Cheney
Dick Cheney: al Qaeda recruitment lifetime achievement award winner.

Just five days after September 11, 2001, Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and delivered the news that the United States would abandon its moral standing in the fight against terror:

MR. RUSSERT: When Osama bin Laden took responsibility for blowing up the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. embassies, several hundred died, the United States launched 60 tomahawk missiles into his training sites in Afghanistan. It only emboldened him. It only inspired him and seemed even to increase his recruitment. Is it safe to say that that kind of response is not something we’re considering, in that kind of minute magnitude?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I – clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

It’s bad enough that Cheney uses the euphemism of "sort of the dark side", and most quotations of this appearance stop here. However, the next question and answer are just as revealing:

MR. RUSSERT: There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Oh, I think so. I think the – one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There’s – if you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I’m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission.

[Emphasis added on both quotations above.]

Cheney and Russert spell it out quite clearly here. The old days of intelligence gathering being subject to rules relating to human rights are over. We have to work "the dark side" because "it’s a mean, nasty, dirty business out there". Cheney throws out the history of the US dealing with "existential threats" many times in its past without abandoning its moral standing and merely insists that we had to do so in our fight against al Qaeda.

Note that rendition of suspects to countries that carry out torture is clearly hinted in this passage. Moving on to carrying out the torture ourselves was merely a natural extension of the idea.

On May 12, Emptywheel gave us an excellent analysis of another Cheney appearance on a Sunday morning talk show. Cheney gave a very strange account of Bush’s involvement in the decision to torture:

SCHIEFFER: How much did President Bush know specifically about the methods that were being used? We know that you– and you have said– that you approved this…

CHENEY: Right.

SCHIEFFER: … somewhere down the line. Did President Bush know everything you knew?

CHENEY: I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew — he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it.

This response makes it very difficult to tell just how Bush was involved in approving torture, but, to me, it comes off as showing Cheney as the prime mover using probably indirect methods to get Bush to come along.

Opposition to the use of torture began to appear in Congress in 2005. We learn from today’s Washington Post that it was Cheney himself who conducted a series of Congressional briefings on behalf of the CIA. It appears that these briefings quelled the Congressional uprising:

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees.

The Cheney-led briefings came at some of the most critical moments for the program, as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate or even terminate the techniques, according to lawmakers, congressional officials, and current and former intelligence officials.

Just to review, we have Cheney coming out five days after 9/11 to tell the world that the US would abandon human rights considerations in its fight against terrorism. Cheney takes the lead role in developing torture as a policy and even personally leads the effort to keep torture as a tool when Congress begins to rebel. What has this policy gotten us? Here’s former interrogator Matthew Alexander, in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

Dick Cheney announced that we would ignore human rights in our intelligence gathering. He then instituted and approved a program of torture. He personally led the fight on Capitol Hill to keep torture going. Torture is the primary recruiting tool for al Qaeda.

The next time international terrorists attack the United States, there will be one person who should take the bulk of the blame: Dick Cheney.