Essay topic: compare and contrast the following two statements in the context of the criminal probe that appears warranted:
CHENEY: ...and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the man who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, blew up the World Trade Center, attacked the Pentagon, tried to blow up the White House or the Capitol building. An evil, evil man that's been in our custody since March of ‘03.
So, what do you do with "evil men", let alone "evil, evil men"? What implication left unsaid and unexposed by Shieffer?
There is no peaceful co-existence with "evil", so ... Nothing is unjustified in fighting "evil" is the sordid implication, right? Torture is to be justified in the public's mind as a necessary, not cheap, component of confronting evil in the world (in the 'foreign world'?). Ever-Catholic Bill "The Warrior" O'Reilly has propagated the same view, so don't laugh.
Anyway, here is the contrast (the cover-story?):
CHENEY: Well, at the heart of what we did with the terrorist surveillance program and the enhanced interrogation techniques for Al Qaida terrorists and so forth was collect information. It was about intelligence. It was about finding out what Al Qaida was going to do, what their capabilities and plans were. It was discovering all those things we needed in order to be able to go defeat Al Qaida.
Do you have confidence that a dispassionate intelligence-gathering operation was constructed or run?
Do you share the misgivings of others that a RULE approach, regulate und legalize, is highly unworkable? Remember, this is an operation that by law conflates prosecutor, judge and jury AND does it behind a cloak of non-accountability called secrecy - how many of those systems function swimmingly?
Bonus part, below the fold
CHENEY: ...we were absolutely convinced, the country was convinced, that there was a very high likelihood of a follow-on attack, a mass casualty attack against the United States.
Since the premise above is that we were seeking intelligence, in extra-ordinary ways, because we were 'caught flat footed', what was the evidence that convinced anyone of an imminent attack in advance of actually gathering the intelligence on the matter?
Al qa'ida's hallmark has been simultaneous attacks, not rapid fire, so ... Say again? Isn't it true that they were "convinced" by their fears and suspicions, mostly the hallmark of weak leadership?
More:
CHENEY: ...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
Why no free-hand assault on "evil"? Now, we are peddling back the Al qa'ida - Iraq link ...er, I mean, the evil-torture link?
Isn't it plausible that the reason they went to OLC to "get" a "memo" was so that the conspiracy could move forward, not that it would be restrained? Notice especially Cheney's word choice - it's not legal "advice" he was after, it was a memo. He knows that OLC "memos" are special inside the Executive, right?
All the voices of policy restraint, until then, had been ignored (they certainly weren't provided to the Congress...). And where is the historical context, now, completely dropped, that al-qa'ida was to be treated as external to the laws of war, precisely so that a free hand was permitted?
