A totally wrong outlook

Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is blistering Attorney General Eric Holder for appointing a special prosecutor to investigate allegations that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists.

Cheney said Tuesday that Holder’s decision raises “doubts about (the Obama administration’s) ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.”

We hold the opposite view.

There are strong and lingering suspicions, based on strong evidence, that our government engaged in torture. Torture is prohibited by federal law and barred by international agreements the United States has signed.

In contrast with what Cheney believes, our nation’s security would be at risk if the Justice Department did not hold the government accountable for upholding laws adopted by our representatives in Congress.

Part of Cheney’s justification for his belief that interrogation methods used by the CIA after 9/11 should remain secret and unquestioned is based on a 2004 report released Monday. The report, prepared by the CIA’s inspector general, contains opinions by agency operatives that their methods enabled the extraction of invaluable intelligence.

“This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks,” Cheney said, indicating he is willing to accept the operatives’ statements at face value, even though there is no corroborating evidence. The inspector general himself, citing examples, said interrogators went too far and that it is unclear whether any of their methods worked.

Examples included turning an electric drill on and off near a suspect, pressuring a shackled detainee’s carotid artery until he was nearly unconsciousness and then slapping him awake, threatening to kill a suspect’s family, making a suspect believe his execution was imminent, scrubbing a suspect with a stiff brush and forcefully throwing suspects to the floor.

Cheney also said Monday that CIA interrogators “do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions.”

Well, no one has said they are the targets. Holder has said that any intelligence officer who acted “in good faith” on orders from the Bush administration would not be prosecuted. Perhaps Cheney’s fiery opposition to the special prosecutor is more because he fears the discovery of who gave the orders.

In any event, Cheney is wrong for not wanting the truth to come out. Torture is against the law for good reasons beyond its inhumanity, including that it can rebound onto our own troops and, if used on suspects who are innocent, can create generations of new enemies.