Dick Cheney Blusters About Pampered Terrorists

It’s polite tradition that after American presidents leave office they write their memoirs, play golf, cash in their chips on the speaking circuit and generally don’t talk about their successors. Not so for Dick Cheney. He’s laughed at and ridiculed – and continues to defend torture methods. Vice-presidents, with a few exceptions like Al Gore, usually sink into total obscurity.

George W. Bush is keeping this tradition alive. He’s working on his book in Dallas and during a visit to Canada declared that President Obama had “earned silence from him.” Dick Cheney, feared, despised, and eulogized as the most powerful vice-president in history right up to his final day last January isn’t even considering staying silent.

In a series of television interviews that began in mid-December and shows no sign of abating, Cheney has set himself up as the most aggressive apologist for his (and, by the way, his boss’s) anti-terror policies in the Republican Party. While Jeb Bush, the ex-president’s younger brother, and a few others are trying to give the Republican Party a more friendly face, Cheney has been acting the part of chief prosecuting attorney against the Obama administration.

He accuses Obama of making the nation less secure, of consciously making America vulnerable (to the point of high treason) to new attacks by rejecting interrogation methods such as waterboarding, thereby coddling terrorists. In a CBS interview, he said, “Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America.”

Richard Bruce Cheney, 68, who previously served Presidents Ford and Bush senior, has nothing to lose but his reputation. Many think it’s already too late to save that. To Democrats, he’s the perfidious puppeteer who pulled George W. Bush’s strings. They hold him responsible for dangerously upsetting the division of power in government, destroying civil rights and dealing with the public and Congress with such secrecy as to be near-paranoid. As prone as he now is to giving incessant interviews, that’s how elusive and irritable he was in office.

After two lost elections, Republicans are reluctant to defend the most unpopular vice-president in human memory. Cheney responds by defending the harsh measures he was forced to use in response to the eternal state of war precipitated by the events of 9/11.

Cheney rationalizes that Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt did far worse by interning tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during the second World War. Americans shouldn’t delude themselves. His anti-terror measures, the “advanced interrogation techniques” and his permissible torture methods he claims “saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives.”

He makes this rash and unsupported claim despite the fact that nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered in a single day on his watch, yet says there are memos that would prove his claim if they could be made public. He claims to remember in great detail reading how effective and medically harmless methods such as waterboarding would be if used in interrogations. When Obama, against the advice and wishes of a snubbed and shamed CIA, made memos public proving exactly the opposite of what Cheney claimed to recall, the fight became even more vicious.

Meanwhile, leading Republicans accuse liberal Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of knowing about waterboarding years prior to its first use in February 2003, and that she’s now disingenuously pretending outrage. Pelosi and other Democrats would be well advised to testify under oath before a congressional committee because beside the torture itself, Democrats with any knowledge of it are also standing in the pillory. It’s not fair; it’s just politics.