Cheney's "ever-escalating game of chicken between the executive branch and the rest of the world"

ProSense

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue Dec-23-08 04:18 PM
Original message

Cheney's "ever-escalating game of chicken between the executive branch and the rest of the world"

jurisprudence

Open and Shut Cases

Dick Cheney's unique gift for making hard questions easy and vice versa.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Dec. 22, 2008, at 7:14 PM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In an ever-escalating game of chicken between the executive branch and the rest of the world, Vice President Dick Cheney wants you to understand that he has done nothing wrong over the past eight years. In fact, to hear him tell it to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday yesterday, we are all safer for his infallibility in the face of our own complacency. His liberal critics, for their part, answer Cheney's moral certainty by continuing to vigorously debate all the reasons to let him off the hook. What other possible response can there be to all that bristling manliness? History will remember Dick Cheney as the man who managed to make President George W. Bush look like a wimp.

One hesitates to waste too much time deconstructing Cheney's last-minute debater's tricks. The threats and insults stopped being impressive a long time ago. But the vice president's greatest rhetorical sleight of hand may be that he has completely inverted settled and open legal questions. As he snarks his way through his final exit interviews, he takes the position that the thorniest legal questions are the easy ones and the settled ones are still open.

<...>

Well, guess what? The efficacy of torture is not a close question anywhere outside of Fox television anymore. Darius Rejali has definitively studied the question and showed that torture does not elicit truthful confessions. In his book How To Break a Terrorist, former interrogator Matthew Alexander agrees that abusive interrogation techniques don't work and endanger Americans. FBI Director Robert Mueller recently told Vanity Fair's David Rosethat he doesn't "believe it to be the case" that enhanced interrogation stopped any attacks on America. And the stunning bipartisan report issued earlier this month by the Senate armed services committee confirms that lawyers in every branch of the military consistently warned top Bush officials that torture wasn't effective. The handful of people�including Dick Cheney�who are still blathering about how well torture works do so in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

What about the legality of torture? That's an easy one, says Cheney, again in his ABC interview. "On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture. We never have. It's not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross." Yet just a few moments later, when asked whether water-boarding a prisoner was appropriate, he said yes, adding that he was even involved in clearing the technique as part of the interrogation program.

Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people�including Dick Cheney�who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not.

more