Gene Lyons on the Dark Lord of torture

After years of going to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Web site for Gene Lyons' weekly column, which just recently started appearing on Thursday rather than Wednesday, it appears that Salon is now regularly picking up his column in syndication. Which is good, not least because their fonts are more readable than the ones the Democrat-Gazette uses.

In Cheney's painful war for torture 04/30/09, he asks:

Having stampeded his ill-informed predecessor into a series of catastrophic blunders, it appears that Dick Cheney has declared open bureaucratic war -- the only kind he's ever known how to fight -- upon President Barack Obama. After decades of bullying the CIA and other intelligence agencies to affirm his crackpot worldviews, he's trying to pull the same routine on the White House to redeem his own shattered reputation. Or is it something more sinister?

Since in my mind "sinister" and "Cheney" have pretty much become synonyms, that would be easy enough to believe.

But Gene's got Cheney's number:

Perennially wrong, but never in doubt, Cheney and his circle first pooh-poohed the al-Qaida terrorist threat, then panicked after 9/11 -- quickly magnifying a band of stateless fanatics with an appetite for mass murder into yet another existential threat to the nation's survival.

He also takes a thoroughly deserves poke at The Dean Of All The Pundits:

The FBI, believing the orders [to torture] illegal, actually withdrew from the investigation -- a development conveniently overlooked by establishment Beltway pundits now bleating like sheep that despite their shamefulness, the "memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places ... by the proper officials."

That's the Washington Post's mincing arbiter of propriety David Broder. God forbid we should criminalize decisions made by insiders; better to junk the Constitution than create awkwardness at Washington dinner parties.

And, dadgummit, from his perch down there in Arkansas, Gene Lyons seems to be able to see the nose in front of his face when it comes to criminal torture:

Prosecuting career CIA agents while Cheney does guest shots with Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh accusing Obama of weakening America's defenses, all but openly hoping for a successful terror strike with the potential to restore his faction to power, would be a grave moral and political error.

This isn't a fight Obama has wanted, but Cheney's making it one he cannot avoid. Nothing short of a full-scale investigation can cauterize this wound.

I don't want to misrepresent his preferences here. A "full-scale investigation" doesn't necessarily mean criminal prosecutions. But enforcement of the law and the relevant treaties requires the Justice Department to do a "full-scale investigation" and then prosecute the perpetrators.

Tags: accountability for torture, gene lyons, torture