By Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R.
According to the script from the media stenographers, Dick Cheney is a pathetic remnant of a discredited presidency. He’s utterly without backing and roundly repudiated.
So why are leftists (and many moderates) fit to be tied every time Cheney opens his mouth? Why the shrill denunciations and repeated urges for Cheney to shut up?
Yes, this is hardly an original observation. Rush Limbaugh (another fearless speaker who leftists wish would go away) has been hammering this point home.
But it bears emphasis. Cheney has become a phenomenon who has repeatedly made Obama blink, just from the power of his words.
Democrats won the presidency and have firm majorities in both houses of Congress. Yet even the leftist UK Guardian says Cheney has forced Obama on the defensive.
How can that be so? As president, Obama has access to all the information Cheney has. If Cheney were lying or mistaken, Obama could just release information to discredit him. But whenever Obama has tried that route, Cheney has trumped him. Even from across the water, the leftist UK Guardian admits it.
The sinister, reclusive figure at the heart of the Bush administration, who attracted labels such as Darth Vader and Dr Strangelove, has returned to the heart of Washington and is causing havoc.
Can’t you feel your flesh crawl at the raw evil?
What has happened, in my view, is that Obama is learning the limits of words. In politics, words famously trump facts. But not always. At some point, facts do matter and words can’t cover for their lack. Cheney is not known for speechifying on Obama’s grand style, but he trumped Obama’s words with a simple challenge anyone can understand.
Obama released information on torture to show how badly we behaved. Okay, Cheney said, now let’s now see the evidence of terrorism we obtained. Make the memos public so the American people can judge whether the methods actually saved lives.
From Obama: nothing. He’s simply avoided addressing the challenge. Supporters hope it would go away, hence the repeatedly urgent calls for Cheney to shut up.
But precisely because Cheney is seen as so evil, because of his Vaderesque prominence as a former vice president who supposedly controlled President Bush, Cheney has power to attract media attention. And the media and Obama’s supporters — but I repeat myself — keep trying to dispatch Cheney. But with his simple challenge, Cheney repels all attacks.
The longer Obama refuses to release the memos, the more the tension continues to grow. Cheney is refusing to play the role assigned to him. And Obama doesn’t know what to do.
I was never a Cheney admirer, nor do I like the attempts to define torture away by saying waterboarding isn’t torture. (Using waterboarding on our own troops is a pathetic cop-out; real waterboardings aren’t voluntary, and they don’t include “safe words”).
But we have been told torture doesn’t work anyway. That belief is an easy way to avoid the tough moral questions of using torture on terrorists who may have information on future attacks.
Admirably, blogger Patterico has addressed the matter over the last two years or so in various posts. Now Cheney has directly confronted that complacent belief in the most direct way possible. He wants us to know the matter isn’t as cut-and-dried as Obama would have us believe.
Obama doesn’t want to talk about it. And that’s what has everyone else talking.
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DISCLAIMER: As with all I write here, this is my opinion, and does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, the North County Times.
How about anti-war protesters waterboarding each other? How about pundits and even shock jocks getting waterboarded? Is there another form of “torture” you can do to a willing victim in public without being arrested?
And KSM did have safe words: “Okay, I’ll tell you what I know about the plot to kill more Americans.”
How is it torture when you can recover and give an interview a couple of minutes later? I don’t see people volunteering to have fingers sawed off one by one or allowing to have thier genitals hooked up to a car battery. Now that is torture.
Did anyone hear the Liz Cheney interview w/ Norah O’Donnell on this topic? Cheney schools O’Donnell soundly and reveals O’Donnell’s ignorance.
http://patterico.com/2009/04/25/liz-cheney-on-waterboardingharsh-interrogation-tactics/
Brett,
The differences between voluntary training for waterboarding and being forcibly waterboarded by an enemy should be obvious. I’m sure you can think of a few differences.
People who tell themselves “but it’s not torture” and define the problem away are just too squeamish to face up to ugly facts. Playing with words doesn’t make the moral dilemma go away. I suggest you read Charles Krauthammer on the issue.
Bradley, I think it is a matter of definition about whether waterboarding is torture. I consider true torture to be techniques in which irreversible consequences follow, such as pulling teeth and fingernails and that sort of thing. WB is extremely unpleasant and fear inducing. It was also used on three people.
The foolishness in the discussion is about whether people will “say anything” to end the session. The point is that saying “anything” is of no use to the subject since the facts are easily checked. The old fashioned use of torture to induce confessions was more problematic because the confessions were untrue and did not produce confirmable facts. The Gestapo broke many resistance cells in WWII with torture and there is the reason why so many agents were equipped with pellets of cyanide.
Cheney is one of the most competent people I have ever read about in politics and would have been a far better president than Bush. He does, however, have very little BS in his nature and thus is probably only electable in someplace like Wyoming where BS walks.
Welcome back, Dr. Capt!
I’ve always thought there were ways to torture without leaving any evidence, or only faint evidence, used by repressive regimes that don’t want graphic proof of torture available. The point is the degree of discomfort or pain induced, not the precise method by which it is achieved.
Some on the left say torture doesn’t work. Some on the right say waterboarding isn’t torture. Both appear to me to be avoiding the real moral diliemma by defining it away with words.
Let’s face up to the issue squarely. I believe what Krauthammer said, torture does work, and there are a couple of very limited examples in which it can be justified.
Bradley ~
Thanks for the Krauthammer link, excellent article. He does not go so far as to say that waterboarding is torture. He does state what is clearly not torture; face slapping, caterpillar in small space, ect. He does say torture is permissible in few circumstances and you do what you have to do, which includes waterboarding.
Some seem to feel that causing terror is torture. I vividly remember the terror I felt standing at the edge of a pool as child and being told to jump in for swimming lessons. I was maybe 5 years old give or take a year or two. I was screaming and crying in fear but the teacher held my hand and forced me into the pool with her while my mother watched. I was terrified!
Am I a victim of torture? Somehow I don’t think so although I can not think that the terror I felt was any less than the terror one feels under some harsh interrogation techniques. Yes, they are harsh. They are supposed to be harsh and extremely uncomfortable.
Harsh interrogation techniques are not induced with the aim to maim, mutilate or cause irreversable harm to the body. That is what torture is designed to do.
Whether torture is permissble is another question but I see harm in allowing the left to redefine torture to include numerous techniques which are clearly not so, in my humble opinion.
Police officers have barking dogs nearby suspects who refuse to cooperate and sometimes release the dogs when suspects pose a danger. But a barking dog at Guantanamo is now torture?
It is the redefining of torture, and the resulting damage it does to U.S. soldiers and policy makers that concerns me most. If the U.S. is able to be portrayed as the propagator of evil designs than our efforts to do good world wide will be thwarted.
George Orwell comes to mind due to this discussion.
He says it well:
“People sleep peaceably in thier beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
I realize Bradley that you and I agree almost entirely agree on this point except for the definition of water boarding as torture. At least, I think we mostly do. Thanks for your post and well thought out points of view.
Brett,
Yes, we are in almost total agreement. Where to draw the line at what is torture is hard to define. And Cheney’s challenge, which Obama has bravely run away from, is pretty convincing to me that the waterboarding did save lives.