Cheney, the torture report – one of them is full of it

“The report's full of crap. Excuse me. I said ‘hooey’ yesterday. Let me use the real word.”

That’s how the man who was Dubya’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, dismissed the US Senate’s report on torture by the CIA, in the measured terms to which he owes his reputation for eloquence and moderation.

Dick Cheney: Aaron Sorkin's Colon Jessup
with the charm surgically excised

He reminds me of no one so much as Colonel Nathan Jessup, from A few good men who, at the end of the film, explains behaviour which – and I’ll pick my words more carefully than Cheney – was reprehensible if not criminal. The end, he suggests, “absolutely” justifies the means. “I’d do it again in a minute.”

No, no. Sorry. That wasn’t Jessup. That was Cheney. Jessup said “I did my job. I'd do it again.”

Jessup explained “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

According to Cheney, “what happened here was that we asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it never happened again, and that's exactly what they did.”

Jessup also made clear the rationale behind a strict chain of command: “We follow orders, son. We follow orders or people die. It's that simple. Are we clear?”

Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan
the marginally more appealing version of Dick Cheney

Cheney made it clear that the same approach operated in his boss’s administration. To the suggestion that the CIA were out of control and didn’t keep the President informed, he replied “He was in fact an integral part of the program. He had to approve it before we moved forward with it.”

With wisdom as clear-sighted as we all associate with the august figure of Dubya, who can doubt that the torture service was being directed with a sure hand and enlightened judgement? And if Dubya was napping or on holiday, there was always his friend Dick to make sure that guidance was maintained.

“You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives,” Jessup declares, talking of the victim of the crime central to the film, Willy Santiago, “and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.”

Talking of the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is believed to have been behind the 9/11 attack, Cheney asked, “what are we supposed to do, kiss him on both cheeks and say, ‘Please, please tell us what you know?’ Of course not. We did exactly what needed to be done.” And it does need to be done, because otherwise people die: “what are you prepared to do to get the truth against future attacks against the United States?”

Fortunately, this kind of tale often has a happy ending. What a way to dismiss a vicious bully with no respect for the rule of law than to tell him “you're under arrest you sonofabitch.”

Sadly, though, such a happy ending tends to be limited to the world of fiction. Jessup is the target of the words, not Cheney.

But we can always dream….

Speaking out for the rights of Morons

One of my favourite lines, from a film full of them, is spoken by Tom Cruise as a young naval lawyer in A few good men: ‘my client's a moron but that's not against the law.’

Tom Cruise as Lieutenant Kaffee: no moron he

Being a moron certainly isn’t against the law, and never should be, and not just because a lot of lawmakers would be in gaol themselves if it were. The prison population would explode to levels that would make today’s overcrowding seem trivial. And the worst of it: no-one would be immune. I like to think of myself as not a moron, but I wouldn’t be the judge; the thought that someone else could decide whether my ideas were sensible enough to justify my being left in freedom is one I'm not especially comfortable with.

All this came to mind when I saw that Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the ugly Front National ultra-right wing party in France, had lost his appeal against a conviction for denying crimes against humanity. The French Senate recently passed legislation banning denial of Turkish genocide against Armenians. Holocaust denial is a crime in numerous countries, most notably Germany.

Le Pen, on the other hand...

There’s no doubt that few people deserve gaol as much as Le Pen (not that he’s likely ever to go there), but in his cases it would be for demagoguery and the attempt to legitimise racism, not for his dotty opinions. His views on the extent and depth of the holocaust and other Nazi era crimes against humanity strike me as completely the wrong issues on which to attack him.

After all, what is holocaust denial when it comes down to it? I’m certain that Le Pen would accept, say, that several thousand Protestants were massacred in Paris in 1572. And yet the evidence for the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre is far less extensive and detailed than for the Holocaust. If we’re prepared to accept the evidence of the earlier crime, how can one explain the refusal to accept the much greater evidence of the later one? Except, that is, by assuming that the person doing the denying is, to use Tom Cruise’s technical term, a moron.

That, I repeat, shouldn’t be against the law. In fact, the law should get out of our heads. It shouldn’t be pronouncing on what we think but only on what we do. To take a completely different matter, I’m not convinced that the rule of the Umayyad dynasty, for example, would inspire many of us these days to want to bring it back. If others, however, believe in a revival of the Moslem Caliphate, I see no reason why they should not say so, or even debate the use of violence to achieve the aim: it could be argued that a debate on what is or is not legitimate violence is overdue. It might have been useful before Coalition forces invaded Iraq.

If, however, those who seek a new Caliphate decide to take their use of free speech to the point of inciting others to actual violence here and now, of neogiating the purchase of arms for that purpose, or of conspiring with others to wreak violence on the rest of us, then they have stepped beyond what the law should tolerate. Then it should intervene.

In other words, the law should prevent certain actions, even if they are only planned actions. It should not attempt to prohibit thoughts, or the open expression of those thoughts. However bizarre and ill-founded they are. 

Let’s remember: merely being a moron may be offensive, but it should never be regarded as an an offence.