Ben Buckman.net

Continuing the thread that Rachel Maddow has been following about former or entrenched Bushies trying to sabotage the Obama administation, Politico has an interview with Dick Cheney in which he criticizes the Obama administration's repudiation of torture and Gitmo.

He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

His comments made unmistakable that Cheney — likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews — is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.

Regarding torture, three things have to be established for there even to be a reasonable policy debate: 1) Torture works (to get real actionable intel), 2) No other interrogation method works as well, 3) It's extremely limited to only "ticking time bomb" terrorists.

Even with these 3 established, a strong case can be made that torture should never be legal or legitimate. (It was illegal throughout the Bush years whether it was legitimate or not.) But none of these have been established anyway. It's not clear that any actionable intel has come of it (though I'm open to Cheney's possibility of files proving otherwise in the future). Reports and interviews I've seen with interrogators all sugest there are superior methods to torture. And it was certainly not limited to ticking time bombs (if any such cases even existed).

So Cheney was and is wrong, was and is a criminal, and the Justice Department would be justified in indicting him for his crimes. Regardless, Cheney should shut up and write his memoirs quietly.