From yesterday's Fox News Channel interview with Dick Cheney:
WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you've heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?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.
WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?
CHENEY: I am.
Think about that. The man who was vice president of the United States is saying that he is untroubled by lawbreaking -- even beyond the permissive rules on harsh interrogation his own administration laid down -- because the lawbreaking was, in his judgment, effective.
The ends, in other words, justify the means. Where do you suppose it would stop with Cheney? What if instead of threatening to rape a detainee's mother, our agents had actually done so in front of him. Would that have been okay with Cheney? Would that have been okay with Bush?
If the United States is governed by men with contempt for the rule of law, and who do not feel bound by the rule of law, we are well on the road to tyranny, and in an important sense are already there. We know about Cheney's view of the powerful executive. It would be interesting to know what he would be prepared to support in terms of the president violating the law with respect to anti-terror operations on US soil.
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I'll just add, Curtis, my own background for your consideration in reading my posts...
My mother's family fled Zagreb with faked confirmation papers (provided unasked by a Catholic priest), and as Jews stayed in hiding in northern Italy (thanks to the daily, potentially fatal risks taken by the Italian farmers and townsfolk) until the Allies swept through.
My father was an officer in the Yugoslav army that fought against the Communist partisans, was a POW in Italy, was convicted a war criminal in absentia, and following Tito's general amnesty was heard saying to a fellow chetnik "We can never go home." His cremains sit in a box on a shelf waiting for me to take him home.
As immigrants, they taught me a clearer and more intense understanding of patriotism than anyone I know.
Let us keep on keeping on, shall we? ;-)
CFK seems to me to be your garden variety blowhard wuss who has been blinded by his own brilliance - a legend in his own mind, no doubt.
This, from a guy who claims to object to ad hominem attacks. Priceless. :-D
(I know, you beat me to that one, celtic, but I couldn't resist.)
Curtis, fourth-grade schoolyard taunts are fine as far as they go, but come on -- "a legend in his own mind" is an awful cliche. You might want to spruce up your repertoire of insults at some point; try something like this, for instance:
http://www.petelevin.com/shakespeare.htm
Practice with these for a while, and eventually, you might be able to come across with something vaguely resembling wit. ;-)
CFK -
"This, from a guy who claims to object to ad hominem attacks. Priceless. :-D"
I wouldn't say so much that I object to them as much as you have a clear pattern here on this board of denigrating others who have made no prior personal attacks on you. Here's another cliche for you to ridicule - If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Clearly, you are blinded by your own hubris. You seem to act as if this is some sort of contest of wits - as if cleverness and facility with language is the determinant or right and wrong, or Truth. That's just so wrong.
"Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time":-)
CFK, sarcastically,
Clearly, long-term, things have usually worked out well for torture regimes.
Your argument here doesn't make much sense. The U.S. has certainly used what you would doubtless consider to be torture on many prisoners, not to mention slaves, over its long history. So have many, perhaps all, other highly successful and long-lasting nations, including the old colonial nations in Europe such as Britain and France. The idea that nations that use torture are destined to share the fate of the Nazis in Germany or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia simply isn't supported by any serious reading of history. In a recent article in the New Yorker, Atul Gawande argued at length that solitary confinement, to which thousands of American prisoners are subjected every day, constitutes torture. That doesn't seem be imperiling the Republic either.
The idea that nations that use torture are destined to share the fate of the Nazis in Germany or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia simply isn't supported by any serious reading of history.
bradL, I'm aware of that, and I wasn't arguing -- sarcastically or otherwise -- for anything being "destined." I was responding to the point that a number of our pro-torture friends here have been making, that somehow torture is essential to the survival of the United States (or the West), and that if you're opposed to it then you don't care about the country's defense. The facts that I was alluding to are, at the very least, inconsistent with that view and serve to raise questions about it. Maybe it's just coincidence that several of the regimes most closely associated with torture and inhumane treatment have met sorry ends, while the world's most prosperous, powerful and successful nations are the same liberal democracies that pushed the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Maybe. But it's certainly not what the torture advocates' dire warnings about the grim necessity of torture would have us predict.
On a related point, it's striking how the torture advocates seem to be making two simultaneous but contradictory arguments: (a) that a willingness to torture, and generally to respect no limits in intelligence-gathering or the fight against terrorists, is vital to the country's defense; and (b) that the things that Bush / Cheney authorized weren't torture and that the U.S. doesn't torture. Add those together, and they're apparently saying that Bush and Cheney failed to do things that are vital to the country's defense. Which actually is a point I agree with, although for entirely different reasons.
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