"A dark lord comes shrieking into the light"

Andrew Sullivan (Sunday London Times):

He was for so long the invisible man. Hunkering down in an undisclosed location, poring over the bureaucratic details that made him a master of manipulating the American ship of state, appearing only for military speeches or conservative fundraisers, the former vice-president Dick Cheney loved the shade.

For him, power was best exercised indirectly — in the always confidential lunches with the president, or by sitting silently through cabinet or military meetings, letting others guess his intentions. He rarely campaigned, seldom explained and never, ever, apologised. And when he actually had to ask for votes in the 2004 re-election campaign, you could sense his Coriolanus-like contempt for the demos. All he wanted was to leave the stage for the offices where the real decisions were made.

Even war — that most public of acts — was private to him, as he said on September 16, 2001: “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows, in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.”

That is Cheney’s vision of effective governance: things are done “quietly, without any discussion”; any means available are used for him to achieve his ends; and nobody knows where he is.

Now, you can’t turn on the television without seeing his leaner, tanned but still grim visage. Since Barack Obama was elected, Cheney has appeared on the big Sunday talk shows five times: that’s more than his tally from 2003 to the end of 2006. The blogosphere twitches with each of his soundbites and his daughter Liz spends hours on television and radio, backing him up.

The strangeness of this is not related entirely to his usual reticence. It is unheard of for a former vice-president to attack a succeeding president aggressively before he has assembled his full cabinet. Even Al Gore, a man who won more votes than George W Bush in the 2000 election, said nothing critical of him for years. It is particularly odd to see Cheney assail Obama on defence and security — while Obama has retained the defence secretary of the Bush administration, Robert Gates, and has bent over backwards to increase troops in Afghanistan, delay an exit from Iraq and nominate a new general for the Afghan campaign, Stanley McChrystal, whom Cheney has previously showered with praise.

Cheney, moreover, is not the best spokesman for Cheney. He has an approval rating of 30% and a disapproval rating of 63%, while he viciously attacks a president with a favourable rating of 64%. None of this is helping his political party. One Republican strategist told The Washington Post last week: “We want Bush to be a very distant memory in the next election. The more Cheney is on the front burner, the more difficult it’s going to be.”

So what on earth is going on? Here’s what’s going on. Cheney is afraid. He knows he is losing the argument about his record. The cumulative effect of leaked reports detailing the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has altered public perceptions. In the most recent poll, 71% of Americans accept the legal fact that waterboarding is torture; and Cheney has openly bragged of using it. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that 71% of Americans, even if they think torture is justified, now believe their last vice-president was a torturer. This is not a good way to go down in history. Nor is it a good way to be perceived by public prosecutors tasked with enforcing the law.

Worse, Cheney’s Bush-era colleagues are turning on him. Philip Zelikow, a key aide of Condoleezza Rice, has testified in Congress that his memo arguing against Cheney’s torture techniques was targeted for destruction. Another former government aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, responded to Cheney’s Sunday interview last week with an all too apt reference to the power-hungry “dark side” villains of Star Wars: “Let’s just say that five minutes of the Sith lord was stunningly inaccurate.”

Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who interrogated the Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah, has said publicly that all the useful information came before Cheney insisted on waterboarding the man — and that he was waterboarded to prove a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, not to prevent future terrorist attacks. In fact, the emerging pattern of the worst torture of prisoners shows it occurred not in the wake of 9/11, to prevent future attacks, but after the botched invasion of Iraq, to justify false intelligence claims.

Bush’s key weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, disclosed last week that when he was interrogating one of Saddam’s aides, Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, in that post-invasion period, a very senior Bush official intervened to propose torturing al-Dulaymi to get evidence of a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. Nobody doubts it was Cheney.

Now, we find out that a quarter of the footnotes of the 9/11 commission report were based on “intelligence” gleaned through the torture and abuse of Al-Qaeda prisoners. As anyone can tell you, the reliability of such evidence is suspect at best — and nobody on the commission was told how the information was gathered.

What do we know about Al-Qaeda and its threat? The problem with torture is not just that it is evil, but that it destroys the possibility of knowable, testable truth. We need truth to defend ourselves.

Even Cheney knows that if he doesn’t push back hard on all of this, the weight of Washington opinion will swing against him. The capital city is a fickle, unprincipled place and, once stripped of office, he can no longer intimidate or threaten to get his way. A memoir will be too late. And so he is forced into the limelight to which he is unused. He has made unforced errors. Last Sunday he picked a fight with the former secretary of state Colin Powell, arguing that Powell was no longer a real Republican. As if Powell does not have the ammunition to fight back. And as if, in a contest for public opinion, Cheney could even begin to compete with Powell’s popularity.

Powell’s former aide Wilkerson said last week: “When will someone of stature tell Dick Cheney that enough is enough? Go home. Spend your $70m. Luxuriate in your Eastern Shore mansion. Stay out of our way as we try to repair the extensive damage you’ve done — to the country and to its Republican party.”

The only person who could really do that is Bush. And he is as silent as he is absent. Telling, don’t you think? And, from Cheney's point of view, ominous.

Howie P.S.: I don't like to give Cheney more attention than absolutely necessary but I missed this last week during my health care "vacation."