Liz,
We have never met. Our paths highly likely would never cross. Though we may be proximate in age, and share the same gender, we are two very different women. I am not a Republican and you are not a Democrat. But with Father's Day approaching, as one daughter to another, I must say, on behalf of all the fathers who are not here because of your father, it is time for you stop promoting the myth that your father kept us safe, and that it was okay for him to sanction torture and wage an unnecessary war to do it.
My father served his country in uniform during times of war and times of peace. He grew up in times of economic hardship and racial segregation, but lived through to see prosperity and integration. Your father -- by his own words -- sought deferment from military service not just once, but five separate times because he had "better things to do." My father had better things to do also. Like raise his own family, love his wife, care for the mother and aunts and uncle that raised him.
He had better things to do like pursue a degree in pharmacy. But he set that aside to serve his country. He had better things to do like many young men of college age who would rather sit on the quad and watch the girls go by, their pleated plaid skirts swishing to and fro, their saddle shoes and bobby sox scuffling leaves in the crisp fall air. That pastime beats the hell out of basic training in the sweltering heat of sprawling air base in southern Texas town with segregated black men of his unit. Yes, my dad had better things to do, but he put them aside for his country. Your father didn't.
In 1962 and 1963, for example, while my father was leaving home at 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning to strap himself into a B-52 and take off for points classified, leaving behind his wife and 5 young children, you father was arrested twice for driving while intoxicated. 1966, when your mom was 10 weeks pregnant with you or your sister, you dad applied for the last of his "hardship" deferments. In contrast, my father and my family endured the hardship of moving to one more foreign country, one more basing housing unit, one more military school system, and one more classified job assignment.
Now, you might argue that your dad worked for presidents and that should count for something. I will grant you that. Your father interned in the Nixon administration, served in Congress where he found a way to be on the wrong side of history numerous times, voting against the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr national holiday, voting to sustain President Reagan's veto of the bill to impose economic sanctions against South Africa for its continuation of apartheid. Your father -- surprising for one who went to such great lengths to avoid military service -- was the architect of three sizable wars: Gulf War I, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq.
Your father used his office to encourage -- some would say "coerce" -- the nation's intelligence agencies to produce and promote and promulgate false intelligence about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, a connection between Saddam Hussein (whose ascension to power your father at one point supported) and Osama Bin Laden. Your father encouraged those same intelligence agencies to swoop in and take men (and apparently women, too) to secret destinations in foreign countries where he knew torture was a common practice and would be used without restraint on people.
That fomenting and prosecuting another war in Iraq was on your father's agenda from well before George W. Bush took office is common knowledge. He was not happy with the ending of the first war. It has been clear that his objective was the Iraqi oilfields and their revenue for his one-time company, Halliburton.
But Liz, this is the sticking point: your defense of your father for supposedly keeping the country safe after September 11, 2001 forces us to question just exactly what he was doing to keep the country safe before September 11, 2001. Your outsized defense of your father for his post 9/11 behaviors -- outing a CIA agent, manufacturing lies about weapons of mass destruction (or is that weapons of mass destruction development systems?) or whatever other obfuscation or construction he chooses -- misses the point on a host of issues, but most importantly misses on torture.
The laws banning the use of torture do not contain a qualifier -- "we got good information!" The laws are direct: no torture. Your father used torture to cover his tracks. He wanted a war in Iraq. He used torture on at least one person 189 times to try to make a link between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. He forced otherwise law abiding US citizens to torture other humans so Dick Cheney's war was more palatable. He used intelligent men and women as foils to concoct lies about yellowcake uranium and fuel rods, chemical weapons and dirty bombs. He used torture to "prove" those lies.
Liz Cheney, I know you must love your father with all your heart. Otherwise, you would not be making such a strenuous argument for him. Both of you point to the more than 3000 people who died on 9/11. But neither of you are willing to answer for the more than 4500 men and women killed by an unnecessary war -- your father's war -- in Iraq. A war based, let me repeat, on the lies that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were colluding together pre- and post- 9/11, the lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to be used on us or Israel or elsewhere. Lies that he wanted "evidence" of, "proof" that came through torture.
So confident is your father in his lies that he promotes Iran as his next war of choice. Thank goodness -- no, I thank God -- he is no longer in office to wage that war.
Liz, whatever you want to tell your father in comfort of your own homes, at celebratory meals around the family table, at picnics and barbecues in your friends' backyards, you are free to say. But do not use the nation's airwaves and mass media to promote these lies anymore.
It is painfully unfair to the daughters and the sons whose fathers died fighting Dick Cheney's personal war. No amount of torture will make them say otherwise.
