Dick Cheney's Faux Arguments
Though I dislike Dick Cheney, I am inclined to listen carefully whenever he expresses an opinion about the War on Terrorism. The Iraq debacle is proof that his strategic instincts can lead the country astray. Even so, he is a man of long experience in government, and his advice is informed by tomes of classified information we’ve never seen. Here is an informed man who wants, insofar as I can tell, what is best for his country. That is enough to earn his arguments an airing.
But what pathetic arguments he offers. I needn’t worry that I should defer to him on some matter where he is possessed of more information when my critique is that his assertions are inconsistent with themselves, or else utterly misunderstand or elide the crux of the matter at hand.
Here is Dick Cheney talking to Bob Schieffer:
SCHIEFFER: What do you say to those, Mr. Vice President, who say that when we employ these kinds of tactics, which are after all the tactics that the other side uses, that when we adopt their methods, that we’re weakening security, not enhancing security, because it sort of makes a mockery of what we tell the rest of the world?
CHENEY: Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America.
Do you see what is going on here? Schieffer is raising the same point that Jim Manzi made: it’s conceivable that torture is an effective tactic but a counterproductive strategy—one that makes us less safe in the long run, in effect sacrificing American lives for information obtained at the cost of long term safety. Does Cheney have no answer? Or is he unable to conceive of the premise behind the question? Either way, he isn’t a very effective spokesman for the position he is ostensibly defending.
The interview continues:
The fact of the matter is, these techniques that we’re talking about are used on our own people. We — in a program that in effect trains our people with respect to capture and evasion and so forth and escape, a lot of them go through these same exact procedures. Now…
SCHIEFFER: Do you — is what you’re saying here is that we should do anything if we could get information?
CHENEY: No. Remember what happened here, Bob. We had captured these people. We had pursued interrogation in a normal way. We decided that we needed some enhanced techniques. So we went to the Justice Department. And the controversy has arisen over the opinions written by the Justice Department.
The reason we went to the Justice Department wasn’t because we felt we were going to take some kind of free hand assault on these people or that we were in the torture business. We weren’t. And specifically, what we got from the Office of Legal Counsel were legal memos that laid out what is appropriate and what’s not appropriate, in light of our international commitments.
This is confusing. One minute, Cheney is arguing that it is wrongheaded to abandon a tactic that works, never mind strategy, because it’s important to do whatever it takes to get the information needed to save American lives. So Schieffer asks, “what you’re saying here is that we should do anything”? And Cheney won’t defend that proposition. He implies that no, we should only interrogate in ways that are in accordance with American law and international treaties we’ve signed. Except he clearly doesn’t believe that — actions speak louder than words!
Even focusing narrowly on the words above, Dick Cheney is unable to defend any coherent position. It is difficult to refute him, as he isn’t saying much of substance directly — much of his arguments are implied. But I can say this: certain assertions he is definitely making are factually wrong — the Bush Administration violated domestic law and the Geneva Conventions, the OLC be damned — and the arguments he implies are inconsistent with one another.
If this is the best case that can be made for the Bush era interrogation practices, they’re even less defensible than I imagined.
It’s kind of stupid and disingenuous to give this level of critical analysis to politicians on talk shows. Obviously, they are trying to produce sound bites for people who don’t understand the issues and aren’t really listening. I guarantee you, if you watch a bunch of Administration officials explain how expansion of government-provided health care will pay for itself with greater efficiencies, or whatever, they won’t be any more honest or intelligible than Cheney.
If Mr. Friedersdorf were as smart as he thinks he is, he would spend his time engaging with people like Richard Posner. But I notice he never does.
— y81 · May 11, 12:39 PM · #
This has officially just become tiresome. Okay, now cue the apoplexy. (Well put, y81)
— Doug · May 11, 01:21 PM · #
Cheney is deeply dishonest. One example – the “mobile biological weapons labs.” We sent a team to Iraq to look at them, and within 24 hours they said they were not related to biological weapons. Within a few weeks they said their purpose was to generate hydrogen for weather balloons, just as the Iraqis had said. The government stamped the reports secret, and for the next year Cheney went around talking about the deadly mobile biological weapons labs we had found.
So, contra Conor, Cheney is not in fact worth listening to, except to find out what it is he wants you to believe.
— peterg · May 11, 02:26 PM · #
Mark Danner is exactly right about all this: Cheney wants to frame this as a debate over effectiveness. Then he wants to get lucky with a terrorist attack during the Obama administration. If he succeeds with that narrative, he wins big-time.
I think liberals ought to be attacking the Cheney right for secretly desiring a terrorist attack (along the lines of the conservative claim that liberals are secretly hoping for failure in Iraq). This is much more despicable, but I don’t doubt that these people are entirely capable of such a thing: they’re fucking nuts.
— Steve C · May 11, 02:36 PM · #
Granted I’m going off a soundbite of a soundbite, but I don’t think Cheney’s two points are contradictory. Conor seems to think that in the first point Cheney is saying “by any means necessary,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m not going to defend Cheney from the charge that he is dodging on the first question, but all he is asserting in that dodge is that extreme interrogations are effective. Nothing in the second point contradicts this. To outline it more clearly…
pt. 1: Extreme interrogations work.
pt. 2: Nevertheless, we recognized that we couldn’t just do any old thing to our prisoners, so we first tried more conventional interrogations, and when those proved fruitless, we consulted Justice (and the current Democratic leadership in Congress, I would add) to see if more extreme techniques could be used. Despite the fact that it ultimately proved effective, we didn’t just whip out the cellophane tape and water bottles until we felt there was no other option, and we established its legality.
Point 2 isn’t a contradiction of point 1, but a qualification. I can think of a few objections to this framework (“establishing legality” can seem a lot like “covering our asses,” for example), but make sure you understand the framework before criticizing it.
Also, there is a hoary, significant argument that granting Geneva protections to combatants that don’t follow the conventional rules of war is not only non-obligatory, but in mockery of the safeguards that Geneva was supposed to enforce. Again, feel free to argue against the point, but do not state as given fact something that is actually very contentious. It is not an argument.
— Blar · May 11, 03:13 PM · #
With a Constitutional law scholar in the White House and a Black
Attorney General, replete with trappings of Camelot, Beware grassy knolls!
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of a shadow government. His successor
was assassinated, and Peace died. If this were a Rocky film, Cheney goes down. Call 911
— I's · May 11, 03:30 PM · #
I don’t think Cheney’s amount of time in government earns him any respect. He’s clearly shown us the many ways one administration can wreak havoc on the country. And frankly, we’ve heard more from this guy in the last two months than we have in the last eight years—when he was in charge and could implement policies! See what that got us….
Quit giving Cheney a platform!!
— Doug · May 11, 03:35 PM · #
Cheney’s “arguments” work fine if you are dealing from a stance of “anything goes”. The Bush Regime (and the Obama regime) are establishing a legal framework for torture and interrogation that can and will be used on ANYONE, not just Brown People With Oil. He needs no reasoning or justification, in the sense that we normally think of it…the end (profit for corporations) justifies the means. Cheney is a pathological, sociopathic product of a pathological, sociopathic Corporatist system, and in that sense, extremely dangerous to at least 80% of the population of Earth.
— Michael · May 11, 05:41 PM · #
“The fact of the matter is, these techniques that we’re talking about are used on our own people. We — in a program that in effect trains our people with respect to capture and evasion and so forth and escape, a lot of them go through these same exact procedures.”
The problem with Cheney’s argument is that it misstates the purpose of the SERE program.
The men sent to SERE are fighter pilots or special operations direct-action types. These men are winnowed down to the best of an already self-selected group; they are already among the most psychologically resilient men on the planet. They are sent to SERE with the military’s “Eight Ps” philosophy in mind: “Proper planning and prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance.” SERE’s purpose is to expose these men to torture techniques in order to increase their resilience – it’s designed to prevent psychological breaks, not to train them to resist giving up information. By subjecting those men to those methods and giving them the information beforehand, they are less likely to become psychologically shattered by any such experience at enemy hands. The whole thing was designed to prevent the breaking of soldiers exhibited by victims of the North Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese during those conflicts.
Worse,Cheney’s statement completely elides the reality of how those soldiers and pilots are trained: they have safe words and gestures that will stop the treatment at any time (thus adding a sense of control and therefore contributing to one’s resilience during training). The psychologists are not there to advise the one’s inflicting the treatment, but to observe the mental state of the trainees and to offer counseling if necessary.
It would behoove reporters who interview Cheney on these topics to be able to speak with familiarity about SERE, in order to call him on such rampant bullshit.
— James F. Elliott · May 11, 06:19 PM · #
Y81,
If officials are dissembling about health care I’ll write about that too. The fact that politicians are obviously using dishonest rhetoric doesn’t obviate the need to push back against it. I’d be glad to take on Richard Posner too, if he and I disagree. Is there a particular post of his you had in mind? Much as I’d like to I cannot read everything.
peterg, we at least agree that Dick Cheney is often dishonest.
Blar, at the very least we violated the Geneva Convention with regard to Iraqi prisoners of war, right? As for your interpretation of Cheney’s remarks, you may be right, but I think my post is consistent with that possibility. As I said, because so many of his points are implied it’s difficult to tell exactly what he is arguing, but we can nevertheless make certain critiques on matters that are clear.
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 11, 07:47 PM · #
Here’s a stab at a complete statement of the problem. Each position in the debate can be given a coordinate in three dimensions. These dimensions are:
1) the law — should it be legal?
2) the morality — is it morally justified?
3) the self-interest — is it rational?
Cheney’s position is (Y, Y, Y), with the middle ‘Y’ a function of the third ‘Y.’ Another position I’ve seen defended is (N, Y, Y), which as far as I can tell treats the law as a signaling tool (let’s call it taqiyyah): a public (legislative) stance against torture on the one hand, and a secretive program of unlawful but necessary interrogation on the other. Positions for torture I haven’t seen are (N, Y, N), (Y, N, N) and (Y, Y, N). This leaves us with four positions for torture: Cheney’s Full Embrace (Y, Y, Y), Goldberg’s Taqiyyah= (N, Y, Y), the Dershowitz Guillotine (Y, N, Y), and the last and most difficult, The Purely Existential (N, N, Y).
(This last is most difficult because (N, N, Y) has been used in support of both pro- and anti- positions — as an “even if” concession from the anti-torturers, where the Moral ‘N’ is the sole determiner; as the final analysis from the pro-torturers, where the sole determiner is the Self-Interested ‘Y’).
The game turns on the third dimension. No pro-torture position is defined by the coordinates (?, ?, N). Only one anti-torture position exists outside the pure (N, N, N); this is the position defined by the coordinate group (N, N, x), with the value of ‘x’ being held irrelevant.
We have two broad types of argument: one assumes the relation between dimensions to be (2 > 3, and 2 —> 1) — i.e., morality trumps self-interest, and morality informs law. Call this Paradigm 1, or P1 (deontology).
The other paradigm orders the dimensions so that (3 > 2, 3 —> 2, and 3 —> 1) — i.e., self-interest trumps morality, self-interest informs morality, and self-interest informs law. Call this P2.
Sad Fact: argument over whether to adopt P1 or P2 is interminable. Consensus cannot be found by arguing P1 vs. P2. This is unfortunate since all P1 arguments end with the same position; if we could get everybody to adopt this mindspace we’d have our agreement.
If all P2 arguments also ended the same, this would be a moral stalemate. However, this is not the case. Within the P2 universe, both pro- and anti- positions can be derived. Thus, given the inevitability of No in P1, there’s at least a possibility that a consensus can be reached if we can get to No in P2.
Three problems with this approach: 1) opportunistic, bad-faith arguments by P1 people in P2, eroding consensus potential, 2) P2 is still incredibly complex, covering everything from geo-political game theory to rule- and act- utilitarianism, and 3) how do we find and weight the evidence?
All three problems have been addressed to some extent. The first by McArdle and Friedersdorf (in particular), the second by everyone, the third by Manzi.
Manzi addresses this last problem by doing two things: he removes self-interest to the national level, and he inserts into the analysis a presumption in favor of tradition (which becomes a de facto presumption against torture). This shifts the burden of proof onto the pro-torturers.
He calls this a pragmatic move (i.e., given the problems of proof, it’s a good rule of thumb). However, it’s clearly a strategic move: rather than a useful way to reach an answer about the rationality of torture, it neutralizes the question by giving one party an insurmountable hurdle (you can’t defeat the presumption without evidence, you can’t get enough evidence without trying what the presumption keeps you from doing). This might be a pragmatic way to reach consensus (I think it is), but it’s definitely not a pragmatic way to determine whether torture is in our national self-interest (I don’t even want to think about what the debate would like were we to argue from personal self-interest).
This is why the torture debate has gone on so long: its P1 vs. P2 manifestations are formally interminable, and even when limited to P2 our analysis founders on the rocks of empiricism and proof.
And that, I think, is our breakthrough: no answer is available on the question of torture’s rationality, and on this we can all agree. Both ‘Y’ and ‘N’ are supportable by argument and evidence, with no discernible winner or loser. Furthermore, once we all agree to this meta-statement about the third-dimension, we are forced by logic into adopting a third-dimensional agnosticism, into accepting maximum uncertainty as our value for the third and final Y/N.
And when we do this, when we take this step into 3-D agnosticism, we are forced to retreat to P1, where (N, N, N) is the consensus. That’s because our third-dimension agnosticism creates an absurdity if we stay in P2, as can be seen with just a little effort. (To remain in P2 after we render D3 undecidable is the logical equivalent of dividing a number by zero.)
Conclusion: P1, thus (N, N, N). Do I win something?
— Sargent · May 11, 08:02 PM · #
P.S. Sorry for doing that to you guys. I was thinking what the argument might look like if we were to square the circle. Basically, I’ve leaned on Mackie’s idea that the function of morality is to prevent the failures of rationality.
— Sargent · May 11, 08:41 PM · #
There seem to be some fairly high officials dissembling on health care today, if Mr. Friedersdorf is sincere. I won’t hold my breath, but I also won’t suggest that President Obama is deeply flawed because he has failed to engage with Megan McArdle.
— y81 · May 11, 10:11 PM · #
I’m not sure what you mean. Abu Ghriab certainly did, but I figure you know better than to conflate that aberrant hellhole with policy. Other than that, it is my understanding that actual Iraqi soldiers were given Geneva protections. Didn’t Saddam get a trial? Isn’t re-Baathification inconsistent with a policy of interminable internment? I’m open to correction on this point, but it doesn’t ring true to me that we had National Guard in Guantanamo.
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if Al Qaeda in Iraq militants found their way to Guantanamo Bay. But those guys were actual terrorists, employing suicide bombings and the like, which certainly violates Geneva protocols. Plus, that organization was a weird transnational militia that swarmed on Iraq, because that was where the action was. Zarqawi himself was Jordanian. Failing to fight under a single recognized nation is also against Geneva protocols.
I think you are confusing consistency with clarity. At any rate, you seem to think that Cheney is trying to make a purely utilitarian argument and then wonder why he contradicts himself. I thought that contradiction was easily resolved in realizing that he was not being purely utilitarian. It seems to me that a hallmark of greater consistency is the ability to resolve apparent contradictions.
— Blar · May 12, 12:40 PM · #
I have not decided what I think about this entire situation yet, but anything that is done illegally should never have happened! There has to be better tactics for getting information out of people. I found a video that talks about the medias reactions to this whole mess. http://www.newsy.com/videos/questioning_dick_cheney/
— KRA · May 12, 09:02 PM · #
===============================
CHUCK SCHUMER SUPPORTS TORTURE
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When is he going to come out of the closet and repeat his words.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4CWk5LfoH0
— N Waff · May 14, 03:28 AM · #