Dick Cheney Is Becoming Obama's Enabler | Gene Healy | Cato Institute: Commentary

Dick Cheney Is Becoming Obama's Enabler | Gene Healy | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Whatever you think the right policy is regarding enemy combatants, warrantless wiretapping, and 'enhanced interrogation,' the differences between Obama and Bush are far more stylistic than substantive.

'Enemy Combatants': Actually, there's no such thing as an 'enemy combatant' anymore: the Obama administration has, with great fanfare, abandoned the term. We can call terrorist suspects our 'special friends' if we like, but the Obama team has fought hard in court to retain the same powers that Bush exercised."

"Surveillance: Here too, the promised "Change" is less than meets the eye. Obama sold out on surveillance well before he was inaugurated, breaking his campaign promise to filibuster any law immunizing telecom companies that cooperated with Bush's illegal wiretapping program.

As president, Obama has gone further still than Bush, arguing in court that, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put it, 'the government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.'"

"Interrogation: In the first week of his presidency, Obama swore his administration would follow the Army Field Manual in interrogations. A welcome change, until you looked at the fine print, which allows the CIA to adopt other tactics if the president chooses.

If Obama sets the CIA loose, they still won't be allowed to waterboard. But only three prisoners were subjected to that technique, and none since 2003. Which points up a weird disconnect in conservative arguments about torture: Folks like Cheney insist that these techniques were vital, but defend themselves by maintaining they were rarely used. Has Bush/Cheney timidity kept us at risk for the last six years?"

"FBI officials scornfully referred to "leads" generated by Bush's secret wiretapping program as "calls to Pizza Hut," and a CIA operative told the Washington Post that, thanks to torture, they'd "spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms." Lacking access to secret evidence, ordinary citizens are hard-pressed to sort out these claims.

Even so, we went more than seven years without a foreign terrorist attack on US soil after the attempted World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Should we therefore conclude that Bill Clinton's policies kept us safe all that time?"