Is Cheney Winning the Torture Debate?

Is Cheney Winning the Torture Debate?
By Eric Etheridge

At the Plum Line, Greg Sargent says that an article in today’s issue of The Times — originally titled “At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?” — is proof that Cheney & Co. are effectively “shifting the torture debate on to the narrow question of whether torture has ‘worked.’ ”

The Bushies want this question — “did torture stave off terror attacks and save lives?” — hovering in the air. There’s plenty of evidence that torture hasn’t worked at all and has done more harm than good. Even some former Bush administration officials have conceded it hasn’t done anything to stop terror attacks.

But it’s easy for the Cheney camp to muddy the waters and turn this into a matter of debate by citing unspecified classified info that supposedly supports the claim that it has saved lives — info that we’ll never see. Having the debate focused this way also lays the groundwork for the Cheney camp to say “I told you so” in the event of another terror attack.


Indeed, the question of effectiveness is “now on the front burner,” writes Michael Tomasky at The Guardian, as it has been pretty much both online and off since Cheney said in his Fox interview Monday night there were classified documents that proved the value of his approach. Former Bush speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen made the “it works” argument in a Washington Post op-ed Tuesday, and his facts and analysis were quickly engaged by Slate’s Timothy Noah, Tapped’s Adam Serwer and others.

Today a former F.B.I. interrogator who questioned Abu Zubaydah writes in a Times op-ed “there was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics.” (At Firedoglake, Marcy Wheeler says the important thing about the op-ed is that it is an “on-the-record refutation of the very cornerstone of the Bybee Memo–and with it the entire torture regime.”)

And Sargent himself just this morning linked to a December 2008 interview of F.B.I. director Robert Mueller in Vanity Fair, in which Mueller said “he believed” no terror incidents had been prevented by information from enhanced interrogations.

If “it works” is the primary line of defense, there are secondary lines being argued as well — primarily “criminalizing policy differences” and “which Democrats should we also indict?”

The Wall Street Journal editorialized about the former this morning, invoking the specter of third-world politics:

[A]t least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

The editorial echoed comments yesterday from senators Arlen Spector, who used the phrase “banana republic,” and John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, who wrote in a letter to the president that they did not believe that “legal analysis should be criminalized.” Also pounding this line online yesterday were John Podhoretz and David Frum, who wrote:

After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush drew a curtain of oblivion against all the errors and mistakes that had led up to the attacks. There was accusation and counter-accusation in the media, but at the official level there was no recrimination against President Clinton’s decision not to kill bin Laden when he had the chance, no action against those who had failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers from entering the country.

If Obama proceeds to take legal action against those who did what they thought was right to defend the country, all that will change. Prosecutions launched by Obama will not stop when Obama declares “game over.” If overzealousness under Bush becomes a crime under Obama, underzealousness under Obama will become a crime under the next Republican president. . . .

It’s a nightmare future. Let’s banish the possibility now.

The other defense — “Which Democrats should be indicted?” — also invokes a scorched-earth, post-apocalyptic scenario, primarily aimed at Congressional Democrats: if anyone gets indicted for torture, so will you. Peter Hoekstra advances this case this morning, also in The Journal, and gets right to the point:

I have asked [Director of National Intelligence Dennis] Blair to provide me with a list of the dates, locations and names of all members of Congress who attended briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques.

Or as Ari Fleischer asked Paul Begala yesterday on Anderson Cooper: “Which Democrat members of Congress who sat in on the briefings . . . would you say need to be prosecuted?”

The battle lines will likely continue to shift as more documents are, or are not, released. And it’s hard to see torture opponents refusing to engage detail-for-detail on the issue of effectiveness, when they have so much evidence to argue from. Still, the simple case against torture — it’s wrong — is being made. Most famously and profanely yesterday on, of all places, Fox News, where Shephard Smith burst forth with an emphatic and impassioned: “We are America! We do not torture!”

That’s the cleaned-up version of what he said, actually. And it’s all I can share with you here, this being a family media outlet and all. But if you don’t mind a bit of saltiness, the video is worth seeking out.