Cheney: Why he’s gone on the offensive

For most of his eight years as vice president, Dick Cheney was “the invisible man,” hunkered down in his “undisclosed location,” secretly pulling the Bush administration’s puppet strings, said Andrew Sullivan in the London Sunday Times. But months after he left office, he has suddenly come “shrieking into the light.” Cheney this week ratcheted up his bizarre public relations blitz in defense of the “enhanced interrogation” of suspected terrorists during the Bush years, insisting anew that President Obama has “made this country more vulnerable” by banning waterboarding and other coercive practices. Cheney’s sudden surge of visibility is causing “queasiness among Republican political strategists,” said Dan Balz in The Washington Post, who would prefer that voters forget the Bush years as quickly as possible. In a new poll, 57 percent of GOP insiders think Cheney’s offensive is hurting the party. “Even if he’s right,” said one GOP strategist, “he’s absolutely the wrong messenger.”

Who cares about the insiders? said William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. While the GOP’s shellshocked apparatchiks wring their hands about “rebranding,” Cheney, alone, is out there reminding actual voters of the GOP’s strongest selling point: The Bush administration kept the nation safe for seven and a half years after 9/11. That makes Cheney, at the moment, the “Most Valuable Republican.” Cheney may have low approval ratings personally, said Stephen Hayes, also in the Standard, but the same isn’t true for the policies he’s defending. Beyond the Beltway and the liberal media, the American people—71 percent of them in one recent poll—now agree that tough interrogation tactics can sometimes be justified if they save American lives. Cheney isn’t just “changing the debate about U.S. national security policy, he’s winning it.”

The hell he is, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. The problem with Cheney’s argument is that “it isn’t really a valid argument at all.” Yes, we haven’t been attacked since 9/11. That doesn’t mean we were spared because we started torturing. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan last week told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’d coaxed al Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah into revealing plenty of information without torturing him. The CIA’s brutal, illegal methods of interrogation, Soufan said, were “ineffective, slow, and unreliable.” And let’s not forget one other small point, said Paul Begala in Huffingtonpost.com: The worst terrorist attack in U.S. history occurred on Bush and Cheney’s watch—an attack that Tom Kean, Republican co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, says the White House could have avoided had it not ignored repeated warnings. Torture, it’s now abundantly clear, fed right into al Qaida’s narrative about America’s hostility to the Muslim world, helped draw thousands of new jihadists to Iraq, and resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis.

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Cheney’s credibility is admittedly suspect, said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, but what if this time he’s right? Torture may be abominable, but the Left has been too quick to embrace the proposition that it doesn’t work. Cheney insists there are two CIA memos cataloguing the vital and voluminous intelligence we extracted from suspected terrorists through techniques such as waterboarding. This debate “is not merely some political catfight conducted by bloggers.” It’s about whether torture stopped other al Qaida plots, and whether it “should be banned across the board, always and forever.” So let’s see those memos.

Those memos provide just part of the picture, said Joe Conason in Salon.com. The bigger question is why Cheney insisted that top al Qaida suspects be subjected to waterboarding over and over again—in one case, 183 times. Cheney’s obsession in 2002, numerous intelligence and Bush administration officials are now telling reporters, was to discover a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaida. After one tortured al Qaida detainee, Ibn al Shaykh al-Libi, said there was no such link, Cheney ordered the CIA to keep torturing until, inevitably, al-Libi broke down and “admitted” that Saddam and al Qaida were in cahoots—“intelligence” that the Bush administration later cited in its bogus justification for a war it had wanted all along. So Cheney wants Americans to know “the truth” about torture? Fine. “We need a serious investigation, with witnesses including the former vice president under oath.” Let’s find out if Cheney and friends truly made America safer through “the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves,” or instead tortured prisoners into saying what they wanted, and thus built the case for “a political lie.”