Scared Cheney puts his head in the noose

The former vice-president fears being held to account on torture and is lashing out, By Andrew Sullivan

Barack Obama’s most underrated talent is his ability to get his enemies to self-destruct. It takes a lot less energy than defeating them directly, and helps maintain Obama’s largely false patina of apolitical niceness.
Obama is about as far from apolitical as you can get; and while he is a decent fellow, he is also a lethal Chicago pol. His greatest achievement in this respect was the total implosion of Bill Clinton around this time last year: Hillary was next. Then came John McCain, merrily strapping on the suicide bomb of Sarah Palin. With the fate of all these formidable figures impossible to miss, one has to wonder what possessed Dick Cheney, the former vice-presi-dent, to come lumbering out twice in the first 50 days of the Obama administration to blast the new guy on national television.
Growling and sneering, Cheney accused the new president of actively endangering the lives of Americans by ending the detention and interrogation programmes of the last administration, and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay. It’s hard to overstate how unseemly and unusual this was.
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Cheney’s critique of Obama’s policies was also inaccurate. He claimed the new administration had abandoned the concept of a war on terror and returned to a pre9/11 law enforcement paradigm. But the noticeable thing about the new administration has been its retention of certain aspects of the terror war that are clearly about war and not law enforcement.
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So what was Cheney thinking? My guess is that he fears he is in trouble. This fear has been created by Obama, but indirectly. Obama has declined to launch a prosecution of Cheney for war crimes, as many in his party (and outside it) would like. He has set up a review of detention, rendition and interrogation policies. And he has simply declassified many of the infamous torture memos kept under wraps by Bush.
He has the power to do this, and much of the time it is in response to outside requests. But as the memos have emerged, the awful truth of what Cheney actually authorised becomes harder and harder to deny. And Cheney is desperately trying to maintain a grip on the narrative before it grips him by the throat.
The threat, however subtle, is real. Eric Holder, the new attorney-general, while eschewing a formal investigation, has told Republicans “prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law”. The justice department is also sitting on an internal report into the calibre of the various torture memos drafted by Bush appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel. The report has apparently already found the memos beneath minimal legal credibility, which implies they were ordered up to make the law fit the already-made decision to torture various terror suspects.
But the big impending release may well be three memos from May 2005, detailing specific torture techniques authorised by Bush and Cheney for use against terror suspects. Newsweek described the yet to be released memos thus: “One senior Obama official . . . said the memos were ‘ugly’ and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a ‘truth commission’ on torture.”