Dick Cheney is at it again. Like an undead vampire he has returned, being interviewed on CNN and once again espousing the virtues of torturing prisoners. It is in a way surreal. How can it be that a former U.S. Vice President can advocate a policy that completely disregards human rights? Under Cheney’s direction the U.S. engaged in a systematic program of capture and torture of people who had suspected Al Qaeda connections. He claims that through techniques, such as waterboarding (were there also other methods, even more diabolical that we don’t know about?) the U.S. obtained key information that allowed us to preempt terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, all the details of the information and the preemptive strikes are so secret the American people can’t be trusted to know the details of these episodes – even though they are episodes that happened in the past. Cheney is convinced that it was only through these extraordinary measures that America has been kept safe. So how come Cheney never used his wonderful torture techniques to find out where Osama bin Laden was hanging out?
It might be instructive to take a brief look at the career of another person who seems to have shared Cheney’s admiration for the use of torture. This person is known today as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad became ruler of a part of Romania, called Wallachia, upon the death of his father. He was confronted by a host of enemies and within a short span of time he had lost and regained his crown three times. During his main reign, from 1456 to 1462, Vlad attained his reputation for torturing his prisoners. Torture was used for various purposes, but one of the primary purposes was to instill fear in his enemies. Vlad would impale his prisoners on posts and set them outside Wallachia as a warning to attacking armies. When Sultan Mehmed II attacked Wallachia in 1462 he was faced with the sight of 20,000 impaled Turkish prisoners between him and Vlad’s town. Mehmed was undeterred and simply drove his army forward and quickly conquered Wallachia. It seems that Vlad’s practice of extreme torture was ineffective as a deterrent. It is also likely that any information he obtained by torture was equally useless because it is well known that people under torture will say anything just to make the torture stop. Confessions given under torture are never admissible as evidence in a court of law. Today, not many people are familiar with the career of Vlad the Impaler. Most people have never heard his name. However, almost everyone in the world knows him today by his other name: Vlad Dracula or simply Dracula. Even for Dracula, torture just never worked as well as he hoped it would.
Getting back to Cheney, our former Vice President is now making the rounds of the news media, asserting that President Obama is making us less safe because he is stopping the torture and extraordinary rendition programs that Cheney the Torturer so loved. What he fails to mention is that it was during his watch, as Vice President, that this country was attacked. What he fails to mention is that his beloved torture program failed to lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden. What he fails to mention is that his torturing of prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to the dark and secret recesses of former Soviet prisons somewhere in Eastern Europe has failed to prevent terrorist attacks in Spain or England. More importantly, his torturing of prisoners has not stopped thousands and thousands of undocumented people flooding across our border with Mexico throughout his term as Vice President. I wonder if an Al Qaeda terrorist could do that too? So how does Cheney’s program of torture prevent that?
Cheney claims that the U.S. is vulnerable to attack, and he should know. He methods of torture have been ineffective, his Department of Homeland Security is incompetent, and his war in Iraq irrelevant. The Pashtun tribes who occupy the border regions between Afganistan and Pakistan are rumored to be helping Osama bin Laden and his buddies, but who can be sure? If we were sure we would capture them, wouldn’t we? The simple fact is that Dick Cheney has looked for Al Qaeda everywhere except where we think Al Qaeda really is. We have sent our armed forces into Iraq and Afghanistan, but no where near the Al Qaeda hideouts. Cheney and Bush tortured people for seven years and their torture produced no effective result.
These days, Cheney the Torturer is still advocating and justifing torture. So did Vlad the Impaler throughout his life. The puzzling thing is this: it really didn’t work very well for Vlad, and it clearly didn’t work very well for Cheney either.
Maybe they both liked torture for some other reason.
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