Blumner: Time for dangerous Cheney to fade away

By Robyn Blumner

Editor's note: Mary Sanchez's column was not available.

Dick Cheney was the ultimate puppet master. The former vice president had a direct hand in the administration's most unconscionable decisions. But as large as Cheney once loomed, that is how small he has since shrunken. Like an old man left to toot his own horn to a dwindling group of listeners, Cheney is trying to defend his legacy, even as evidence mounts that he led this country in tragic directions without enhancing our safety.

Since leaving office, Cheney has been crowing that the Bush administration policies of mistreating prisoners and exposing Americans to “what do you have to hide?” surveillance kept the United States from another terrorist attack.

How sad for him that as official reports emerge, they say it isn't true.

On the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Cheney said on CBS' “Face the Nation” back in May that he had “no regrets.” “I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives,” he said.

But that was not the conclusion of the CIA inspector general. Although the full 2004 IG report on abusive interrogations has not yet been released publicly, Justice Department lawyers have quoted from it as saying, “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks.” Add to that an April report of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which describes how military people gave repeated warnings that the intelligence extracted through abusive techniques was “less reliable” than that gained by traditional interrogation methods.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder was so sickened by reading the 2004 IG report and its graphic descriptions of what the CIA and private contractors did to the imprisoned men in their charge that he is now reconsidering his opposition to appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate.

All that suffering inflicted and no significant security gains to show for it. That's Dick Cheney's legacy.

The use of illegal, domestic, warrantless surveillance is another area where Cheney insisted that America abandon its traditional civil liberties protections. His justification, once again, was that “thousands of lives” were at stake. He told this to a Justice Department official who questioned the program's legality and was reluctant to approve it, according to a recently released report by the inspector generals of five federal agencies, including the National Security Agency and the CIA.

But the intelligence agencies' report found that other espionage methods provided more timely and useful information on terrorist threats than what was obtained from the NSA program. CIA officials complained that the stuff they got from the program was often “vague or without context.”

All those law-abiding Americans with their privacy invaded, all those intelligence resources wasted, and without demonstrable security gains. That's Dick Cheney's legacy.

He was a dangerous man who has, thankfully, been put out to pasture. Now the old guy needs to fade away.

n Contact the writer at blumner@sptimes.com