Cheney: Torture is good

The torture issue has whipsawed back and hit the Obama Administration in the face despite O’s best efforts to keep the guilty happy by traipsing out to CIA headquarters in Langley and reassuring the spooks. But the revelations of exactly what has been happening in our government-run secret dungeons is just too ugly to brush under the rug.

Congress now looks likely to dig deeper and bring out more unsavory facts, and the intellectual authors may face scrutiny and perhaps sanctions for their role in ordering prisoners to be tortured. In any case, the national debate will continue despite Emanuel Rahm’s frantic insistence that we focus attention on today’s deals and away from yesterday’s crimes.

But Obama and his team need to grow a pair and find a way to answer the Dan Burton’s and the Dick Cheney’s who are insisting that torturing defenseless prisoners was and is something to be proud of. ‘Serving America’ is the catchword, I believe.

So yes, let’s take Cheney up on the offer to review all the results of the systematic use of torture and objectively examine how much or how little protection it provided us. Then let’s set that data against the moral rot that has set in to our society due to its use. Let’s include the failure to pay attention to the terrorist threats in the first year of Bush’s reign, too, since the 9/11 incident and the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario continue to be the justifications for using torture. And why not throw in the use of torture-derived ‘intelligence’ to drum up support for the Iraq debacle, too, given that the next terrorist act may well be a direct result of that catastrophe.

All that would not fit Obama’s fantasy about looking forward and avoiding ‘retribution’, a desire clearly not shared by his enemies.

Obama’s appeal was post-partisan, post-racial and post-Washington-slugfest, but he was foolishly naïve to think that just wanting to do what’s best for the country was going to attract cooperation from the organized criminal racket that has been in power there. The Cheneyoid opposition is the gang that seized power as a minority in 2000 and used that non-mandate to radically shift the nation’s course. They ignored our safety and cynically manipulated patriotic fervor to launch foolhardy wars of conquest, bankrupt the national treasury and push us closer to a police state. Pelosi, Obama and Reid seem to have forgotten that the Democrats were painted as virtual traitors for voicing opposition to any of this.

These ideologues seem downright eager to see another terrorist attack occur so that they can score political points against Obama as a softie. Making verbal nice with them as if they care about solving economic, energy, diplomatic or other policy problems is fine as long as Obama is not so lulled by his own rhetoric that he fails to notice his raging partisan enemies are winking at calls to secede from the union and the frantic buying up of assault rifles. It’s not the time to look or act weak, and letting these bug-eyed hysterics set the terms of the debate on torture is potentially Obama’s worst mistake so far.