In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Richard Cohen at the WaPo asks:

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.

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 on Sunday, on CBS's "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?

Cohen misses the point completely. His question is actually completely irrelevant to the actual debate. The question he should be asking is this: "How did the Bush/Cheney One Percent Doctrine's assumption that terrorists must be exposed to these techniques hundreds of times in order to gain dubious information become our first choice when dealing with suspected terrorists, given all the risks, the illegality of the measures, and the suspect information it gave interrogators?"

That however would require real journalism and not the knee-jerk reaction of genuflecting to a monster like Cheney and framing the debate in terms of the idiotic false choice of "we must use these techniques or Americans will die."

Life is not a Vince Flynn novel.