Another dismal Dick Cheney speech

Dick Cheney giving the Commencement address at West Point:

The standards of this Academy only highlight the deepest and most fundamental difference between the United States and our sworn enemies. A month ago, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Pace, spoke to this class about each officer's duty to follow a moral compass in all of his or her actions.  In these four years you have learned the rules of warfare and professional military ethics.  You've studied the tenets of morality.  You've reflected on the seven Army values:  of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage.  You have lived by a code of honor, and internalized that code as West Point men and women always do.

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for.  Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States.  Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.  These are men who glorify murder and suicide.  Their cruelty is not rebuked by human suffering, only fed by it.  They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society.  The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend. [Emphasis added].

Is it unfair to detect a note of impatience from the Vice-President here? Damn those pesky Geneva Conventions! Isn't that Constitution thingy inconvenient! Equally, if you think the enemies' behaviour lessens his right to the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions - which does not seem an unfair inference - then the differences between you and the enemy are not so clear as you may care to think. But then we know this to be the case: when you contract out the torture of your enemies you are at least as (and perhaps more) responsible for their torture as are the men who put the thumbscrews on. And that's what Extraordinary Rendition is. Maybe it doesn't happen often and maybe it doesn't end with a video-taped decapitation, but it's part of the same tradition...

For that reason, too, the most depressing moment of the Republican debate in South Carolina was Mitt Romney's desire to "double Guantanamo." Admittedly it's not exactly clear what that means, and it may be but another transparently shameless attempt to pander to the grosser instincts of grass-roots Republicans, but it was a telling moment nonetheless. Now, I happen to believe that some European reaction to Guantanamo has been motivated by bad faith, but the notion that doubling the scale of this disaster is a sensible, let alone popular, proposal is dispiriting to say the least. If you spend all your time proclaiming a moral superiority that is tarnished by obviously observable reality don't be quite so surprised if your credibility is eroded on other issues. It shouldn't be too hard to understand, should it, that this sort of thing has consequences?

Comments

[Chris]

Every so often I go to this blog via some link, and am inhibited from adding it to my favourites by nonsense like the above. Why should non-citizens who have taken up arms against the US be protected by its constitution? Why should non-state actors be protected by a treaty that regulates the treatment of soldiers in conlficts between states? (Oh, right, Hamdan and the treasonous liberals on the Supreme Court.) Where in the quoted extract does Cheney say anything about extraordinary rendition?(And why initial caps? Your straw man has got green ink on him, Alex.) As for Guantanamo, I give up - the liars have won, and yes, it's a hellhole of torture by giving prisoners so much food they put on weught, and intimidating them by giving them Korans and not shooting them when they throw faeces at you.