I Still Hate Him

Former VP Dick Cheney has been making press lately by saying that Obama's attempts to roll back some of his administration's worst abuses will make us less safe. This enrages me for a couple reasons.

First, he exaggerates the benefits of using torture and unlimited detentions while ignoring the costs. As we know, torture only creates the incentive for the victim to say what his interrogators want to hear. Sometimes this produces good intelligence, but sometimes not. In fact, it can lead the prisoner to overstate or lie about existing threats (which then further creates the false impression that the torture is working).

More importantly, it completely ignores the effect that our policies of torture have on recruitment of new terrorists. In fact, any security gains policies of torture can achieve are only short-term, while the costs are long term. This works for politicians like Bush and Cheney, who can claim short-term victory, and deny the long term affects that surface after they have left office.

But second, Cheney's statements and the Bush administration policies suggest that security is both attainable and our primary concern; holding to our values and protecting liberties is secondary. The idea that security, that protection from all terrorist attacks, is attainable is false. Once we admit that, that we can never achieve total security, than we must also decide not to sacrifice our values, for there is no payoff.

People like Dick Cheney will always be there, describing our deepest fears and fooling us into thinking that we can be safe. His solution will be through short term policies and sacrificing of our values and freedoms. We can defeat people like that by deciding that our values are more important, and accepting that by living free, we live with risk.