Dick Cheney's David Frost Moment

[This post was originally published on the History News Network.]

All of us who teach face a daily, daunting task: how do we take our subject matter—which we know from years of study to be terrifically complicated and nuanced—and make it accessible and understandable to our students, all while avoiding the peril of oversimplification?

We all do our best, succeeding sometimes, failing others. We are eternally grateful when we find a key: that piece of evidence, that compelling argument, that helps us do our jobs. The most prominent example of that for my teaching is perhaps Richard Nixon’s infamous comment to David Frost about his actions during the Watergate scandal: "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

That one simple sentence helps me communicate to students the essence of the danger inherent in the many complicated events that we call “Watergate”: Nixon’s sincerely held belief that as president he was incapable of committing an illegal act; that whatever he deemed necessary to security of the United States was, by definition, legal. It was a sentiment more consistent with the absolutism of Louis XIV than the constitutional principles that gave birth to the nation. What makes those words so powerful is that they come not from one of Nixon’s many implacable political foes, or from a historian interpreting his actions. They come from the man himself.

Since the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report last week, I’ve been struggling with how to synthesize the multiplicity of reactions it provoked. Then on Sunday, I saw former Vice President Dick Cheney on “Meet the Press.”

Amidst all the dissembling, Cheney made one remark that struck me as his David Frost moment.

Moderator Chuck Todd confronted Cheney with evidence that 25% of the detainees were innocent, and that one was physically abused so badly that he died. Cheney replied: “I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.” When pressed about whether it was acceptable to abuse innocent people even to the point of death, Cheney said: “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”

Keep in mind, Cheney was not talking about the accidental death of innocents on the battlefield. Every war involves the accidental death of innocents, but just war standards command that every reasonable effort be made to avoid them. This was someone in the custody of the United States, who had done no wrong and was mistakenly taken into custody, whose physical mistreatment by representatives of the United States killed him while in custody. Faced with that travesty of justice, Dick Cheney could not even muster a perfunctory expression of regret.

Confronted with an unquestionable injustice, Cheney says: “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.” That is the essence of everything wrong with the Bush-Cheney “war on terror.” It admitted no principle whatsoever as superior to the objective of keeping the nation safe. Fundamental human rights—even of innocent people—can be violated with impunity, Cheney asserts. Even after being presented with evidence that an innocent man was killed, Cheney blithely said, “I'd do it again in a minute.” The end justifies the means.

That is the mindset of the authoritarian. Dictators the world over use that logic every day. Dick Cheney will never admit that the techniques he endorsed constitute torture—to do so would be to admit he is a war criminal. But he has now admitted, beyond any doubt, that he has the mentality of a torturer.

Tortured Defense

Andrew Sullivan dissects former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen's disreputable attempt to square his support for torture with Catholic moral teaching better than I could ever dream of doing. While reading it, however, something nagged at me: this sounds familiar. I couldn't put my finger on it until reading Mark Shea's post on the same subject, when he said that Dick Cheney is "pressing hard to defend the use of torture as a positive good." That was it--"positive good"--the same phrase that defenders of slavery used in the decades before the Civil War.

There are at least two distinct eras in the American defense of slavery. In the age of the founders, slavery was largely defended as a "necessary evil." Jefferson in 1820 famously wrote that slavery is like having "a wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let go." But he did not seek to defend slavery on any other than practical grounds: "Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation in the other." In general, the attitude was that if slavery did not exist, they would not now choose to adopt it, but given its existence, the price of its destruction was too high.

By the 1830s, with slavery under attack by abolitionists as an inherent moral evil, the defenders of slavery took on a new tact: the positive good argument. It was impossible to defend slavery from the moral arguments of its critics while admitting it was an evil. That, they believed, would doom slavery. Instead it must be defended as a good thing.

The foremost proponent of the "positive good" theory was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. In a speech to the Senate in 1837, Calhoun forthrightly stated that he did not believe slavery to be "an evil--far otherwise, I hold it to be a good.... a positive good." By that, Calhoun explicitly meant it was good for the slave. Under slavery, he said "so much is left to the share of the laborer and so little extracted from him."

The defense of torture since 9/11 has undergone a similar evolution. Back in 2003, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued that torture could be justified in extreme cases--the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario. But in such situations he called for "a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture." Under certain extreme circumstances, Dershowitz argued, torture can be a necessary evil that may prevent something worse. Self-preservation requires it.

Seven years later, people like Marc Thiessen are, as Calhoun did with slavery, taking it a step further: torture is good for the prisoner being tortured. He asserts that Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to waterboarding over 80 times, "thanked his interrogators for waterboarding him" and told them: "you must do this for all the brothers." This, Thiessen claims, is because the jihadist mentality is that, having resisted until "he has reached his limit," someone subjected to torture is released from the "moral burden" of continued resistance and can talk without shame. In other words, we're doing the jihadists a favor by torturing them. It is good for them. (It is worth noting that by tacitly admitting that waterboarding pushes people to their "limit," Thiessen by implication admits it is in fact torture.)

This attempt to portray torture as anything but an intrinsic evil is uncannily like Calhoun's defense of slavery. And like that earlier effort, future generations will see it for what it is: morally bankrupt.