This memorandum, as Rizzo remarks, "remains in effect to this day." So too does Congress's Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Bush signed the following day. More than a dozen years later these are the two pillars, secret and public, dark side and light, on which the unending "war on terror" still rests. Though we have become accustomed to President Obama telling us, as he most recently did in the State of the Union address, that "America must move off a permanent war footing," these words have come to sound, in their repetition, less like the orders of a commander in chief than the pleas of one lonely man hoping to persuade.
What are these words, after all, next to the iron realities of the post-September 11 world? The defense budget has more than doubled, including a Special Operations Command able to launch secret, lethal raids anywhere in the world that has grown from 30,000 elite troops to more than 67,000. The drone force has expanded from fewer than 200 unmanned aerial vehicles to more than 11,000, including perhaps 400 "armed-capable" drones that can and do target and kill from the sky -- and that, following the computer directives of "pilots" manning terminals in Virginia and Nevada and elsewhere in the United States, have killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia an estimated 3,600 people.
The "black sites" -- the network of secret prisons the CIA set up around the world, from Thailand and Afghanistan to Romania and Poland and Morocco -- were ordered shut down by President Obama, but despite his executive order on his second day in office, Guantánamo Bay, the "public black site," remains open, its 155 detainees, but for a handful, uncharged and untried. Among that number live "high-value detainees" who were once secretly imprisoned at the black sites, where many were subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques."9 Asked by Cutler whether he considers "a prolonged period of creating the sensation of drowning" -- waterboarding -- to be torture, Cheney's response comes fast and certain:
"I don't. Tell me what terrorist attacks that you would have let go forward because you didn't want to be a mean and nasty fellow. Are you gonna trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your, your honor, or are you going to do your job, do what's required first and foremost, your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens? Now given a choice between doing what we did or backing off and saying, "We know you know their next attack against the United States but we're not gonna force you to tell us what is is because it might create a bad image for us.' That's not a close call for me."
Quite apart from the large factual questions blithely begged, there is a kind of stark amoral grandeur to this answer that takes one's breath away. Just as he was likely the most important and influential American official in making the decision to withhold the protection of the Geneva Conventions from detainees, Cheney was likely the most important and influential American when it came to imposing an official government policy of torture. It is quite clear he simply cannot, or will not, acknowledge that such a policy raises any serious moral or legal questions at all. Those who do acknowledge such questions, he appears to believe, are poseurs, acting out some highfalutin and affected pretense based on -- there is a barely suppressed sneer here -- "preserving your honor." What does he think of those -- and their number includes the current attorney general of the United States and the president himself -- who believe and have declared publicly that waterboarding is torture and thus plainly illegal? For Cheney the question is not only "not a close call." It is not even a question.
As I write, five men are being tried for plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001. Though one would expect that such proceedings might be dubbed "the trial of the century" and attract commensurate attention, it is quite possible -- likely, even -- that you have not even heard of them. The five defendants accused of killing nearly three thousand Americans are being tried before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay. Those handful of visitors who are able to gain permission to attend, including a very few journalists, find the conditions rather unusual, quite unlike any courtroom they have ever seen, as Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch reports:
"Visitors observe the hearings behind sound-proof glass, with an audio feed that runs 40 seconds behind. When something sensitive is said in the courtroom, the infamous 'hockey light' on the judge's bench lights up and the comment is bleeped out...
"The degree of classification of banal matters is bewildering. A former camp commander issued a memo on exactly what material the defense lawyers were allowed to bring in to their clients. One thing that was not allowed to be brought in? The memo itself."
The defendants include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of September 11, who was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003 and immediately disappeared into the CIA's network of secret prisons, spending time, reportedly, at black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, and Poland, where he was subjected to a medley of "enhanced interrogation techniques," including prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, forced nudity, "walling," cold water immersions, and waterboarding, which procedure he endured no less than 183 times. Though this particular information comes from CIA documents, including an authoritative report by the CIA's inspector general, which have long been public, any mention of the treatment of Mohammed, and the other defendants, is forbidden in court. And yet, Bogert writes, "Torture is Guantanamo's Original Sin."
"It is both invisible and omnipresent. The US government wants coverage of the 9/11 attacks, but not the waterboarding, sleep deprivation, prolonged standing and other forms of torture that the CIA applied to the defendants. It's tricky, prosecuting the 9/11 case while trying to keep torture out of the public eye. "Torture is the thread running through all of this,' one of the detainees' psychiatrists told me. "You can't tell the story [of 9/11] without it.'"
And yet in that Guantánamo pseudo-courtroom American military officers acting under color of law as well as some civilian lawyers are trying to do so. This peculiar, mortifying procedure -- a futile attempt to render a kind of disfigured justice to those responsible for killing thousands of Americans and upending the history of the country -- is one more legacy of the misshapen response to the attacks: not a remnant of a past we want to forget but of a present we are trying to ignore. Bogert goes on:
"The 9/11 defendants are not being tortured today, at least not in the way they once were. But we don't know much about conditions in their prison. For years, even its name, "Camp Seven,' was a secret. Proceedings have now ground to a halt while the mental competency of one defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, is evaluated. He kept interrupting the hearings last month with shouts of "This is my life. This is torture. TOR! TURE!'
"We're not sure what else he said.... Bin al-Shibh's audio went fuzzy partway through."10
Orwellian? Kafkaesque? The words seem pale and inadequate. Against the backroom noise of these distant, choked-off voices, largely forgotten and ignored, stands the former vice president, speaking clearly and forthrightly, defiantly unashamed. One can't help feeling grim gratitude to him for this, for, as I shall explore in the next article, it was Dick Cheney, more than any other official, who set the terms for the post-September 11 world we all share.
Mark Danner is Chancellor's Professor of Journalism and English at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard. His latest book is Torture and the Forever War. His writing and other work can be found at markdanner.com. This article, the first of three on Cheney, appears in the March 6th issue of the New York Review of Books.
[Under review in this essay:
The World According to Dick Cheney, a film directed by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir by Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney. Threshold, 565 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Heart: An American Medical Odyssey by Dick Cheney and Jonathan Reiner, MD, with Liz Cheney. Scribner, 344 pp., $28.00]
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