Cheney's Tortured Logic

WASHINGTON -- Does Dick Cheney matter? Are the former vice president's comments on the torture report worth dissecting?

Some friends, as I mused the other day about what topic to tackle, argued no: Cheney is history. Too easy a target. Enough about torture. What about a nice holiday column?

But Cheney's torture remarks are both too outrageous and, judging from my inbox, too common to ignore. When I wrote last week both praising release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture and reaffirming my belief that prosecuting the torturers would have been a mistake, I was braced for flak from the left.

Instead, it came from the right, and boiled down to: Before you talk about the stain of torture, tell it to the families of those who leaped from the burning twin towers.

I understand. Torture was tempting in the aftermath of 9/11. It required us to think through what we were willing to do -- more precisely, what we were willing to have done on our behalf -- to protect ourselves.

What is so striking about Cheney is the complete absence of intellectual wrestling. This man sees no grays.

The late Daniel Moynihan famously wrote about defining deviancy down. Cheney does the opposite: he defines torture up. "Torture to me," he told NBC's Chuck Todd, "is an American citizen on a cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York City on 9/11."

We did not kill thousands of innocent civilians; therefore, we are not torturers. Todd noted the treatment of Majid Kahn, in which a "lunch tray consisting of hummus, pasta, sauce, nuts and raisins was pureed and rectally infused," and asked Cheney, "Does that meet the definition of torture in your mind?"

Cheney repeated his invocation of 9/11, adding, "I believe it was done for medical reasons."

Not true, actually, but Cheney, with relentlessly circular reasoning, could not bring himself to condemn it. "It wasn't torture in terms of it wasn't part of the program," Cheney said.

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