1 Boring Old Man

Cheney Requests Release of 2 CIA Reports on Interrogations
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post
April 25, 2009

^{Former vice president Richard B. Cheney is asking for the release of two CIA reports in his bid to marshal evidence that coercive interrogation tactics such as waterboarding helped thwart terrorist plots, according to documents released yesterday by the National Archives and Records Administration. Cheney’s request was submitted March 31, more than two weeks before President Obama decided to release four "top secret" memos in which Bush administration lawyers sanctioned harsh tactics for questioning prisoners.}

^{The release of the memos has renewed a fiery debate over whether former senior Bush officials should be the targets of criminal investigations into whether they violated U.S. and international laws prohibiting torture. Obama said this week that his administration has not ruled out prosecuting senior lawyers and others responsible for allowing the harsh tactics, but he said he opposes a special "truth commission" favored by some lawmakers.}

^{Cheney, who has emerged as an outspoken critic of Obama’s national security policies, said in an interview on Fox News this week that he had asked for the release of documents that "lay out what we learned through the interrogation process" and how it saved U.S. lives…}

^{Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said Cheney is attempting to "cherry-pick" intelligence to support his argument in favor of coercive interrogation tactics. "If we really wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation program, we have to look at more than two small documents," he said.}

^{The Obama administration is wrestling with how much material to release related to harsh interrogations, in part because of ongoing lawsuits demanding disclosures. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told Congress he would not "play hide and seek" with documents and would strive to release as many records about interrogations as possible.}

Cheney Doesn’t Care What You Think
By Dan Froomkin
Washington Post
March 20, 2008

^{It’s never exactly been a secret that Vice President Cheney operates by his own rules and thinks he knows better than the American public. But yesterday, he made it official. Talking to ABC News’s Martha Raddatz, in the piano lounge of the Shangri-La resort and spa in Oman, Cheney said he isn’t the least bit concerned that the public overwhelmingly opposes the war in Iraq. In fact, it makes him identify with Abraham Lincoln…}

^{Raddatz: "Two-thirds of Americans say it’s not worth fighting, and they’re looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives."}
^{Cheney: "So?"}
^{Raddatz: "So – you don’t care what the American people think?"}
^{Cheney: "No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn’t had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there."…}

Unless I’m missing some really big point here, the public debate isn’t about whether we should continue to have a torture policy for prisoners of war. We’re not going to do that. With the exception of Dick Cheney, I don’t hear anyone arguing that we should. The arguments from the other side are that releasing the documents is a political ploy designed to embarrass the former occupants of the White House or that the torture policy seemed justified back in 2002 because we were so afraid of another attack. Neither of those arguments makes much sense. Any fool can see that Obama would love to have this issue evaporate. Likewise, history has relegated the "ends justify the means" argument to an uncivilized era in the development of organized society along with its partner, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

More at the center of things: Do we make group decisions en masse [consensus, laws, voting, debate], or do we leave such things to a few powerful individuals? It’s more of an open question than we regularly realize. Our form of government has compromised in a very specific way between the snails’ pace of consensus and the dangers of despotism, the perils of mob rule versus the restraint of a single level head – a compromise that insures constant conflict between expediency and caution, action and debate.

Dick Cheney has no patience for such a system. He "just knows" the right thing to do, so he’s perfectly suited to Machiavellian manipulation. For Cheney, Congressional debate, oversight, our legal system are not part of the careful ways we make decisions, they’re only roadblocks in the way of doing what he knows is right. But he is currently operating in the region of his Achilles heel. He did the same thing with the Valerie Plame incident. This absolutely secretive man is wanting to release classified documents to vindicate himself. His claim to Martha Radditz that he is impervious to public opinion is a classic instance of the paradox of Narcissism. On the one hand, he needs no other – an island of strength and conviction. On the other hand, he’s very reactive to criticism, easily hurt, and can’t keep his mouth shut. For what it’s worth, he’s also a male chauvinist bully of the first order. He picks on girls – Valerie Plame,  Martha Radditz, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton. Hillary struck back the other day, saying that Cheney was "not a reliable source of information," and the truth hurts people like Dick Cheney.

What Dick Cheney thinks is irrelevant. His opinions about the "unitary executive," foreign policy, torture, secrecy, energy, global warming, etc. have been rendered immaterial by their disastrous results. I expect that his supporters would love for him to ride off into the Wyoming sunset and get out of their way. He’s not going to do that. He’s going to keep self-justifying and trying to remain the "voice of truth" in Washington. As tired as I am of hearing him talk, I suppose the greater purpose is served by letting him rant, release documents, appear on the shows with Karl Rove and the O’Reilly/Hannity/Limbaugh set. It places him in the proper context.

What Dick Cheney did is not irrelevant. Cheney’s assault on our government [the parts that were specifically designed to deal with someone like him] has been a disaster. He made a mockery of our legal system, oversight, and our legislative branch. He spent 10 years in the House of Representatives and 8 years as President of the Senate, yet his only goal while in Congress seems to have been to destroy its effectiveness. He surrounded himself with lawyers [Libby, Addington, Bybee, Yoo, Gonzales], yet their main function was to evade and distort the law. He became the Vice President under our poorest presidential choice in modern history, and instead of helping the guy do a job he was ill-suited to do, Cheney took over and ran the country in his own image, unassisted by other opinions.