Cheney on the Couch

Stooping to psychobabble this Memorial Day weekend, I find myself wondering: What is the former Vice President, who evaded military service in his youth, trying to prove with his late-in-life display of extreme machismo? What fuels his tougher-than-thou attacks on Barack Obama, a Commander-in-Chief from a post-draft generation that did not have to face a public test of personal courage?

In his weekend address today, the President observes that "our survival as a nation came down not simply to the wisdom of our leaders or the resilience of our people, but to the courage and valor of our fighting men and women."

Below that simple statement of fact are many millions of individual struggles of conscience by young people over risking their lives for their country. (As one of them in World War II, I can testify to the fears as well as the courage of what is now called the Greatest Generation.)

In the 1960s, Dick Cheney resolved his own conflict by asking for and getting five draft deferments during the Vietnam war. Looking back, he said in a Washington Post interview, "I had other priorities in the 60's than military service."

Ever since then, as a member of Congress, Secretary of Defense and Vice President, Cheney has been part of a process that sends young people to give their lives for their country--without the deeply felt experience of those like John McCain, who doesn't share his views on torture.

What's disturbing about this disconnection between rhetoric and reality is the sense that Dick Cheney is, at some level, driven to prove that his earlier choices in life are not the true test of his manhood. No reasonable person would argue that they are, but does he himself believe that?

However unfair it may be to put Cheney on the couch this way, there is an oblique recognition of the issue in Gail Collins' comment today:

“'To bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come,' snarled Dick Cheney in his 'no middle ground' speech. Although really, for the sake of the national mental health, it might be better if we all just ignore the former vice president until he agrees to undergo therapy."

That's not likely to happen, but it would help if lay Republican leaders would advise him to stop acting out in public.

Dueling Speeches and Ragtag Terrorists

The 9/11 world is back with full force as Barack Obama makes the case for a judicious approach to terrorism, Dick Cheney argues that only bare knuckles can keep us safe and New York police stage a perp walk of petty criminals scammed into believing they could bomb synagogues and shoot down Air National Guard planes.

It's one of those wake-me-when-it's-over days as the overloaded mind wants only to watch an old movie on TV or hide under the covers, but the dueling speeches and the terrorist bust are part of the way we live now. There is no escape.

For someone of advanced age, there are powerful echoes of the 1950s in all this--another era of anxiety about threats to "our way of life" from evil forces and politicians eager to exploit them with an easy sell of fear.

Dick Cheney is no Joe McCarthy, but here he is attacking the Obama Administration for closing Guantanamo with a desire "to bring some of these hardened terrorists into the United States" and praising Congressional exploitation of fears that "the terrorists might soon be relocating into their states," as if they were going to be walking the streets rather than being held in maximum-security prisons.

But Cheney's retroactive paean to torture, which has raised his approval ratings a few points from abysmal to awful, is less relevant than the President's attempt today to reconcile national ideals with what has to be done "to keep the American people safe."

Obama reviewed what he called the Guantanamo "mess--a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country."

Along with a dissection of the legal and moral issues involved, the President, who prefers to focus on the future, nevertheless acknowledged the demagoguery of "fear-mongering" surrounding the issue.

"Listening to the recent debate," he said, "I've heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country."

As this rhetorical duel was going on, New York Police were illustrating the complexities of the post-9/11 world by arresting four would-be jihadists for an "aspirational" plot (translation: they had the desire to bomb and kill but apparently neither the brains nor means until authorities provided them with harmless "explosives" and fake surface-to-air missiles).

The sadness in all this what used to be "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" comedy is that it now has to be treated with dead seriousness since Osama bin Laden took away our innocence almost eight years ago.

Cheney's Media Torture

After eight years in the Bush bunker, the former Vice-President is out waterboarding voters with interviews to make them confess that electing Barack Obama was a plot to subvert national security.

Dick Cheney capped his first hundred days as a voluble has-been with a "Face the Nation" appearance yesterday to illustrate Murray Kempton's classic definition of politicians as generals who watch the battle from afar and come down afterward to shoot the wounded.

His main target was a real general, Colin Powell, whose injuries leading up to the Iraq war were inflicted by Cheney's own twisted Scooter Libby intelligence used in Powell's speech to persuade the UN that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

Asked to choose between Powell and Rush Limbaugh to represent Republican principles, Cheney did not hesitate to side with The Mouth, saying "my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican."

More and more, Cheney is looking like one of those Japanese soldiers discovered in caves long after World War II ended to emerge blinking in the daylight, convinced that their emperor was still on the throne. The difference is that they slunk off in silence, too shamed to be giving interviews.

Torturing Ourselves

The continuing national debate is getting more and more self-righteous as Americans look for absolutes in a world of moral murk.

Dick Cheney emerges from his psychic cave to insist that torture works, but he has no standing after eight years of secrecy and ruthlessness. Barack Obama tells us we are not the kind of people who torture on principle but refuses to punish those who did while believing they had a legal right to do so.

Now we are rooting through the moral wreckage for evidence of whether or not vile treatment of human beings can sometimes serve a greater good. Are those who insist that it never can and insist on punishing anyone who disagrees any less rigid than Cheney?

At 19, I was given a rifle and ordered to kill for my country against all my beliefs and three years later saw an American president command the only use of nuclear weapons in history to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children to save lives like mine in what would have been a bloody invasion of Japan.

Those experiences left me with a lifelong aversion to sanctimony on questions where life and death are involved. Even if the Cheney-minded can show that torture may sometimes produce useful information, does that justify its use as a policy? Even if those who disagree can refute those claims, does it justify their moral certitude?

The dangers of living in a world where rectitude is a zero-sum game (If I'm right, you must be wrong) are the greater threat to our humanity than the issue of torture as an abstraction in a world where, while recognizing ambiguity and ambivalence, nonetheless taking a moral stand is our best hope for surviving as the kind of people we believe ourselves to be.

How Low Can Cheney Go?

When he left office, the former Vice President's approval rating was 13 percent. Yet in the past week, Dick Cheney has managed to make it worse.

By criticizing President Obama for refusing to torture, Cheney has outdone himself to the point that even Republican Congressmen are now calling on him to shut up.

“He became so unpopular while he was in the White House," says Congressman John Duncan, "that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public.”

That motion is seconded by fellow Tennessee House member Zach Wamp: “Interpret it however you want to, but what I’m saying is: We should focus on the people that will lead us tomorrow, not the people who led us yesterday. With all due respect to former Vice President Cheney, he represents what’s behind us, not what’s ahead of us.”

As politely as possible, Republicans are suggesting that Cheney find other ways to occupy himself.

"Tending a legacy is best done in a memoir,” says Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk, who hopes to run for Obama's former Senate seat next year. “I would just encourage everybody who has left office to follow the tradition of the Founding Fathers--to write your memoirs."

How many ways can the GOP find to tell Cheney to get lost?

An Obama Kiss for Cousin Cheney

On 60 Minutes tonight, the President takes note of the assertion by his long-lost relative Dick Cheney that the Obama Administration's refusal to torture raises the risk for another 9/11 attack on America.

"How many terrorists," Obama asks, "have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

In answer to a question about released Guantanamo detainees who have reportedly returned to terrorism, the President acknowledges, "There is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals...to make sure [they] are not a threat to us" but calls the Bush policy of long incarcerations with no trials "unsustainable."

As unusual as it is for a president and former vice-president to engage in public argument, at least this one is all in the family, but Obama may want to engage his own genealogist to double-check on the lineage.

Vintage Cheney: Sour and Poisonous

Torture, the former Vice President tell us today, is "absolutely essential" to preventing future 9/11s and that "President Obama campaigned against it all across the country, and now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack."

If Dick Cheney's goal is to make George W. Bush look like a statesman, his CNN interview today is a good start. "Cheap shot" is too mild a description for a former Vice President casually calling a sitting president too naïve to head off terrorist attacks with no chance of ever being held to account for saying it.

But being unaccountable is Cheney's hallmark. As the most secretive Vice President in history, he shrugged off all demands for transparency and now, instead of remaining in his accustomed silence, emerges to defend the alternate reality he helped create for eight years.

In Iraq, Cheney says, "We've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do."

The economy? "Stuff happens, and an administration has to be able to respond to that and we did," he tells John King.

It's unclear whether or not George W. Bush has the least sense of shame over what he did to the country, but it's clear that Dick Cheney doesn't and that he doesn't intend to stop doing it.

Obama's Janus Dilemma

As he takes the oath in this aptly named month, Barack Obama is faced with looking both forward and back over an enormous list of national problems.

Steering the country through economic minefields will obviously take almost all of his administration's energies but, to the extent that present difficulties are rooted in the disastrous Bush years, the past can't be totally ignored.

In cataloguing the major frauds and deceptions, Frank Rich in the New York Times asserts, "The more we learn about where all the bodies and billions were buried on our path to ruin, the easier it may be for our new president to make the case for a bold, whatever-it-takes New Deal."

In his interview, George Stephanopoulos asked the President-Elect about appointing a special prosecutor to "investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping" and got an ambivalent response, "I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

Those who were outraged by the Bush-Cheney assault on traditional American freedoms may be disappointed by such hesitation but will have to consider the priorities of doing things right for the future against punishing the wrongs of the past.

Stephanopoulos asked about Dick Cheney's advice: "Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it."

Obama agreed but not in the way Cheney had in mind. Perhaps the best way to resolve his Janus-like dilemma is the answer Frank Rich got from Henry Waxman, Capitol Hill's "most tireless inquisitor into Bush scandals."

Though Waxman "remains outraged about both the chicanery used to sell the Iraq war and the administration’s overall abuse of power, he adds: 'I don’t see Congress pursuing it. We’ve got to move on to other issues.'

"He would rather see any prosecutions augmented by an independent investigation that fills in the historical record. 'We need to depoliticize it,' he says. 'If a Democratic Congress or administration pursues it, it will be seen as partisan.'”

For Obama, that may turn out to be the best Janus-like approach.

Dick Cheney's Farewell Snarls

Bush's Scrooge is making some final appearances and, true to his nature, giving us "Bah, humbug" to the very end.

Almost six years, 4210 American lives and trillions of dollars after the Iraq invasion, the Vice President tells us "the world is better off with Saddam gone...This was a bad actor."

Torture? "Did it produce the desired results? I think it did...it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves."

William Kristol, in his fond farewell, assures Cheney "Popularity Isn't Everything" as a new poll shows 23 percent of Americans ranking him as the worst vice president ever. But the VP, who picked himself for the job, doesn't require solace. "I'm very comfortable," he says. "with where we are and what we achieved substantively. And frankly, I would not want to be one of those guys who spends all his time reading the polls."

Kristol's compatriots on the New York Times editorial page have a slightly different view, pointing out that "it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews."

Not for someone who personifies the old saying, "often wrong but never in doubt." Asked about "second thoughts" over publicly telling Sen. Pat Leahy to copulate with himself, Cheney says, "No, I thought he merited it at the time."

Judging from his curtain calls this week, Dick Cheney has felt that way about the rest of us for eight years.

Waterboarding for Fun and Profit

Christopher Hitchens, who doesn't believe in God or waterboarding as torture, has just cut his list in half after undergoing an aquatic experience (it wasn't baptism) on assignment from Vanity Fair.

After airily dismissing the difference between "extreme interrogation" and "outright torture," Hitchens was challenged to see for himself and, writers being as they are, agreed to do so if the experience yielded a magazine article. He did, and it did, in the current issue under the title, "Believe Me, It's Torture."

For those who want to read about and see a video of how far a portly 59-year-old man with phobias about drowning will go for money and attention, it's all there on the magazine's web site.

Meanwhile, any editor with an idea of how to test the existence of the Deity can be in touch with Hitchens as soon as he catches his breath.

New View of the 9/11 Stonewall

From the start, the Bush Administration did everything possible to hamper the 9/11 Commission, opposing its creation altogether and then, after authorizing it under pressure, appointing housebroken Henry Kissinger to head it until public outcry made them back off.

Today the chairman, former Republican Governor Tom Kean, and vice chairman Lee Hamilton in a New York Times OpEd review the CIA's and the White House's efforts to deny the Commission access to or even knowledge of the tapes that recorded Al Qaeda interrogations and, stopping just short of calling their actions illegal, characterize the process as "obstruction."

This only confirms what veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas in 2003 described as a "stonewall" of "public pledges of cordial cooperation with investigators, followed by private resistance, delay, excuses, partial compliance or self-righteous assertion of constitutional prerogatives."

The Commission, as Kean and Hamilton make clear, was not authorized to judge whether or not torture was involved in the questioning but had a critical need to learn what the senior Al Qaeda operatives knew. Apparently while trying to hide their methods, the CIA and White House denied them that information.

The more we learn, the worse it gets.

Torturing Questions

News today that members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, failed to protest when they were briefed about waterboarding and other harsh techniques of interrogation five years ago recalls the disturbing Milgram experiments of the 1960s.

A Yale professor wanted to find out how much pain people would inflict on others for what they believed to be a good cause.

"Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others," Prof. Stanley Milgram reported, "and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

We still don't know the answer to that question, which was originally raised in an effort to see behind the Eichmann defense for Nazi atrocities during World War War II, "I was only following orders." But we should keep trying to find out.

Today's revelation about waterboarding further underscores how dicey individual morality can become under social pressure. According to the Washington Post, "officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support.

"'Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,' said [Porter] Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. 'And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.'"

All this is clearly intended to relieve pressure on the Administration for its secrecy, including the destruction of torture tapes, but if involving lawmakers clears the air of some holier-than-thou posturing, it doesn't absolve anyone or lessen the need to move forward in the public debate on what kind of people we are and want to be.

What Stanley Milgram wrote in 1974, looking back on his experiments, might be as good a place as any to start:

"There was a time, perhaps, when people were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own actions.

"Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-b into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society."

As today's furor over torture goes on, it might help to think about that.

Bill Clinton's Jack Bauer Moment

On Meet the Press yesterday, the former President worked his way around to agreeing with his wife, the future President, that our policy should be “uncompromisingly opposed to terror--I mean to torture.”

Freudian slip aside (some lingering doubt about using torture to avert terror?), Bill Clinton’s, uh, tortured explanation may have given us some insight into how a President deals with the real world as opposed to abstractions.

“There’s a one in a million chance,” Clinton said, “that you might be alone somewhere, and you’re Jack Bauer on ‘24’...It happens every season with Jack Bauer, but in the real world it doesn’t happen very much. If you have a policy which legitimizes this, it’s a slippery slope and you get in the kind of trouble we’ve been in here with Abu Ghraib, with Guantanamo, with lots of other examples.

“And I’m not even sure what I said is right now. I think what happens is the honest truth is that Tim Russert, Bill Clinton, people filming this show, if we were the Jack Bauer person and it was six hours to the bomb or whatever, you don’t know what you would do, and you have to--but I think what our policy ought to be is to be uncompromisingly opposed to terror—I mean to torture, and that if you’re the Jack Bauer person, you’ll do whatever you do and you should be prepared to take the consequences. And I think the consequences will be imposed based on what turns out to be the truth.”

Translation: Policy and politics don’t cover every contingency in the real world, and people in power sometimes have to make horrific judgments. But if a President decides to become Jack Bauer or his ancestor, Dirty Harry, at some critical moment, he should be prepared to take the consequences for breaking the rules.

Would somebody please explain that to George Bush and Dick Cheney?

Too-Easy Answers About Torture

Tim Russert blindsided Hillary Clinton last night, positing “a situation in which we were holding the “number three man in Al Qaeda. We know there's a bomb about to go off, and we have three days, and we know this guy knows where it is. Should there be a presidential exception to allow torture in that kind of situation? Don't we have the right and responsibility to beat it out of him? You could set up a law where the president could make a finding or could guarantee a pardon.”

When Sen. Clinton answered that “torture cannot be American policy period” and “in addition to the values that are so important for our country to exhibit is that there is very little evidence that it works,” Russert told her that the scenario was suggested by Bill Clinton last year.

“Well, he's not standing here right now,” she responded to applause.

As other Democrats more or less agreed, a whiff of sanctimony was in the air, as it always is when politicians talk about the subject.

Only a fool (pace Alberto Gonzales) would advocate torture as policy, but as with so many other issues, it’s not always that simple. One of the less obvious sad results of Bush’s black/white, good/evil view of the world is that it has infected those who oppose him.

Before answering Russert’s “scenario,” Hillary Clinton had observed that “these hypotheticals are very dangerous because they open a great big hole in what should be an attitude that our country and our president takes toward the appropriate treatment of everyone. And I think it's dangerous to go down this path.”

It certainly is. In an era when presidents talk publicly about their underwear, voters expect definite answers about everything. But important issues don’t lend themselves to sound-bite solutions.

Just as there is the yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater exception to free speech, there may be situations that override the prohibition against torture or, as Joe Biden suggested, offering pardons to terrorists in exchange for information that would prevent devastation.

Years ago, when he had a TV show, William F. Buckley asked a noted attorney who strongly advocated defendants’ rights what he would do to get information from a suspect who knew where a kidnapped child was buried with a limited supply of air.

The lawyer did not hesitate: “Beat it out of him.”

In failing to acknowledge that there are no doctrinaire answers to everything a la George Bush, Democrats who want to replace him are doing themselves, and us, no service. Republicans will be only too happy to characterize them as lily-livered liberals.