Dick Cheney is “Proud of What We Did”

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Originally published on Alternet.

How many times have you heard the famous fallacy: “torture saves lives?”
On August 30 former Vice President Dick Cheney sat on one of his thrones in a Fox News studio and criticized those who are pushing for investigations into his torture policies as they were utilized by the CIA under the Bush Administration. Cheney was disappointed with the nature of unfavorable discussions surrounding the contents of the newly released 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on prisoner interrogation which has prompted calls to investigate the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka torture techniques) that Cheney directly initiated and continues to support. Cheney was also outraged that Attorney General Eric Holder has named a prosecutor to investigate CIA abuses of suspects and proceeded to claim that he was merely speaking in defense (bless his heart!) of those who in the CIA will be investigated:

I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, Chris, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?
Instead, they’re out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening contrary to what the president originally said. They’re going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations. I just think it’s an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say.

That’s right, Cheney doesn’t believe that people should be held responsible for their actions in the political arena. If we recall that he is one of the most notorious living war criminals today, we might be able to better understand where he’s coming from.
As award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill reminds us, Cheney’s words in alleged defense of the CIA contradict his actual actions:

…Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised it to criticize the Bush administration’s lie-filled, one-way propaganda train to the Iraq war).

Scahill goes on to make 6 additional points in the same manner, including:

CIA interrogators themselves have said that they believed that Cheney’s torture policy put individual CIA personnel in legal jeopardy.

And:

Dick Cheney showed utter contempt for the CIA when he went not once, not twice, but more than a dozen times to Langley to pressure analysts to fit intelligence to his political agenda.

So why then is Cheney suddenly going on what Scahill has referred to as a “pro-torture media blitz?” Could it be because he fears that these investigations will eventually lead to the higher ups who gave the orders for others to do their dirty work for them? He of course being one of them?

…Holder is going to go back and review it again, supposedly, to try to find some evidence of wrongdoing by CIA personnel.
In other words, you know, a review is never going to be final anymore now. We can have somebody, some future administration, come along 10 years from now, 15 years from now, and go back and rehash all of these decisions by an earlier administration.

Goodness forbid further investigations! Just imagine the kind of filthy truths that could be discovered.
Now, onto Cheney’s continued defense of torture, which will play eternally like a broken record within the walls of America’s infamous torture centers, in places like the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, Bagram Theater Internment Facility and Abu Gharib.
States Cheney:

Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States, and giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States.
It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well.

Significantly, after reading the aforementioned report (an act which many other journalists apparently have yet to do) Scahill notes:

… there is no evidence — none — to suggest any of this torture produced any actionable intelligence.

Scahill is, fortunately, not the only one who has made this statement or statements like this, though he is sadly part of only a few. In fact, in May 2009 a former senior military interrogator who has conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them publicly contradicted Cheney:

Torture does not save lives. Torture costs us lives…And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool … These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse … literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.

Using the pseudo name Matthew Alexander, the former senior interrogator who was appointed to the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi even wrote a book about the inefficacy of torture as an interrogation technique for extracting intelligence:

After 9/11, military interrogators focused on two techniques: fear and control. The Army trained their ‘gators to confront and dominate prisoners. This led down the disastrous path to the Abu Ghraib scandal. At Guantánamo Bay, the early interrogators not only abused the detainees, they tried to belittle their religious beliefs. I’d heard stories from a friend who had been there that some of the ‘gators even tried to convert prisoners to Christianity. These approaches rarely yielded results … My group is among the first to bring a new approach to interrogating detainees. Respect, rapport, hope, cunning, and deception are our tools.

Despite all this, Cheney continues to delude himself into believing that he will go down in history as one of the United States’ greatest defenders:

I’m very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully. And, you know, it won’t take a prosecutor to find out what I think. I’ve already expressed those views rather forthrightly.

The US has lost over 4,000 Americans in Iraq, almost 1,000 in Afghanistan and tens of thousands have been wounded, maimed and disabled. Moreover, almost 200 Iraq war veterans have committed suicide up until now — that’s 200 families who have lost a father, a mother, a wife, a husband, a sister or a brother. In addition to all this, thousands of Afghan civilians have been wounded and killed and some reports indicate that over 1 million Iraqis have lost their lives due to the American invasion. Other reports provide lower numbers, but they are still in the hundreds of thousands. These are all numbers however. Just one needless death destroys a family, negatively impacts a society and can change the course of history. Just think of all the death that the Bush Administration has caused.
No doubt being aware of this, Cheney is still “proud of what we did.” Words that would make the ears of many Americans bleed.