{"id":975,"date":"2011-09-01T10:32:54","date_gmt":"2011-09-01T14:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=975"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:28:08","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:28:08","slug":"vice-president-cheney-and-normalizing-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2011\/09\/01\/vice-president-cheney-and-normalizing-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Vice President Cheney and Normalizing Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span>Mark Wilson<\/em><\/p>\n

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is on a whirlwind tour this week to promote his new book,\u00a0In My Time<\/em>. He chronicles, among other things, the tough decisions he had to make in order to keep America safe, including torturing, authorizing torture, legalizing torture, and justifying torture.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare said it best: Enhanced interrogation techniques by any other name would be just as sour. Or something like that. But we\u2019ll never know; President Obama, in his quest to\u00a0look forward, not backward<\/a>, has said in no uncertain terms that we won\u2019t be investigating Bush Administration officials for their parts in justifying America\u2019s reaction to terrorism between 2001 and 2009.<\/p>\n

Vice President Cheney\u2019s lasting legacy is a dark one. Torture suddenly became\u00a0acceptable<\/em>, and we talked about its acceptability in degrees. Some kinds of torture were okay, others weren\u2019t, but mostly torture was okay.\u00a0<\/span>We even changed the language we used. When\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0talks about the United States, it\u2019s \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d But when talking about any other country that does the same thing, it\u2019s okay to call it torture. Just not when we do it. (Is that in the style guide?)<\/p>\n

Things like the so-called\u00a0one percent doctrine<\/a>\u00a0have prevented the nation at large from having an adult discussion about the lengths our government has gone to deal with the terrorism problem. The one percent doctrine kept Bill Murray\u2019s character in\u00a0What About Bob?<\/em>\u00a0from ever leaving the house. Vice President Cheney similarly impacted the national psyche, rendering us so terrified of unspecified threats that we gladly looked the other way as innocent people were sent off to other countries to be tortured (with the full, but clandestine, support of the United States).<\/p>\n

The prevailing viewpoint now is that \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d are perfectly acceptable, and the burden rests with challengers of these techniques to demonstrate that they\u2019re not. As Vice President Cheney goes on smile-time shows like\u00a0Good Morning America<\/em>\u00a0to promote his book, it\u2019s unlikely that anyone will seriously engage him in the issues his vice presidency raised. Those who disagree with torture are labeled, as Salon columnist and former civil rights attorney Glenn Greenwald says, \u201cunserious\u201d people who clearly don\u2019t take national security seriously.<\/p>\n

In a post-Cheney world, then, torture is a rebuttable presumption, where the burden of overcoming that presumption is about 99% certainty, plus the weight of public opinion that\u2019s in favor of torture, created in no small part by Guess Who.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Mark Wilson Former Vice President Dick Cheney is on a whirlwind tour this week to promote his new book,\u00a0In My […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-fJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}