WASHINGTON — Does Dick Cheney matter? Are the former vice president’s comments on the torture report worth dissecting?
Some friends, as I mused the other day about what topic to tackle, argued no: Cheney is history. Too easy a target. Enough about torture. What about a nice holiday column?
But Cheney’s torture remarks are both too outrageous and, judging from my inbox, too common to ignore. When I wrote last week both praising release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture and reaffirming my belief that prosecuting the torturers would have been a mistake, I was braced for flak from the left.
Instead, it came from the right, and boiled down to: Before you talk about the stain of torture, tell it to the families of those who leaped from the burning twin towers.
I understand. Torture was tempting in the aftermath of 9/11. It required us to think through what we were willing to do — more precisely, what we were willing to have done on our behalf — to protect ourselves.
What is so striking about Cheney is the complete absence of intellectual wrestling. This man sees no grays.
The late Daniel Moynihan famously wrote about defining deviancy down. Cheney does the opposite: he defines torture up. “Torture to me,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd, “is an American citizen on a 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 City on 9/11.”
We did not kill thousands of innocent civilians; therefore, we are not torturers. Todd noted the treatment of Majid Kahn, in which a “lunch tray consisting of hummus, pasta, sauce, nuts and raisins was pureed and rectally infused,” and asked Cheney, “Does that meet the definition of torture in your mind?”
Cheney repeated his invocation of 9/11, adding, “I believe it was done for medical reasons.”
Not true, actually, but Cheney, with relentlessly circular reasoning, could not bring himself to condemn it. “It wasn’t torture in terms of it wasn’t part of the program,” Cheney said.
But then there are techniques that were “part of the program,” and here, too, Cheney gives no ground. Todd cited Riyadh al-Najjar, handcuffed to an overhead bar, 22 hours a day for two days, wearing a diaper. He cited Abu Zubaydah, confined for a total of 266 hours in a coffin-sized box.
“We were very careful to stop short of torture,” Cheney insisted. “The Senate has seen fit to label (it) torture. But we worked hard to stay short of that definition.”
Except that is demonstrably false. Zubaydah, for instance, was waterboarded so intensively he “became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s waterboarding deteriorated into “a series of near drownings,” the Intelligence Committee found.
But don’t trust them — listen to the same Justice Department that Cheney said bestowed its blessing. One example: a July 2004 letter to the CIA in which Attorney General John Ashcroft prohibited waterboarding a detainee “primarily because of the view that the technique had been employed in a different fashion than that which DOJ initially approved.”
And then there were detainees who were not terrorists. Once again, not a scintilla of regret. Gul Rahman, Todd noted, “was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in CIA custody. And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity.”
Of the 119 suspected terrorists held by the CIA, the Senate panel found, at least 26 were wrongly detained.
Todd: “You’re OK 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.”
Perhaps Blackstone’s formulation, that it is better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent to suffer, may need tweaking in the age of terrorism, when freeing the guilty poses risks to all. But to detain, and torture, the innocent with insouciance is something different.
Cheney’s no-regrets attitude is chilling, enhanced by the unsettling fact that so many Americans agree with him. Six in 10 in an ABC/Washington Post poll found the CIA’s treatment of suspected terrorists justified, although half, contra Cheney, at least had the decency to call it torture.
Which is why Cheney is not an easy or irrelevant target. He makes a flawed case that cannot safely be ignored.
Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.
