The reality is, Cheney is seriously unbalanced. For decades, he has espoused an imperial Presidency, an all-powerful head of state concept that drips with Cold War paranoia and McCarthyistic delusion. The mindset that there is an enemy lurking behind every corner, that there are anti-American plots afoot everywhere, makes for the worst kind of domestic despot. This Neo-con melodrama is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By carrying out a secretive, scheming, lying, elitist government agenda, these former Trotskyites have created the very anti-American sentiment against which they purport to fight. And while Cheney and company attempt to encircle the globe with their tentacles of influence and oil-friendliness, the entire world economy/ecology has rendered their James Bond bullshit obsolete and dangerous. This cohort needs to disappear, pronto. Because if they manage to dupe a good portion of the American populace into believing that their crypto-fascist plan still has some legitimacy, we could see the entire country's economy leveraged to preserve the $1 trillion-a-year military, while our towns, cities, and ecosystems crumble out from underneath us.

So yes, Cheney, shut the F@*! up, please. 

Alright, onto terrorism. I don't have the expertise to delve into the legal issues here, and many scholars, columnists, and lawyers have done stellar work on the subject already. Suffice it to say, the important technical details are these, as best as I understand (which is probably not good):

• The "enhanced interrogation techniques" utilized by the CIA and directed by the White House were vetted by lawyers in the Justice Department's OLC, and given approval
• At the same time, all of the legal counsel offices of the branches of the US military itself had defined these techniques as unacceptable under current US and international statutes (or at least highly controversial)
• The OLC claimed that, even if certain techniques were found in violation of certain federal statutes, those laws themselves would thus be unconstitutional, since they were impeding the ability of the President to conduct war
• In any case, the torture techniques weren't so bad anyway, and didn't really do any permanent damage -- so.... no harm, no foul
• And..... even if they were really bad, it's okay -- because sometimes they yielded actionable intelligence.  So there, you liberal pussies, take that!

Okay, I guess those are not all "technical" details, but literary license allows me some leeway. You get the idea. Much like the pre-Iraq invasion intelligence, the Bush administration (i.e., Cheney) stove-piped the legal rationale for torture, running end-arounds past all of the established legal thought in the military, to get the answers it wanted. So the JAG doesn't like what we want to do? We'll just grab our own lawyers and have them draft some secret memos that will cover our asses if things ever get out of hand. All bases covered. And if that doesn't work, we'll fall back on the old standbys of Executive Privilege, State Secrets, wartime powers, etc. In essence, just as with Iraq, the pretense of 9-11 allowed the Bush administration to get away with all manner of criminal activity.

But as I said, better minds than mine have taken up the legal and technical issues of the torture issue. And I won't even get into the morality of torture, and how it relates to international law, religious faith, and reciprocal treatment of POWs. These are important issues in their own right, and they all lean heavily towards the correctness and righteousness of banning torture outright.

What I want to focus on is the idea that sometimes torture "works." Specifically, how is "actionable intelligence" related to Islamic terrorism? Now, we all should know the usual arguments against the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation technique: it generates false confessions, as prisoners say whatever they have to say to stop the pain; torture is a highly suggestible situation, meaning that it becomes very easy for the interrogators to insert their own preconceptions into the process, again creating false intel; excessive trauma can produce jumbled, confused, and conflated information, leading the interrogators on wild-goose chases. And endless studies have shown that the "softer" psychological techniques of interrogation (i.e., creating camaraderie) by trained experts produce far more actionable intelligence than torture. These factors alone should make it obvious that torture is not just immoral, but just plain stupid, in the bigger picture.

But beyond that, it still sticks in my craw that Cheney is balls-out calling for Obama to release more torture docs that show the successes of the "enhanced techniques." And whatever else he is, Cheney is no dunce. He would not be calling these docs out for exposure if they didn't back up his assertions. And he's writing his inevitable book as well (oh, happy day), so you just know that there's gonna be a lot of "see how awesomely patriotic and effective we were, you lefty namby-pambys"-type stuff in there. So there have to be multiple examples of torture leading to actionable intelligence, whereby terrorist plots were uncovered and thwarted, and lives saved.

And it is at this very point that we need to confront the torture and terror issue, because it goes to the heart of the interpretation of 9-11, which was the font from which all this crap has flowed. Again, if you remember back to the aftermath of 9-11, the question on everyone's lips was, "why do they hate us?" Americans were shocked and surprised, and we were lurching around looking for any explanatory framework we could find. This was really a pre-anger phase, with far more intellectual curiosity than one might imagine or recall. I know that there were certainly a lot of people who were instantly enraged and lookin' for a fight. But I also remember many people being, of all things, thoughtful. They were soul-searching both their own selves and their country, wondering how this could have happened. And the low-tech nature of the attack really mitigated against an instant obsession with the HOW of the attack, which was very simple, and pointed people's gaze toward the WHY. 

This was a crucial moment, and the path chosen out of this soul-searching would affect everything that followed, and it would prove impossible to turn back and select a different road. I covered this issue in more detail in an earlier post, but long story short: we chose the easy explanation for 9-11, the story that told of a blameless America and a criminally-insane group of Islamic savages. The people that attacked us were absolutely irrational, and the historical actions and policies of the US government had nothing to do with anything. This is the tale that allowed us to invade Afghanistan, and then Iraq, with nary a thought as to the ridiculously expensive and ultimately futile nature of Middle East occupation. This story is what facilitated the deeds of an imbecile President and a devious Vice, so that civil liberties, economic sanity, and ecological vision were put on the chopping block. And ultimately, this was the reckless path that has led to torture, and the idea that cruel interrogation techniques could actually lead to "useful" information about something as amorphous and expansive as "terrorism."

This is the Neo-Con vision of terrorism, that reads the massively-organized nature of State Communism onto the ragtag, multi-faceted hydra of "Islamic Extremism." In this view, we have actually accomplished something substantive if we foil one or two specific terrorist plots. But what have we really done if we stop a couple attacks? Have we fatally wounded the whole seething cauldron of anti-American sentiment and hatred, or have we just made it stronger? If our underlying policies towards the Islamic world remain unchanged, we could torture and torture until the cows come home, and bust a thousand terrorist plots, but still be bailing out the ocean with a spoon. Terrorism is not a thing, it is a tactic. Terrorists live in certain places, utilizing certain things -- but terrorism itself lives in the minds of people, and can spread and grow at the speed of a TV broadcast or a newspaper headline. 

Cheney and his ilk want us to believe that torture can produce results, can save lives. And on a very small level, it certainly can. But at what cost? How many more attacks are hatched because of these heinous practices, attacks that might not have been dreamt of, had the United States pursued a more realistic, mature stance towards policy? Cheney wants us thinking that we can sleuth and fight our way out of the Islamic "problem." If we portray the enemy as this sinister, irrational, savage, and inhuman entity, there will be no end to war, military spending, geopolitical intrigue, and all manner of Strangelovian bullshit. That's how these guys stay in power, lining the pockets of corporate cronies and thinktank jackasses. Make everyone afraid, and you can get away with anything, even destroying your own country.

My own stance on terrorism is that it can only be eliminated by drying up the reservoirs of discontent upon which it thrives. By nature, terrorist enterprises have to survive by co-mingling with civilian populations, from which they draw cover, sustenance and membership. And these wider sympathetic populations will always exist if the United States continues to ignore global issues of justice, true democratic processes, and economic/ecological collapse. A broader, non-military approach to eliminating the circumstances that give rise to terrorism would be much cheaper in the long run, in both lives and money. And it has the added advantage of being right.