Cheney's Jihad

Why "enhanced interrogation techniques" don't enhance U.S. interests.

BY PETER BERGEN | AUGUST 26, 2009

Since he left office, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has been waging a lonesome jihad to defend the practices of the Bush administration during the "war on terror," saying in an emblematic interview in February: "If it hadn't been for what we did -- with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth -- then we would have been attacked again. ... Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S."

In a speech he gave three months later at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, Cheney said, "In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program."

Cheney gave this speech at AEI the very same day that President Barack Obama, just a couple of miles away at the National Archives, was giving his own major speech on his administration's revamped detention and interrogation policies. Giving such a dueling policy speech was something of a first for a just-stepped-down vice president, a job that is generally supposed to entail a comfortably obscure retirement fly-fishing and attending rubber-chicken fundraisers.

But Cheney did not go gently into that vice presidential night. At AEI Cheney amped up his own sky-is-falling rhetoric, claiming that the coercive interrogations of al Qaeda detainees had "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." Holy smokes!

Cheney's AEI speech was essentially a remix of the arguments that he had made in the run-up to the Iraq war: that if only ordinary American citizens had seen the top secret information he had access to, they would be even more alarmed than he was. And the Bush administration had only prudently taken every measure necessary to keep Americans safe.

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Hiding behind a wall of classification has been a quintessential Cheney trope. But that wall just crumbled.

On Monday Cheney released a statement -- first reported through the reliably unchallenging conduit of The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who was also the amanuensis of Cheney's authorized biography -- in which the former vice president once again defended the Bush administration's record on the coercive interrogations of al Qaeda members, stating that CIA documents declassified earlier this week "clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks."

Those documents include two CIA assessments from 2004 and 2005 of the information derived from what the U.S. government terms its "high-value detainees." Cheney had pressed the agency to release those assessments because he said that they would substantiate his claims that coercive measures on al Qaeda prisoners had kept the United States safe.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

 

Peter Bergen, editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, where he codirects its Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative. His most recent book is The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader.

TRIPLECHECK

2:16 AM ET

August 27, 2009

Defending his conscience

I never trusted Cheney when he was in office because he had his and Bush's agenda. It didn't matter what was good for the American people they flew the American Flag, but really it was the Texas Flag that they really flew. Oil and revenge is what drove us to the state of despair and it will take years for America to hold its head high amidst all of the other flags of the world.

 

MOHAIR.SAM

9:47 AM ET

August 27, 2009

Our 18-year misadventure in Iraq

* Iraq never represented a threat to the United States. Never. We allowed ourselves to get sucked in there, and we have spent an enormous amount of blood and money trying to figure a way out. And we're really no closer, in spite of Obama's promises.
* We invaded Iraq twice without following the Constitutional provision that only Congress can declare war. This continues both parties' complete disavowal of what strikes my eyes as a clear Constitutional requirement, so it can hardly be surprising that our government continues to pursue a foreign policy that ensures blowback at every turn.
* Everyone who hates Bush for the Iraq War seemingly has no problem with Obama's foot-dragging in Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan, which makes as little sense (arguably, even less) and will cost us dearly in the end, should "the end" ever actually come. But hey, it's a Democrat's war, so that's OK.

 

RALPHINJERSEY

2:20 PM ET

August 28, 2009

How quickly they forget

Wait a minute, isn't questioning the president's decisions treason? Seems to me it used to be, as recently as this time last year ...

 

RAFAELO

5:33 PM ET

August 29, 2009

So much for the Enlightenment

If torture doesn't work, that's the end of the argument.

But what if it does? Even if it only sometimes works? The article argues it didn't really, but then--the Washington Post reports that post-torture, Khalid Sheik Mohammed turned himself into a freelance lecturer on all things al-Quaida. He may have given up no operational plans, since he had none to reveal, but his background and organizational material was voluminous.

Then the question is, if torture may work, sometimes--should we do it? Even though it is contrary to the principles on which the country was founded, principles for which we stand--the respect for the autonomy of the individual, the right against self-incrimination, fundamental rights born of the Enlightenment, enshrined in our Constitution?

Phillip Zelikow has argued in these pages that the Justice Department torture rationale extends beyond foreigners, and could well apply to US citizens. Why just terrorists? Why not domestic kidnappers? Or child molesters, to find out all their victims? Are we ready to throw out the right against self-incrimination, as impractical? I for one do not want to see this debate, because I don't think we are up to it. Justice O'Connor has said: America is "forgetting" what we are all about. A debate on when torture is okay would mean a debate on throwing out our founding principles, by people who have "forgotten." Its hard to argue against practicality--they might win.