Didion on Cheney: The Fatal Touch

"Ultimately, I am the guy who pulled the trigger and fired the round that hit Harry," he managed, four days later, to say to Fox News in a memorable performance of a man accepting responsibility but not quite. "You can talk about all the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. It's not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else."

Like "it's not Harry's fault," which implied that you or I or any other fair observer (for example Katharine Armstrong, characterized by Cheney as "an acknowledged expert in all of this") might well conclude that it had been, "other priorities" suggested a familiar character wrinkle, in this case the same willingness to cloud an actual issue with circular arguments ("I complied fully with all the requirements of the statutes") that would later be demonstrated by the Vice President's people when they maintained that the Geneva Conventions need not apply to Afghan detainees because Afghanistan was a "failed state." What these tortured and in many cases invented legalities are designed to preclude is any acknowledgment that the issue at hand, whether it is avoiding military service or authorizing torture, might have a moral or an ethical or even a self-interested dimension that merits discussion.

This latter dimension, self-interest, which was the basis for John McCain's argument that we could not expect others to honor the Geneva Conventions if we did not do so ourselves, was dismissed by David Addington, at the time Cheney's legal architect, in the "new paradigm" memo he drafted in 2002 to go to the President over White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales's signature. "It should be noted that your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers," the memo read, sliding past a key point, which was that the "new paradigm" differentiated between "enemy detainees" and "illegal enemy combatants," or "terrorists," a distinction to be determined by whoever did the detaining.

Moreover, even if GPW [Geneva Convention III Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War] is not applicable, we can still bring war crimes charges against anyone who mistreats US personnel. Finally, I note that...terrorists will not follow GPW rules in any event.
This is not law. This is casuistry, the detritus of another perfect storm, the one that occurred when the deferments of the Vietnam years met the ardor of the Reagan Revolution..."