Dan

Calabrese

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April 14, 2008

Thank You, Dick Cheney, For Approving Torture

Before Dick Cheney passes from this life to the next, he ought to receive another Presidential Medal of Freedom for boldly protecting this country while interminably catching holy hell for doing so. (He already got it once, for his exceptional service as Secretary of Defense.)

But you know he won’t. It is a measure of Cheney’s selfless devotion to the United States that he obviously does not care.

Headlines blared on Friday that Cheney made the call – in consultation with the highest-ranking White House staff, but excluding the president for what I guess were reasons of plausible deniability – to approve “harsh interrogations” of terrorism suspects.

Yeah, that means torture.

At least one such interrogation – that of Al Qaeda higher-up and 9/11 lead planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – netted intelligence that likely prevented a further terror attack. At the very least, KSM deserved to have the crap beaten out of him for planning 9/11. The fact that useful intelligence came out of it is a bonus. The fact that he didn’t die from whatever brutality was inflicted upon him is just a reminder that you can’t have everything, although we can rest assured that worms will be eating him soon enough.

The coverage of all this, of course, is presented in scandal-exposé mode. Cheney approved torture! And we’ve caught him! Investigate! Impeach!

Cheney must wonder why he ever left his cushy position as CEO of Halliburton to take this job. Not only does he get skewered for everything he does to protect the country, but he gets accused of still profiting from Halliburton’s government contracts – even though he severed his ties to the company eight years ago.

I would like to see President Bush boldly proclaim that the U.S. will do whatever is necessary to kill, capture and otherwise stop terrorists – including torture – and that if the Democrats, the media and the “international community” don’t like it they can stick their indignation where the sun doesn’t shine.

Since that is obviously not the administration’s game plan, but serious people in the White House still understand that you can’t fight these people by sending them to the corner for time outs, it fell to someone to make the call and take responsibility – knowing full well that he might have to deal with the fallout.

It fell to a patriotic individual who sees doing the right thing as more important than his own political standing. It fell to Dick Cheney.

Cheney, like Bush, has not forgotten the devastation visited upon this country on September 11, 2001. He has not forgotten that efforts before that date to deal with terrorism resulted in complete and utter failure. He has not forgotten the lessons that we cannot stop people who are bent on our destruction, and have no regard for their own lives or limbs, by taking the law-enforcement approach of Bill Clinton or the “realist” political-stabilization approach of lifetime professional cynics like James Baker III.

Most of America has long since returned to dreamland: Terrorism isn’t such a big threat. Suggestions to the contrary are “fear-mongering” and, as Barack Obama would say, “using 9/11 to scare up votes.”

Ironically, Dick Cheney’s decision to sign off on the torture of terror suspects has likely contributed the nation’s renewed forgetfulness. With no new attacks for nearly seven years, it’s easy to start forgetting what happened, and easy to dismiss the very real work that is necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

It would have been inconceivable in the months immediately following 9/11 that anyone not on the outer fringes of the political left would have objected to the torture of terrorists. Most people would have lined up for the privilege of striking a blow.

Conventional wisdom today is that the emotions of that time were over the top, and that America’s rightful disposition is one of restraint, of a genteel handling of the bad guys that respects rules the enemy itself would never follow for a second.

We were right then. We are wrong now.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey, still relatively new in the job, recently said he was stunned when, exposed to daily national security briefings for the first time, he realized how many real terror threats are still out there, and how much effort is required to prevent them from coming to fruition.

If this is true, then if anything the Bush Administration has been too muted in explaining to America how serious the threat really is. Far from “fear-mongering,” they seem content to work behind the scenes saving our lives daily while everyone else worries about whether Europe will ever like us again.

As for Dick Cheney, that rare vice president who took the job to serve rather than to position himself for the presidency, he may never escape the label of sinister hatchet man, applied to him by unserious people with nothing better to do. That he understands this and carries on regardless speaks to his exceptional character.

Will the next administration have a man like Cheney – who is willing to make the call, and take the heat, to keep America safe? I don’t think our chances are very good. The nation is not serious enough to understand that such a man is just what we need.

This is Column # DC167.  Request permission to publish here.