Cheney's Tortured Logic

But then there are techniques that were "part of the program," and here, too, Cheney gives no ground. Todd cited Riyadh al-Najjar, handcuffed to an overhead bar, 22 hours a day for two days, wearing a diaper. He cited Abu Zubaydah, confined for a total of 266 hours in a coffin-sized box.

"We were very careful to stop short of torture," Cheney insisted. "The Senate has seen fit to label [it] torture. But we worked hard to stay short of that definition."

Except that is demonstrably false. Zubaydah, for instance, was waterboarded so intensively he "became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's waterboarding deteriorated into "a series of near drownings," the Intelligence Committee found.

But don't trust them -- listen to the same Justice Department that Cheney said bestowed its blessing. One example: a July 2004 letter to the CIA in which Attorney General John Ashcroft prohibited waterboarding a detainee "primarily because of the view that the technique had been employed in a different fashion than that which DOJ initially approved."

And then there were detainees who were not terrorists. Once again, not a scintilla of regret. Gul Rahman, Todd noted, "was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in CIA custody. And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity."

Of the 119 suspected terrorists held by the CIA, the Senate panel found, at least 26 were wrongly detained.

Todd: "You're OK with that margin for error?"

Cheney: "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States."

Perhaps Blackstone's formulation, that it is better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent to suffer, may need tweaking in the age of terrorism, when freeing the guilty poses risks to all. But to detain, and torture, the innocent with insouciance is something different.

Cheney's no-regrets attitude is chilling, enhanced by the unsettling fact that so many Americans agree with him. Six in 10 in an ABC/Washington Post poll found the CIA's treatment of suspected terrorists justified, although half, contra Cheney, at least had the decency to call it torture.

Which is why Cheney is not an easy or irrelevant target. He makes a flawed case that cannot safely be ignored.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.