Cheney Returns

It's maddening to me - but entirely predictable - that Obama's successful coup in finding and killing Osama bin Laden should be turned by the GOP into a defense of torture. It is almost as if they cannot explain how on their watch, when torture was widespread in every branch of the services and authorized by the White House, they were unable to get bin Laden, indeed unable to make any serious progress either in the terror war, where they let Osama get away in Tora Bora, or in the democratization of the Middle East.

There is no evidence that torture was integral to capturing bin Laden. Of three tortured prisoners among the countless leads and tips and interviewees, one was deemed "quite cooperative" before being tortured, thereby leaving open the question of whether the shred of information he provided could have been gotten by non-barbaric methods; and two denied any knowledge of the courier under the torture technique called "waterboarding." So in order to defend torture, Cheney has to say that it's a success when the tortured tell lies. Heads he wins, tails we lose. Moreover, in the last two years or so, torture has been forbidden - although its legacy remains with war criminals protected by the US government, in violation of Geneva - and it was after those two years of a return to decency that bin Laden was found and killed. As for the Bush administration's over-arching goal - democratization of the Middle East - it was only under Obama that we got the Green Revolution in Iran, the successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the power-struggles now happening in Syria and Libya.

When these Bush administration fanatics are presented with clear evidence that Obama has been far more successful against terror and its causes than they ever were, they return to their precious, their torture program, and claim ludicrously that, without it, bin Laden would not have been captured. Rumsfeld joined in the chorus of mass distraction this weekend on the same basis. All this really tells you is that these people realize that if their torture regime is definitively found to have been counter-productive in their lifetimes, if bin Laden was caught two years after the torture program was ended and with no evidence it helped, then their barbaric policy will be exposed once again as unnecessary, un-American, unproductive, and a violation of core human values.
Cheney calls investigations into war crimes that went beyond the authorized torture techniques "an outrage." Well, he would, wouldn't he? He knows where the war crimes trail ends up - in his office. And he knows where he should be if we were governed by the rule of law: in jail. The real outrage is that he is still walking free - and doing all he can to entrench torture in the American way of war.
(Photograph: the corpse of a detainee at Abu Ghraib who died under Bush-authorized torture techniques.)