Real torture is watching Chaney
I don’t have to tell you this, but there’s always lots of news.
Last week, President Obama signed a $1.1 trillion dollar budget deal; madmen attacked innocent people in Sydney, Australia and in Pakistan; there’s a thaw in the 60 year hostilities between Cuba and the United States, and there’s the ominous sign that North Korea can flex its muscles around the world.
All of those news stories, no matter how controversial they might seem to be, will eventually fade from the public dialogue.
There’s one story, however, that’s become embedded in a seemingly unending public policy debate – torture.
And the “Chief Embedder” is Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney.
The serial draft-evading (“I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service”), former vice president has helped keep alive the firestorm of controversy about this nation’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” no matter how the subject may have easily fallen into a backstory of its own weight.
Cheney’s appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Dec. 14, exposed him as a man who clings hard to a tortured logic about torture.
When the show’s host, Chuck Todd, reminded Cheney of the extensive time detainee Abu Zubaydah was forced to lay in tortuously confining, coffin-like boxes, his response was, “I think that was, in fact, one of the approved techniques.”
It’s true, the Justice Department and its Office of Legal Counsel did offer opinions that certain “techniques” were legal.
That provides Cheney, and CIA officials with the dubious fallback position that “they told us it was legal, so we went out and did it.”
Using that logic, the Justice Department could’ve proclaimed that performing involuntary tooth-extractions, or even beheadings are a legal means of getting people to talk. To the Bush administration, that would’ve been OK.
Balderdash.
Todd challenged Cheney to try to react to the “enhanced interrogation” shoe being placed on the other foot.
Todd asked, “If another country captures a U.S. soldier; the Iranian regime waterboards. Is that going to be an accepted…”
But Cheney, sensing that he’d be forced to accept waterboarding by people doing it to Americans as being “legal,” quickly interjected, “…You’re trying to come up now with hypothetical situations. Waterboarding, the way we did it, was not torture.”
There are no acceptable “ways” of holding people down; flooding their mouths with water 183 times, until they think they’re about to drown.
Anybody who knows anything about torture, knows that’s what it is.
Sen. John McCain, knows a whole lot about torture, because he suffered that fate during the Vietnam War.
“On waterboarding – it began with the Spanish Inquisition. It was done during the Philippines War. We tried and hung Japanese war criminals for waterboarding during WWII,” says McCain.
Who do you believe? One man found ways of not serving his country when it counted. While another man dutifully served and paid the cost for that service.
Cheney is no expert on what is or isn’t torture. He’s shown his only lasting goal was vengeance.
And there have many cases where he’s shown his vengeful nature, even when it was obviously misplaced.
“He (Saddam Hussein) has, indeed, stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons,” he said on Meet the Press on Sept. 8, 2002.
HE WAS WRONG.
“”We’ve learned more and more that there has been a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, that stretch back through most of the decade of the 90’s,” he said on Meet the Press later that month.
HE WAS WRONG!
In March of 2003, he appeared on Meet the Press again.
He had, by then, sounded the loudest call to invade Iraq.
When asked by the host Tim Russert, if he felt “the American people was prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle, with significant American casualties,” Cheney responded with all-due smugness.
“I don’t think it’s to unfold that way, Tim. Because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.”
WRONG AGAIN!
If there are arguments to be made about this country’s treatment of detainees, Dick Cheney shouldn’t be making them.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net