Same old Dick Cheney, same old hyperbole, exaggeration, and spin

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Dick Cheney, our nation’s former vice president, may have gotten one thing right (aside from his consent with the generals doing away with don’t ask don’t tell). He declared in his interview with ABC’s ‘This Week’ that Guantanamo Bay may remain open through the end of President Obama’s administration. Given their inability to come anywhere close to shutting down the American island gulag in the past calendar year, it’s difficult for me to imagine that they’ll find the will or the vision to shut it down in the next three calendar years, or even in the next seven years. And with the gelatinous spine they’ve shown on following through with a civilian criminal prosecution for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 conspirators in New York City, it’s pretty clear that they can’t quit Gitmo.

Cheney also effectively admitted what we all know (and the point that Andrew Sullivan made in his quotes in this Politico article). Cheney’s advocacy isn’t just about America – it’s about him. He explained that he started speaking out against the Obama administration’s terrorism policies because he was offended by talk of prosecuting CIA officers. Of course, if any serious prosecutions ever went forward, the investigations would lead back to Vice President Cheney and his staff. He’s getting out ahead to try to prevent prosecutors from coming for him and probing any war crimes in which he might be complicit. And there were plenty.

Bush’s vice president also made it clear that he continues to support torture (he’s for waterboarding) and he wants us to keep the military option against Iran on the table. Same ol’ same ol’. He doesn’t have anything new to say, so why is the media still making us listen?

Of course, it’s not just that he’s making the same arguments, it’s also that he’s still making them in the same way that led us into the war with Iraq – by twisting intelligence to suit his political agenda.

A lot of what his argument boiled down to was a response to Vice President Joe Biden’s pre-emptive talk about America’s successes with disrupting al Qaida’s operation. Biden argued during the week that we’re unlikely to see a 9/11-scale assault by Qaida because the terrorists remain on the run. Cheney countered by referring to a study on al Qaida’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction from Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a Harvard researcher who spent a long time in the US intelligence community.

Mowatt-Larssen is certainly qualified to discuss the consequences of a WMD attack and al Qaida’s efforts to perpetrate one. But his point is not that the current administration does not believe that al Qaida is a threat. His point is that we shouldn’t be skeptical of Qaida’s desire to leave a mushroom cloud hanging over an American city. He explains here why Qaida probably hasn’t been able to get WMDs so far:

So, why hasn’t a terrorist WMD attack happened since 9/11?

There are many plausible explanations for why the world has not experienced an al Qaeda attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, but it would be foolish to discount the possibility that such an event will occur in the future. To date, al Qaeda’s WMD programs may have been disrupted. This is in fact one likely explanation, given a sustained and ferocious counterterrorist response to 9/11 that largely destroyed al Qaeda as the organization that existed before the fateful attack on the US. If so, terrorists must continue to be disrupted and denied a safe haven to reestablish the ability to launch a major strike on the US homeland, or elsewhere in the world.

Or perhaps, al Qaeda operational planners have failed to acquire the kind of weapons they seek, because they are unwilling to settle for anything other than a large scale attack in the US. It would surely be hard for al Qaeda to lower the bar they set on 9/11: what would constitute a worthy follow-up to 9/11, on their terms? What would they achieve through another attack? There are few weapons that would meet their expectations in this regard. It is extremely difficult to acquire a functioning nuclear bomb, or to steal enough weapons usable material to build a bomb. And as al Qaeda probably learned in trying to weaponize anthrax, biological pathogens may seem simple enough to produce, but such weapons are not easy to bottle up and control. To complicate matters further, an attack on the scale of 9/11 is more difficult to accomplish in an environment of heightened security and vigilance in the US.

Basically, Mowatt-Larssen’s argument is not the one Cheney was making – that the Obama administration is making America unsafe and increasing the likelihood of a major attack against American soil. The Harvard researcher’s point is that al Qaida wants to pull off a *major* attack and won’t settle for setting off a junk radiological weapon – they want a real nuke or weaponized biological agents. They’re facing difficulties making that happen because their operations have probably been disrupted by our ongoing security focus on al Qaida.

Reading Mowatt-Larssen’s report puts the former Vice President’s arguments in perspective. What it makes it clear is that even after all of these years, he’s still willing to take the fruits of the intelligence community – in this case an open source publication by an ex-senior intelligence official – and twist their findings to political purposes. Dick Cheney wants to terrify the American public and all but say that President Obama is not fit to serve as commander-in-chief because he wants the Republicans to return his anti-Constitution fifth column to the White House in the process. Just like the Iraq War, he doesn’t care if he needs to warp the intelligence in order to make it look like what he needs it to look like to get what he wants.