Cheney's tortured argument

Cheney's tortured argument
By Clarence Page
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
April 29, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0429pageapr29,0,542921.column


What a difference an election makes. Our national position has now shifted from "we don't torture" to "we don't torture anymore." Let us, then, disabuse ourselves of former President George W. Bush's notion that waterboarding and the other so-called "harsh" or "enhanced" interrogation techniques are anything but torture. Euphemism is the first refuge of scoundrels -- and the desperate.

President Barack Obama wants to help us as a country to reconcile our shameful torture period. He says -- repeatedly -- that he wants to "look forward" and "not backward." He absolved CIA officers from prosecution for the inhumanities of harsh interrogation. That's OK by me. It's not quite fair to prosecute lower ranks of the food chain while top policymakers walk free. And, this country has little appetite for a criminal trial of Team Bush.

But the torture debate won't go away soon, especially since the disclosure on April 16. That's when the Obama administration released four Justice Department memos in which Bush's administration defined "enhanced" techniques. The disclosures have only fired up the already heated debate about whether torture techniques actually prevented any acts of terror.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says they did. Obama says, uh, not so fast.

This is not a small question, since about 70 percent of the public tells pollsters they support worse torture than waterboarding if it will prevent an attack. Sure. Who wouldn't? Unfortunately, as scholars in counterterrorism point out, real life ain't like the movies.

So now that Cheney has a legacy to salvage and a sure-to-be-best-selling book in the works, he is relaxing his famous obsession for secrecy. To back up his case, he is requesting through his publisher that the Obama administration release previously classified documents. Do it. Please.

In fact, don't stop there, Mr. Cheney. Let's have a full-fledged truth-commission-style investigation into torture techniques during the Bush years -- not necessarily to prosecute anyone, since the debate has become so muddied by misinformation and disinformation, but to separate fact from enhanced non-fiction.

Cheney growls a good game as he complains about Obama's anti-torture stance. But the Bush-Cheney evidence and arguments have raised more questions than they have answered.

For example, former Bush speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen argues dramatically in an April 21 Washington Post op-ed that "without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York."

Specifically, Thiessen argues, the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, "led to the discovery" of a plot to crash planes into the U.S. Bank Tower, then known as the Library Tower, in Los Angeles.

But, as Slate.com senior editor Timothy Noah was the first to note, the big flaw in Thiessen's claim is chronology. Bush's counterterrorism officials told reporters that the L.A. plot effectively ended when its cell leader was arrested in February 2002. Sheikh Mohammed was not captured until March 2003. So much for Thiessen's hole in the ground.

Does torture work? Contrary to the certainty expressed by Cheney and Co., torture has been a topic of heated debate within the intelligence community and among the CIA, FBI, State Department and Justice Department for years.

More significant, Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator who worked closely with Abu Zubaydah, a high-level Al Qaeda operative, says the FBI did extract crucial intelligence, but long before Zubaydah was subjected to harsh techniques.

Then there's National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, Obama's top intelligence adviser. Blair told intelligence personnel on April 16 that "high-value information" came from harsh interrogation methods. But in a later statement, he backed away, saying "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means." Besides, he conceded, "the damage" these techniques "have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." Nice backpedaling.

The truth? We need a bipartisan commission in the spirit of the 9/11 commission to hear some of that. A truth commission won't satisfy everyone. Americans still argue, for example, about the Warren Commission and whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But at least those of us who have a quaint, old-fashioned interest in facts will have something on which to build new laws and a new torture policy. I suggest we begin with the words: "Don't do it."

cptime@aol.com