The Stew

I want to make two points about Dick Cheney’s views on waterboarding. Here’s what he said in his speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

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. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.

That’s a bold claim, and one that — conveniently — may never be provable. He can continue to point to real or fictitious classified documents that may or may not back up what he’s saying, and those documents cannot be unclassified for security reasons. He can even go through the motions of asking for such documents to be released, knowing full well that they won’t be.

Of course, he could have released such documents when he was in power, but didn’t. Applying Occam’s razor,  he’s lying.

It amazes me that we’re even having this discussion about the efficacy of torture. It’s beyond the point. The point is, you don’t get to do things that are unconstitutional. Police might have a much easier time with the war on drugs if they could just randomly enter people’s houses and search for contraband, but that pesky constitution says they can’t. Even if I could prove that such a policy would be efficacious, it’s not going to happen.

But let’s take Cheney’s logic to the next few steps:

• If our enhanced interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, are legal, essential, justified and successful, does that mean all methods of torture are thus? If you’ve waterboarded a guy 180 times in one month and he hasn’t talked, would it be okay to waterboard his young child in front of him? Why or why not? Would it be okay to switch to flaying?
• If this works so well, why limit it to a few dozen suspects in Cuba? How about letting police departments all over the U.S. start using these techniques on anyone suspected of any crime? They’re legal and they work, after all.

I can’t believe this stuff even needs to be discussed in this country. Grabbing people and secreting them away to hidden dungeons where they’re tortured into confessing their crimes — that’s what we were told happened in the police state of the former Soviet Union. The United States was supposed to be fighting that sort of thing.