Cheney articulates chilling truths

Let history note that Dick Cheney smuggled a bit of truth into a very large package of lies last week.

And believe me, history will indeed take note.

JAY BOOKMAN
MY OPINION

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As their second term comes to a close, Cheney and President Bush have been doing a series of interviews and public appearances offering their assessments of the past eight years.

In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, the vice president was asked whether he thought the invasion of Iraq would have been justified even if we had known beforehand that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.

His answer? Yes, of course. We wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and we did. Whether he actually possessed stockpiles of WMD, as the administration claimed at the time, was pretty much beside the point, Cheney explained.

“He had a long reputation and record of having started two wars. Of having brutalized and killed hundreds of thousands of people, some of them with weapons of mass destruction in his own country. He had violated 16 National Security Council resolutions. He had established a relationship as a terror sponsoring state according to the State Department. He was making $25,000 payments to the families of suicide bombers,” Cheney said. “This was a bad actor and the country’s better off, the world’s better off with Saddam gone.”

Of course, that’s not the story we were hearing back in 2002 and 2003. Back then we heard talk of mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities and unmanned aerial vehicles attacking our shores and huge stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that had to be eliminated because they posed a direct threat to our security. And the deceptions did not stop there.

The American people were lied to not just about the justification for the war but about its cost, its length and its impact, not just on Iraq but on our standing in the world. Cheney believes those deceptions were justified because in his view, it was all for our own good.

That same chilling arrogance was also apparent in Cheney’s response to a question about torture.

In his trademark deadpan style, the vice president endorsed the use of torture as necessary and productive while dismissing the possibility that any torture had actually occurred.

“On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture,” he said. “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.

“The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful — wouldn’t do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal.”

Accepting that explanation requires accepting the notion that words have no fixed meaning. What Bush and Cheney sanctioned wasn’t torture, they claim, because administration lawyers changed the definition of the word, deciding for example that “torture” required inflicting pain equivalent to death or major organ failure. It also wasn’t torture because they had “the requisite opinions in order” and everything was authorized.

In the months and years to come, the American people will learn that torture had been far more widespread than they have been led to believe.

They will also come to understand that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib — a tragedy that Bush himself acknowledged has been our most serious setback in the war on terror — was not some low-level aberration but the inevitable consequence of behavior and examples set at the very highest levels of the U.S. government.

I’m not ready to argue that Bush, Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and others ought to be prosecuted for approving torture and thus committing a felony under U.S. law. That’s the kind of decision that can only be made after a full, honest, unbiased airing of the facts. But I do think it’s time those facts were brought to light.