"Why is Cheney Wrong...Let Me Count the Ways"

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, May 27, 2009; 5:52 PM

Some people think we're paying too much attention to former Vice
President *** Cheney. I think we may be paying too little. As bracing
as last week's Obama-Cheney face-off was, the inevitable focus was on
the current president, not the former vice. And for those of us who
are relieved he's out of office, there's a tendency to treat Cheney
with "there he goes again" ennui. Yet Cheney's speech at the American
Enterprise Institute was so chockfull of faulty arguments and rank
misrepresentations that it's worth taking the time to review them, in
their multiple incarnations.

The baseless straw man: "[H]ere's 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 --
coordinated, devastating -- but also unique and not sufficient to
justify a sustained wartime effort."

Now Obama has erected his squadron of straw men, but this one of
Cheney's is particularly hollow. There has not been another terrorist
attack; therefore, everything the previous administration did must be
kept in place. Anyone who disagrees is by definition feckless about
confronting terrorism.

But Obama's speech made clear he understands that "this threat will be
with us for a long time, and that we must use all elements of our
power to defeat it." The "great dividing line" between Obama and
Cheney involves whether to fight terrorism in a way consistent with
the Constitution and American values or to subordinate those niceties
to the imperative of self-defense.


The dangerous overstatement, topped off with partisan jab: "The
administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of
middle ground in policies addressing terrorism... But in the fight
against terrorism, there is no middle ground. And half measures keep
you half exposed... Triangulation is a political strategy, not a
national security strategy."

If there is no middle ground, why place any limits on how enhanced
interrogations can get? Why not wiretap all conversations? Why give
detainees any legal process at all? Calibrating the proper balance
between liberty and security is difficult, and reasonable people can
differ about where lines should be drawn. But Cheney's whatever-it-
takes worldview seems to contemplate no tradeoffs whatsoever. Obama
isn't seizing on terrorism for political advantage, like Bill Clinton
with welfare reform. He's addressing a real threat -- and cleaning up
Cheney's mess.

The outright misstatement: "The interrogations were used on hardened
terrorists after other efforts had failed. They were legal, essential,
justified, successful and the right thing to do."

But former FBI agent Ali Soufan offered a completely conflicting
account of his interrogation of Abu Zubaida, telling the Senate
Judiciary Committee that the injured terrorist was cooperating and
yielding important information -- the previously unknown role of
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the Sept. 11 attacks -- until other
interrogators insisted on stepping up the pressure, at which point
Zubaydah clammed up.

A twist on the above, misstatement wrapped in demagoguery: "Attorney
General Holder and others have admitted that the United States will be
compelled to accept terrorists here in the homeland, and it has even
been suggested U.S. taxpayer dollars will be used to support them....
Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas
since 9/11. The ones that were considered low risk were released a
long time ago."

Hard to know where to start parsing the misinformation here.
"Compelled to accept terrorists here in the homeland" makes it sound
like they'll be roaming the local malls. I don't recall Cheney
deploying the "terrorists in the homeland" bogeyman when Zacarias
Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, was being tried, sentenced and
imprisoned here. As Obama said: "We are not going to release anyone if
it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees
within the United States who endanger the American people. Where
demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer
some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all
manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders -- highly
secure prisons that ensure the public safety."

U.S. taxpayer dollars supporting terrorists sounds like the 2009
version of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, with about as much truth.
As if tax dollars aren't being spent on Guantanamo? As to the notion
that only the "worst of the worst" remain, in fact, courts have ruled
-- and in some cases Cheney's administration acknowledged -- that
there was no legitimate reason to hold 21 of the 241 prisoners
currently at Guantanamo; another 50 have been approved for transfer to
another country. So the notion that the "low risk" ones are long gone
is simply wrong. Ask the Chinese Uighurs who never intended harm to
America but have been held without basis for seven years.

The best defense is a good offense: "[T]here has been a strange and
sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened to Abu Ghraib with
a top-secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few
sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law,
military regulation and simple decency.... And it takes a deeply
unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the
lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained
to deal with a few malevolent men."

What radicals have engaged in this slur? Well, a panel appointed by
then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and headed by former Defense
Secretary James Schlesinger, for one. Enhanced interrogation
techniques "migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither
limited nor safeguarded," Schlesinger's report found.

Finally, ultimate chutzpah: Cheney assailing the Obama administration
for failing to disclose documents. "[A]ll that remains an official
secret is the information that we gained as a result [of
interrogations]. Some of his defenders say the unseen memos are
inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won't let the
American people decide that for themselves."

Cheney, ardent tribune of open government. Now, that's rich.



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