Blogger Alert: I have written a column in defense of Dick Cheney. I know how upsetting this will be to some Cheney critics, and I count myself as one, who think -- in respectful paraphrase of what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman -- that everything he says is a lie, including the ands and the thes. Yet I have to wonder whether what he is saying now is the truth -- i.e., torture works.
In some sense, this is an arcane point since the United States insists it will not torture anymore -- not that, the Bush people quickly add, it ever did. Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupçon 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 the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.
Nice rhetorical trick there, eh? Call into question a fact by alluding to the "absolute conviction" of liberals, and, wow! Suddenly it's no longer a fact, even if it is supported by tons of evidence! But, folks, torture does not work as an interrogation tool.
Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.
That is, if there's anything the Bush administration was obsessed with, it was the projection of power. And didn't the Bush administration use torture to get "evidence" of al Qaeda's link to Iraq? So yeah, Cheney probably does think torture works. But not in the way Cohen means...
This time, Cohen - officially a "liberal" -- is playing the conservative game of "hysterical outrage and demand denunciations." You know the game. Find something essentially meaningless, blow it out of proportion, attach values to it, then demand everybody pay homage to it by denouncing whatever it is they've cooked up. Like, oh, I don't know, a newspaper ad or something.
Basically Cohen wants Obama to denounce Louis Farrakhan.
Obama belongs to a Christian church. The church has a pastor. The pastor has a daughter. The daughter helps run the church magazine. The magazine featured some praise for Louis Farrakhan last year.
Cohen sees this and insists, in his nationally-syndicated column, that Obama has a personal "obligation to speak out" - not because Obama has been connected with Farrakhan or anti-Semitism in any way, but because his church's pastor's daughter's magazine said something complementary about Farrakhan.
This is utterly ridiculous and Cohen ought to be embarrassed for putting his name on such nonsense. Cohen's been around long enough to know that he and his paper are above these kinds of attacks. Or, they're supposed to be.
The shorter Henry Farrell on Cohen's "logic": Louis Farrakhan is black. Barack Obama is black. Therefore, before I can trust Obama, he must denounce Farrakhan.
Yes, I was wondering how a presidential campaign involving an African-Amerian and a women as the two front-runners would play in 21st century America. I have to admit, I've been surprised. The voters don't appear to care: it's the media that's tangling itself in racist and sexist knots.
