No one thinks that he's the terrorist. The terrorist is always someone else. That's what happening these days, with Dick Cheney giving his farewell tour on the television news shows. He is brazenly defending the actions of the Bush administration, specifically, its policies on war and torture. He's lucky no one is going to serve him with a criminal warrant on the day he leaves office.

We don't associate terrorism with American policy. For that reason, terrorism is the most loaded word in the English language. They do it, not us. But that's silly. If human nature is what it is, and if terrorism is defined as politically-motivated violence, then terrorism is rampant all around the world, and there are terrorists among us. Like in Washington, which consistently maintains a violent foreign policy in violation of international law.

Portrait of a terrorist

Dick Cheney has been a bad guy for many years. I make it a point to read every good non-fiction book that comes out, particularly books on recent American history. As you read about American history from the Nixon administration to the present, there is one name that pops up regularly: Dick Cheney. He worked for the Nixon regime, a criminal enterprise by any definition. He hung around when Gerald Ford became president upon Nixon's resignation in 1974. Cheney never liked how the presidency lost presige and power as a result of post-Watergate reforms, and when he became a Congressman in the 1980's he defended President Reagan's illegal foreign policy when it erupted in scandal, the Iran-contra affair. After Reagan was caught trading weapons to Iranian terrorists in order to release American hostages and using the profits to finance the terrorist contras in Nicaragua in violation of American law, Cheney defended the practice and said that Congress had taken on too much authority in regulating foreign affairs. Cheney then became George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, presiding over the invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, military actions which killed thousands and proceeded on the basis of very flimsy justifications.

When Cheney became vice president in the Bush administration, astute political observers knew that he would be calling the shots, since George W. Bush had no experience on the national stage and knew nothing about foreign affairs. It was Cheney who forcefully pushed for war in Iraq and promoted the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture against prisoners captured in the war on terror.

There is no way to comment on Cheney's recent comments defending the use of torture. His words say it all. Here is a summary from ThinkProgress.org:

In an interview earlier this week, Vice President Cheney admitted to personally approving the torture of high-profile detainees. In a new interview with the Washington Times, Cheney stridently defended the Bush administration’s torture policies, saying, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do.” He added emphatically that he would “do exactly the same thing again.”

Most audaciously, Cheney specifically defended the morality of torture, suggesting that it would have been immoral for the United States to not torture:

“In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that’s what we’ve done,” he said. […]

“I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said.

Cheney insisted that the torture policies he helped craft were “directly responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for 7 1/2 years.”

Torture has endangered, not protected, American lives. Military experts say that the U.S.’s torture policies have been the single greatest recruiting tool for al Qaeda. A former interrogator who worked in Iraq stated unequivocally, “The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.”

Rather than keeping us safe, former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan warned that Cheney’s torture policies will lead directly to another domestic terrorist attack:

Based on my experience in talking to Al Qaida members, I am persuaded that revenge in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland is coming; that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans; and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

The piece at Think Progress has links the original sources and articles to back up the commentary. More here. Many of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were found guilty of nothing and therefore sent back to their native lands with a new hatred for the United States. Torture probably reveals very little in the way of usable intelligence because people will say anything to stop the agony. Then investigators have to double-check what the prisoners say under duress and these leads often produce nothing useful while wasting the valuable time of American intelligence officials.

Historians will look back at the Bush administration with horror and scorn at an infantile president and his malicious vice president. Historians will correct the current lie now being pushed by Bush and his defenders: that the U.S. did not suffer any terrorist attacks during the Bush administration. September 11 happened on Bush's watch, and there are websites galore which document how the administration was grossly negligent in dealing with red alert threats. Just Google "August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing" to see what I mean. Invading a sovereign nation without any justification, killing thousands in the process, won't go over too well with future historians, especially as they and their kids will have to keep paying the bill, totalling hundreds of hundreds of billions of dollars.

There will be many celebrations when Bush leaves the White House on January 20, 2009. I will be among the celebrators. But don't forget the terrorist who will be taking out the garbage with Bush. May Dick Cheney live out the rest of his life coming to terms with the terror and violence that happened on his watch. May his sleepness nights and night-frights dwarf those of the victims of his heinous war policies.