To Dick Cheney, facts just don't matter: Our view

By his own admission, Dick Cheney doesn't have much use for introspection. Once he's made up his mind, he doesn't look back — or let inconvenient facts muddle his thinking.

He still claims the Iraq War was justified by Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, which were never found, and by a supposed connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, which was debunked long ago by the 9/11 Commission, among others.

So no one should be surprised by Cheney's aggressive, evasive, factually challenged defense of torture — in form, if not in name — Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. The performance was as revealing as it was appalling.

As the former vice president stonewalled his way through tough questions drawn from last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report, alternately ducking and counterattacking like a fighter on the ropes, it wasn't hard to see how he had led a country panicked by the 9/11 attacks to abandon principles it had preached for more than half a century.

Facts just didn't matter.

What of Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner locked for 266 hours in a coffin-sized box and 29 hours more in a smaller box, just 21 inches wide, asked moderator Chuck Todd. Was that torture?

Cheney said it was "one of the approved techniques."

What about Riyhad al-Najjar, whose wrists were handcuffed over his head 22 hours a day for two consecutive days?

Cheney said he didn't know whether that tactic had been approved. Pressed for a definition of torture, he dodged: It's what the hijackers did on 9/11.

How about Gul Rahman, who was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water and froze to death in CIA custody — one of 26 prisoners found to be innocent?

"I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective," Cheney said.

Cheney, given a leading role in the fight against al-Qaeda by President Bush, no doubt acted similarly then. And so the United States began an era of torture so severe that even some veteran CIA officers were sickened.

But Cheney, ever the tough guy, remains unmoved, preaching his harsh, ends-justify-the-means reasoning, which always has some political appeal. In times of stress, it's easy for rigid leaders to cast everyone else as wimps.

But Sen. John McCain, victim of torture during the Vietnam War and a critic of it, is no wimp. Nor is former Iraq War commander David Petraeus. Nor were the authors of the Geneva Conventions, who had just survived the horrors of World War II.

Those authors steered the world onto a higher road — one that attempted to preserve moral principle even in the heat of war.

The treaties were written not just to restrain dictators in far off lands but also to override men such as Dick Cheney, who act as if any abomination is justifiable, even against the innocent.

It's unlikely that Cheney, one of the darker characters in recent U.S. history, will feel any remorse, whether as instigator of a calamitous war or promoter of torture. But as new information lends increasing insight into America's largely ineffective detour from its principles, his actions stand as a model not to be emulated.

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