To torture or . . . um, what was the other option again? Oh, right, NOT to torture (ha-ha-ha!)

"I’d do it again in a minute."

-- "Big Dick" Cheney ("The Biggest Dick of Them All"),
Sunday on Meet the Press

by Ken

Let's table for a moment the question of what exactly the "it" in question is in this pithy quote. After all, I imagine it applies equally well to every dastardly deed done and every monstrous policy advocated and implemented in the entire squalid, life-denying and -destroying career and life of "Big Dick" Cheney, aka "The Biggest Dick of Them All." This is a creature who would leave no stone unturned, no decent person unscrewed in pursuit of his life's goal of turning everything he touched, or even looked at, into shit.

Before we proceed, we must remember that Big Dick doesn't consider waterboarding torture, or for that matter anything else done by the squads of torturers he energized during his years of quasi-executive authority. You always wonder how he would feel if any of the varieties of torture he champions were done to him -- not for show, mind you, where you know that it will end, but for real, where you don't know, and where, if the rest of us get lucky, Big Dick might have been turned into the Carcass Formerly Known as "Big Dick" Cheney.

That said, as Amy Davidson notes in a new newyorker.com post, "Torture in a Dick Cheney Minute,"

Cheney’s “do it again in a minute” line came, remarkably, in response to [Meet the Press host Chuck] Todd’s question about the finding, in a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report released last week, that twenty-six out of a hundred and nineteen known inmates in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons were wrongfully held. Todd mentioned a number of cases of outright mistaken identity—“They were released, no apologies, nothing”—and wondered what those people were owed. “Twenty-five per cent turned out to be innocent. … Is that too high? You’re O.K. with that margin of error?” Todd asked. Yes, Cheney was O.K. with that. “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective,” he said. A couple of minutes later, as if the exchange about mistaken detentions had not taken place, Cheney said of the prisoners, sweepingly and unequivocally, “They are unlawful combatants. They are terrorists.” He spoke approvingly of the decision not to read them any Miranda rights.

How can you not love that "as if the exchange about mistaken detentions had not taken place"? Is that Big Dick in a nutshell or what? Once the man has settled on his preferred lies and delusions, fuck any facts that attempt to get in his way.

Amy notes Chuck Todd's vain attempt to get Big Dick to tell us just what he considers torture, and could only get the opposite: a category of activities he considers not torture: anything "specifically authorized and O.K.'d" and "blessed by the Justice Department." As best she can work it out from the Dickman's puzzling utterances:

Basically, in Cheney’s world, nothing Americans do can be called torture, because we are not Al Qaeda and we are not the Japanese in the Second World War (whom we prosecuted for waterboarding) and we are not ISIS. “The way we did it,” as he said of waterboarding, was not torture. In other words, it was not really the Justice Department that “blessed,” or rather transubstantiated, torture; it was our American-ness. Is there an argument that could degrade that American identity more?

Alas, though, there are cadres of stand-by torturers who don't fit the gargantuan-cartoon mold of Big Dick.

It would be comforting to dismiss Cheney as a historical oddity, to picture him sitting in the dimly lit room of a motel, changing the pitch of his voice to pretend he wasn’t alone. But he’s got company, and it’s dangerous. The way that many, including the present and former directors of the C.I.A., have responded to the Senate report has been shameless and sordid. (There have been exceptions, as Jane Mayer notes.) They have spent a lot of time complaining that the Agency hasn’t been sufficiently praised. The word “torture” upsets them.

Those intelligence officials talk, too, about what they think they learned from torturing people, scrounging for something to put in the moral balance. (It’s the wrong currency, and not exchangeable.) Brennan said that it was “unknowable” whether the same things could have been learned another way; what is knowable, based on the report, is that false information given to us by prisoners who were tortured was then used to justify the torture of other prisoners.

One rhetorical trick has been to say, as Brennan did last Thursday, that most of what was done was proper, apart from a few cases when interrogators went beyond what was authorized—“went outside of the bounds,” as Brennan put it. He argued that what everyone else did “should neither be criticized nor conflated with the actions of the few who did not follow the guidance issued.” A rational person, hearing stray, awful details in the press reports, might be reassured, assuming that “outside of the bounds” included shackling a person for extended periods in “stress positions” as he soils himself, slamming him against a wall, nearly drowning him, keeping him awake for days, or putting him in a cold cell, stripped of most of his clothes. (That last one happened to a prisoner who was wrongfully held; he died of hypothermia.) But those “techniques”—acts of torture—were part of the policy. Brennan is essentially just admonishing Americans not to “conflate” putting hummus in a person’s rectum with locking him in a box the size of a coffin. (“Confinement boxes” were an approved measure.) Thirteen years after 9/11, there’s surely more to think about. It’s not enough to call the rule-breaking abhorrent, when the rules were abhorrent, too.

John Brennan works for Barack Obama. As Jane Mayer writes in the magazine this week, the President, when it comes to torture, has preferred avoidance to accountability. Obama looks back in sorrow, and seems to think that everyone else does, too. But if this past week has proved anything, it’s that the legacy of torture is not quiet repentance but impunity. This President has told his agents not to torture, and Brennan says he can work with that, while the C.I.A. waits for instructions from the next one.

SPEAKING OF TORTURE --

Ian Welsh, who a few days ago offered a beautiful consideration of "The Ethics of Torture 101," distinguishing between the pragmatic (it doesn't work) and ethical (it's for God's sake wrong) cases against torture, follows up today with an anguished post called "America's Depraved Leadership Has Created a Depraved Population":

A majority of Americans thing torture is justified.  They are split on whether the Torture report should have been released.  And they think Torture prevented attacks."

According to the American people, torture is justified, and it works.

Every demographic has at least a plurality for torture: men and women, young and old, white and non-white.

The only good finding is that a plurality of Democrats believe torture was not justified, though, within the margin of error, they do believe it was helpful.

Before Bush, most Americans were against torture.  The endless drumbeat of propaganda and the need to justify what America does (America is good, therefore America does not do evil), has had its effect.

I will make an ethical judgment: people think torture is justified are bad people. Depraved people.  A society where a majority thinks it is justified is a depraved culture.  (And remember, 51% think it was justified, but 20% don’t have an opinion.  Only about a third of Americans are opposed.)

Sounds reasonable to me.

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