A Dick At The American Enterprise Institute

By Steve Hynd

William Kristol has the text of Dick Cheney's speech to the neocon mothership, the American Enterprise Institute, today. "Bloody Bill" describes it as being something "I think fair-minded people will find it very well-argued and powerful." Only if they're on drugs.

Cheney starts with what I presume is a joke referencing how he became Bush's VP in the first place:

I’m looking forward to spending more time here myself as a returning trustee. What happened was, they were looking for a new member of the board of trustees, and they asked me to head up the search committee.

Ha ha, very droll. Let's all laugh along with the megalomaniac. It's downhill from there.

Cheney insults every police officer and FBI agent in the country by seriously mis-characterizing "law enforcement" to fit his own agenda:

The first attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a law enforcement problem, with everything handled after the fact – crime scene, arrests, indictments, convictions, prison sentences, case closed.

That’s how it seemed from a law enforcement perspective, at least

No mention of rolling up criminal networks, of preventative policing, of any of the myriad of good law enforecement tasks that come before and after the fact of a crime and which good law officers work so hard at. Apparently you can't insult the troops but it's ok to insult the cops. And all this ignored so that Cheney can say that combatting terrorism is an "ongoing war" rather than any of these law enforcement tasks. And in a "war", Cheney implies, you don't have to act in accordance with the law.

For Cheney, that it's a war rather than a law enforcement matter sidesteps the question of legality of surveillance without warrants on American citizens. It sidesteps the whole notion of "guilty until proven innocent" - Cheney makes it very clear that he thinks everyone ever held at Gitmo or any other US detention facility during his "war" was utterly guilty of being a terrorist murderer. And it sidesteps the whole notion of what is or isn't a crime when it comes to dealing with those detainees. It's not torture if Americans are doing it to that kind of people, just "enhanced interrogation" - and if it isn't torture then it's legal.

And so:

"since wars cannot be won on the defensive...We decided, as well, to confront the regimes that sponsored terrorists, and to go after those who provide sanctuary, funding, and weapons to enemies of the United States. We turned special attention to regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists."

Which means the US and its Coalition of the Coerced invaded Iraq and Afghanistan...but not Libya, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea or other nations with a WMD capacity and ties to terror groups.

Cheney also manages to suggest that shutting Gitmo would mean terrorist murderers walking free on American streets, ignoring as inconvenient the fact that terrorist murderers are already locked up safely in mainland prisons and ignoring the fact that, even, now, many of those held at Gitmo are not terrorist murderers. He suggests that 'enemy combatant" is just a term, easily replaced by any other phrase you care for, rather than a signifier for a deliberately created yawning gap in the Geneva Conventions between Prisoner of War and "criminal", paving the way for illegal acts under the Laws of War that weren't really illegal because it was a war.  He insists that information gained by torture was essential to stopping attacks and couldn't have been gained any other way - and so it's OK that it was illegal even though it wasn't actually illegal!

Cheney al wants to paint those who point out that these illegal acts were Al Qaeda's best recruitment tool as just no-nothing lefties:

Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a “recruitment tool” for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, “We brought it on ourselves.”

Thus, and glibly, does he dismiss the testimony of the likes of Major Matthew Alexander, who was given the Bronze Star during Cheney's time in office for leading the interrogators who rolled up Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - by good law enforcement practise and without using torture. Major Alexander believes that, by furnishing such a recruiting tool, torture may have killed more US citizens (in both Iraq and Afghanistan) as 9/11. Major Alexander recently wrote:

Former VP Dick Cheney has requested the release of additional memos showing that torture and abuse saved American lives by preventing terrorist attacks.  If the Obama Administration decides to release these memos, then I suggest they also release statistics from Iraq showing the number of foreign fighters that were recruited because of our policy of torture and abuse.  It was tracked.  I know because I saw the slides and because I heard captured foreign fighters state this day in and day out.  The government can also release the statistics that show that 90% of suicide bombers in Iraq were these same foreign fighters.  These foreign fighters killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers.  

Cheney insults Major Alexander's professionalism, and the memories of all those US soldiers killed by extremists who joined the cause because of Cheney's torturous ways. But it's this kind of convoluted logic and selective reasoning, born from pantswetting fear (as he recounts), that passes as "well-argued and powerful" in the neocon-verse. He'd do it all again too:

Today I want to set forth the strategic thinking behind our policies. I do so as one who was there every day of the Bush Administration –who supported the policies when they were made, and without hesitation would do so again in the same circumstances.

The best place for people as dangerous to Americans as Cheney is, by his own lights, is in eternal detention being waterboarded.

Update: Steve Benen describes Cheney, accurately, as a "small, petty man" provided with a balcony by the AEI:

"Cheney referenced 9/11 25 times. It was enough to make Rudy Giuliani blush."