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Torture is a moral abomination, and President Barack Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupcon of doubt is over the question of whether enhanced interrogation techniques actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that suspected terrorists were tortured by the CIA just for the hell of it.
Cheney, though, is adamant that the very measures that are now deemed illegal did work and that, furthermore, doing away with them has made the country less safe. Cheney said this most recently last Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation. "Those policies were responsible for saving lives," he told Bob Schieffer. In effect, Cheney poses a hard, hard question: Is it more immoral to torture than it is to fail to prevent the deaths of thousands?
Cheney is a one-man credibility gap. In the past, he has said, "We know they (the Iraqis) have biological and chemical weapons," when it turned out we knew nothing of the sort. He insisted that "the evidence is overwhelming" that al-Qaeda had been in high-level contact with Saddam Hussein's regime when the "evidence" was virtually nonexistent. And he repeatedly asserted that Iraq had a menacing nuclear weapons program.
Still, every dog has his day and Cheney is barking up a storm on the torture issue. He says he knows of two CIA memos that support his contention that the harsh interrogation methods worked and that many lives were saved. "That's what's in those memos," he told Schieffer. They talk "specifically about different attack planning that was under way and how it was stopped."
Cheney says he once had the memos in his files and has since asked that they be released. He's got a point. After all, this is more than a political catfight. It is about life and death – not ideology, but people hurling themselves from the burning World Trade Center.
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