Conservatives Without Conscience

Bad judgment is Dick Cheney’s trademark. It was not George Bush who came up with the idea of imposing blanket secrecy on the executive branch when he and Cheney took over. It was not George Bush who conceived of the horrible—and in some cases actually evil—policies that typify this authoritarian presidency, such as detaining “enemy combatants” with no due process and contrary to international law. It was not George Bush who had the idea of using torture during interrogations, and removing restraints on the National Security Agency from collecting intelligence on Americans. These were policies developed by Cheney and his staff, and sold to the president, and then imposed on many who subsequently objected to this authoritarian lawlessness. It was Cheney and his mentor, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who convinced Bush to go to war in Iraq, which is proving to be a protracted calamity. As Colin Powell’s former top aide, Laurence Wilkinson, rather bluntly puts it: In 2002 Cheney must have believed that Iraq was a spawning ground for terrorists, “otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.”[71] Colonel Wilkinson, it appears, has a rather solid take on the vice president’s thinking, for there is no evidence that Cheney believed—or had any basis for such a belief—that Iraq was a spawning ground for terrorism—before we made it into one.

The issue of Dick Cheney’s judgment must be raised because he is the catalyst, architect, and chief proponent of Bush’s authoritarian policies. In fact, Cheney’s authoritarian vice presidency has simply swallowed the president, and Cheney sought to take the office way beyond even Nixon’s imperial presidency, which they had accomplished by the end of the first term.[*]Insidiously, Cheney and his staff are proceeding with strategic moves, largely out of sight, that are undertaken regularly to accomplish his goal, and often at the political expense of the president, which creates periodic, but growing, rifts between the men. These include things like ramming through the White House a presidential signing statement regarding a new law. Rather than vetoing legislation when it arrives at the White House, the White House (read: Cheney and his staff) issues a brief statement giving its interpretation of the new law as it relates to presidential powers. These statements are consistently different from the clear intent of Congress, so Bush and Cheney have, in effect, told Congress to go to hell on the few occasions when the Republican Congress has stood up to the White House. Typical was its response when Senator John McCain (R-AZ) sought to end the use of torture by Americans when interrogating putative terrorists.

George Bush has repeatedly insisted, “We do not torture.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has repeatedly claimed that the United States does not engage in “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” And CIA director Porter Goss affirms that his agency “does not do torture. Torture does not work.” But no one believes the Bush administration on this issue, and for good reason. When the so-called torture memos prepared by the Department of Justice were leaked—after the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib had surfaced—they revealed that the White House had managed to get the Justice Department to virtually define away torture. As the Economist commented, the words of the Bush administration officials on torture count “for little when the administration has argued, first, that during time of war, the president can make just about anything legal, and, second, that the UN Convention Against Torture does not apply to interrogations of foreign terrorist suspects outside the United States.” Similarly, Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam and took pride in the belief that his country would never resort to using such measures, did not believe the Bush administration. In 2004 Congress passed a bipartisan amendment to the defense authorization bill, reaffirming that detainees in U.S. custody could not be subject to torture or cruel treatment as those terms have been previously defined by the U.S. government. “But since last year’s DOD bill,” Senator McCain informed his colleagues, “a strange legal determination was made that the prohibition in the Convention Against Torture against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment does not legally apply to foreigners held outside the United States.” Or, as the senator put it more bluntly, “They can apparently be treated inhumanely.” The Bush/Cheney administration’s reading of the law was pure expediency. Judge Abe Sofaer, who negotiated the torture convention, wrote an op-ed explaining that there was never any intention to limit the torture agreement to American soil. McCain had a powerful case for why his amendments were needed.