep deprivation, rectal feeding and other harsh treatment outlined in a U.S. Senate report last week could violate anti-torture laws.
“If these things happened as they’re described in the report … they were not supposed to be done. And the people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders,” Yoo said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
In an interview on C-SPAN, Yoo added, “Looking at it now, I think of course you can do these things cumulatively or too much that it would cross the line of the anti-torture statute.”
Just to be clear, this is not to suggest Yoo endorses or agrees with the torture report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. On the contrary, it’s quite clear that he does not.
But as a political matter, his willingness to draw legal lines now, in light of the new revelations, creates an interesting dynamic.
We know, for example, that according to the CIA’s records, rectal feeding and hydration were forced on detainees without medical need.
According to former CIA director Michael Hayden, that wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t torture.
According to former Vice President Dick Cheney, that wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t torture.
According to Karl Rove, that wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t torture.
But according to John Yoo, this crossed the line. In other words, a variety of leading Republican voices haven’t just embraced torture as a legitimate tool, they’ve positioned themselves to the right of the torture-memo author who helped give the Bush/Cheney White House the green light in the first place.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 15, 2014
“Bush’s Willful Ignorance”: Why He Wanted To Know As Little About Torture As Possible
It’s happening more than 10 years too late (and in a better world it wouldn’t need to happen at all), but now that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released its so-called torture report, the American people are finally having an informed debate over their government’s use of “enhanced interrogation” during the presidency of George W. Bush. The process is not always pretty — at times, in fact, it is downright chilling. But now that we know some of the harrowing details of what was done in our name, it’ll be easier for us Americans to step a bit closer to the mirror and see what we’ve become. As Glenn Greenwald put it earlier this week, “Everybody’s noses got rubbed in [the torture program] by this report.”
Still, the human brain has an awesome capacity to reject information it finds upsetting — like proof that one’s leaders embraced practices refined by the Bolsheviks and the Gestapo. At least that’s my explanation for why some people would rather talk about alleged partisanship than “rectal rehydration.” Or why there’s been increasing focus on the question of whether the CIA “misled” President Bush about the effectiveness of the program, as well as its essential nature. The whining from conservatives over the Committee not interviewing CIA agents is a red herring, of course (as Chris Hayes has noted, arguments about process are almost uniformly disingenuous). But I think the chatter about Bush the Younger really being Bush the Clueless gets to something deeper.
Before we get into that, though, let’s lay out the basic thrust of the Bush-as-patsy narrative. The key data point for the argument, which the report’s authors say is based on the CIA’s own records, is the fact that Bush wasn’t officially briefed on the agency’s use of waterboarding until 2006. By that point, CIA agents had been subjecting “more than three dozen prisoners” to a series of “near drownings” for years. The report also found that when the president was told of some of the program’s details — specifically, the practice of chaining alleged “evildoers” to the ceiling and forcing them to soil themselves — he “expressed discomfort.” He was, after all, the ultimate compassionate conservative.
Admittedly, there’s much in this formulation that’s seductive, confirming as it does a few widely held beliefs about Bush and his administration. For one thing, it jibes perfectly with the trope that depicts Bush as little more than a figurehead, the emptiest of suits. For another, because the torture program has been so vociferously defended by the former vice president, the story also seems to confirm the related suspicion that, for most of the Bush era, Dick Cheney was the real president. Last but not least, the idea that Bush was kept in the dark (not literally; that was reserved for detainees) lines up with another popular Bush motif: that he was, at least for a commander-in-chief, a “regular guy,” just like us, and not a sadistic authoritarian.
To paraphrase CIA Director John Brennan’s remarks this week, what Bush knew and when he knew it is “unknowable” to the rest of us. And to some extent, depending on how much “discomfort” he feels over being a war criminal, it may not even be knowable to him. All the same, there are a few signs that the Bush-as-patsy explanation is a little too pat. And there are historical reasons to believe that he not only knew enough to be culpable, but that he purposefully avoided finding out more than the bare minimum of what he needed. As Andrew Sullivan put it recently, there was “a desire not to know, not to have direct and explicit knowledge of what was actually being done, because of the immense gravity of the crimes.”
The first, most obvious, reason to question whether Bush really knew so little is the fact that in “Decision Points,” his listicle-cum-memoir, he claims to have directly given the thumbs-up in 2002 when the CIA asked if Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al-Qaeda detainee, could be waterboarded. “I thought about the 2,971 people stolen from their families by al Qaeda on 9/11,” Bush writes. “And I thought about my duty to protect my country from another act of terror.” After so judiciously weighing his duty to protect Americans from harm (which up to that point he hadn’t done so well) against his obligation not to be a war criminal, Bush came to his conclusion: “’Damn right,’ I said.”
Of course, just because Bush had his ghostwriter Christopher Michel include this anecdote in his book doesn’t make it true. As a New York Times article on Bush’s response to allegedly being misled suggests, it’s quite possible that Bush is lying about giving the go-ahead to torture Zubaydah in order to shield the CIA — as well as to mitigate his embarrassment. “I suspect,” Sullivan writes in the post I mentioned previously, “Bush decided that, in his book, he had a duty to provide cover for the people who worked for him.” But even if you reject that explanation, there’s still good reason to doubt Bush was on the periphery — or, to be more precise, he was more marginalized than he may have wanted.
That reason has a name: Richard Bruce Cheney, also known as the United States’ most powerful vice president. The theory here isn’t that Cheney was doing a whole lot of dirty work behind Bush’s back, but rather that he had taken the gloves off with the tacit encouragement and approval of the president. As Cheney-watchers — especially the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and former Cheney co-worker John Dean — have noted, Cheney’s experience in the Nixon administration during its final days did not lead him to the same conclusion as most of us, that an unchecked president is dangerous for American democracy, but instead to conclude that Watergate was proof that if you’re going to break the law, you’d better do it in a way that insulates the president. And as Greenwald noted in my interview with him this week, and historian Sean Wilentz wrote about in a 2007 New York Times op-ed, Cheney reached a similar conclusion after Iran-Contra (which, like Watergate, he believed to be a power grab by Democrats).
Plausible deniability, in other words, is the key phrase to understand what Bush “knew” about the global network of torture chambers and dungeons that will stand as one of the most enduring legacies of his tenure as president. And I suppose in a bitter, depressing way, that’s all too fitting. Because while Bush is the American who bears the most responsibility for the evil unleashed by the United States in the wake of 9/11, the truth is that all of American society let fear and panic overwhelm its values and senses; all of American society was desperately willing to believe that impossible promise: that it had nothing to fear. And when the true costs of its panic and its terror began to float to the surface, all of American society was content to ask no further questions, and to look the other way.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, December 13, 2014
“Enhanced Interviewing”: Five Questions Chuck Todd Should Ask Dick Cheney On Sunday
This Sunday, Dick Cheney will be interviewed by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. If the former vice president’s previous appearances on that program and others are any indication, he will likely say things that are untrue, and say them with that quiet yet firm Cheneyesque confidence that makes it clear that anyone who disagrees with him is either a fool or a traitor, if not both.
So I thought it would be worthwhile to offer Todd some suggestions on questions he might ask Cheney, in order to elicit the most revealing answers as we have this vital debate on our recent past.
You have long insisted that techniques like waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation are not torture. In order to come to that conclusion, you must have a definition of torture that those techniques do not meet. So what is your definition of torture?
This may seem like a matter of semantics, but it is an absolutely central question to this entire debate, and one that neither Cheney nor any of the other Bush administration defenders of the torture program have ever answered. When asked, Cheney has always simply insisted that we didn’t torture, and that the “enhanced” techniques we used aren’t torture Why? Because they aren’t. Unlike most sane Americans, I’ve actually read Cheney’s turgid memoir, “In My Time,” and there too he simply states flatly that “The program was safe, legal, and effective,” but not torture.
There is a common definition of torture — the infliction of extreme physical or mental suffering in order to obtain information or a confession — that is reflected in U.S. law, the UN Convention Against Torture, and in the minds of pretty much everyone around the world. Under no reasonable interpretation of the term would something like stress positions, which are designed to produce excruciating pain and which have been used as a torture technique for centuries, not qualify. But Cheney doesn’t agree. So he really ought to tell us what he thinks does constitute torture.
We’ll have a new president in two years. Would you advise him or her to restart the torture program?
Two days after taking office in 2009, Barack Obama signed an executive order banning the use of cruel and degrading techniques, and declaring that all U.S. personnel, whether in the CIA or any other agency, would have to abide by the interrogation guidelines set out in the Army Field Manual. It also revoked a 2007 order signed by President Bush, which had declared that “members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces” were outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
What I asked yesterday applies here: Since Cheney is an enthusiastic defender of the torture program in place during the Bush years, and since there are still terrorists in the world, one might presume that he believes not only that it was right to torture suspects in the past, but that we should continue to torture suspects in the future. He should have the chance to make clear whether that is in fact what he believes, and what his advice to the next president would be.
If things like waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation are “safe, legal, and effective,” but are not torture, would you recommend that other countries also use them on prisoners they hold?
Some liberals have noted that Cheney’s implicit position is that these techniques are not torture if we perform them, but would be torture if someone else did. Since this is obviously not something anyone would admit to believing, Cheney should be asked directly if he thinks other countries should also start using these techniques. That would apply to our allies, but it could also apply to less friendly countries like China or Russia. And of course, the natural follow-up is: If an American is captured in some conflict and is subjected to things like waterboarding and stress positions, would Cheney tell that person that not only hadn’t he been tortured, but he had been treated in a safe and legal manner?
During the run-up to the Iraq War and in its early days, you told the American people many things that were false. I know you still believe that all things considered, the war was the right thing to do. But do you think that if you and other members of the Bush administration had argued only from what you actually knew to be true, the public would have supported the war?
The Iraq War’s defenders furiously resist the idea that it was sold on false premises. Some of the things administration representatives said, like “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” were misleading bits of fear-mongering, but were technically hypothetical. However, many of the other things they said were provably false. That’s why, if and when Todd asks such a question, he should have some specifics at hand to keep Cheney from simply asserting that it was all a matter of interpretation and our judgment based on what we thought at the time. What distinguished Cheney’s remarks from those of some of his colleagues was that they were spoken without any qualification or hedging, but were stated as undeniable facts.
For instance, in an August 26, 2002, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Cheney said: “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” That was false. He also said: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Not only was this not true, the idea that there was “no doubt” about it was also not true — it was a matter of vigorous debate within the intelligence community, a fact of which Cheney was surely aware.
In an appearance a week later on Meet the Press, Cheney said, “we do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” Tim Russert then asked: “He does not have a nuclear weapon now?” And Cheney replied, “I can’t say that. I can say that I know for sure that he’s trying to acquire the capability.”
Or there’s his statement that “it’s been pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta traveled to Prague to meet with Iraqi intelligence officials, an utterly bogus story that was nothing like “pretty well confirmed” when Cheney made the claim. I could go on, but it’s worth probing whether Cheney thinks that deceiving the public in the manner they did was necessary to achieve what he sees as a greater good.
Since the end of the recession, the economy has created over 10 million new jobs. Even if we count from the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency when hundreds of thousands of jobs were being shedded every month, he has still overseen the creation of a net of six million jobs. In its eight years in office, the Bush administration created a net of 1.3 million jobs. Why has Barack Obama done better than your administration did on job creation?
This is a non-torture-related bonus question. Perhaps Cheney would respond, as many conservatives would, that Barack Obama deserves no credit for anything good that happens with the American economy. But the follow-up would then be, does that mean George W. Bush had no effect on the economy either? The Bush administration enacted huge tax cuts which, all the administration’s representatives assured the public, would result in an explosion of job growth. That never happened. How would Cheney explain it?
One thing we should be able to agree on is that Todd shouldn’t waste his time with Cheney doing things like handicapping the 2016 presidential race. Cheney doesn’t answer questions very often, so when he does, the interviewer ought to make the most of the opportunity.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 11, 2014
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