Torture and truthiness

If Dick Cheney believes he can prove that torture saved us from terrorist attacks, why does he oppose a full investigation?

By Joe Conason
Salon.com
Apr. 27, 2009

Defenses for the Bush administration’s advocates and perpetrators of “enhanced interrogation” –- that euphemism for torture from the Nazi era –- are narrowing as the public learns more about their appalling record. The repeated claims that waterboarding, for example, was not illegal or should not be categorized as torture sound increasingly feeble to anyone who understands that we have prosecuted such acts as war crimes for more than a century, whether committed by our enemies or our own personnel.

So the ultimate justification is not that torture isn’t torture or that torture is lawful and constitutional, but simply that torture works –- as Dick Cheney insists -- and that specific acts of torture curtailed terrorist plots and saved lives. The former vice president says that previously classified information will vindicate the cruelties and abuses endorsed by him, former president George W. Bush, former CIA directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden, and a host of lesser figures from the old regime.

It is a claim long overdue for scrupulous examination, rather than inflated proclamation on talk radio and cable television. The surest sign that Cheney and his supporters don’t believe their own boasts is their horrified resistance to a bipartisan truth commission -- which could undertake the essential task of gathering documents, hearing testimony and sorting out facts from propaganda. Despite the constant repetition of warnings that without torture we would be left vulnerable to terrorism, the record so far offers scant proof that the Bush administration’s crude brutality somehow rescued the nation from disaster.

Set against the assertions of Cheney and company, whose credibility has languished ever since the fiasco of the missing Iraqi WMDs, are the statements of other officials who have had continuing access to highly classified briefings about the “war on terror.” In a floor speech last spring, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) bluntly disparaged the effectiveness of the torture program. “Although the CIA has described the information obtained from its program,” he said, “I have heard nothing that leads me to believe that information obtained from interrogation using harsh interrogation tactics has prevented an imminent terrorist attack.” Two months later, a reporter for Vanity Fair asked FBI director Robert Mueller in London whether he knew of any terrorist attacks on the United States that had been thwarted thanks to intelligence obtained through "enhanced techniques" of interrogation. At first reluctant to answer that question, the FBI chief finally said: “I don't believe that has been the case."

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