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The Constitution Is For Wusses

Here is a portion of what Vice President Cheney said as part of his commencement address to the United States Military Academy at West Point:

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.

Steve Brenen at Talking Points Memo reacted to the statement:

At the risk of sounding picky, is it too much to ask the Vice President to refer to the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States as good things? Perhaps protections that he’s proud of?

Digby links to and echoes Steve Benen’s reaction:

No kidding. He talks about such things as if they are some sort of anachronistic nicety that everyone agress is completely ridiculous. But, it’s actually worse than that. He’s explicitly saying that only a bunch of girly-men with “delicate sensibilities” need the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the Constitution of the United States. He isn’t proud of them. He thinks they make the US weak and it’s obvious that he’d be thrilled to take a match to both the treaty and the constitution.

I would like to believe the Vice President’s intention was to point out the irony that the same terrorists who use such cowardly and brutal methods to achieve their goals turn around and demand the civilized and sophisticated protections offered by the Geneva Conventions and the United States Constitution.

But I don’t think that’s quite right. It seems like the “civilized and sophisticated” bit might be better interpreted as “quaint and unnecessary”. I think I’d be quicker to overlook this statement if it was made off the cuff at some impromptu press conference of some sort. But these were prepared remarks delivered in the form of a commencement address at West Point. Whoever crafted that statement did so in a pre-meditated fashion. And the Vice President ostensibly felt comfortable making the statement in the form he did.

I just don’t see a way to read what the Vice President said as anything else but disdain for the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions and the United States Constitution. I think if a Vice President who genuinely valued such protections had spoken, his statement would be more of the form where he pointed out that even though the terrorists are as cowardly and brutal as they are, we have had the collective strength of character to stick to our values, the values our founding fathers held, and we have resisted the urge to crawl into a shell and leave those values behind.

But that’s not what the Vice President said. And this isn’t an isolated instance. Dick Cheney has said similar things in the past. I think twenty, thirty, forty years from now, if I had to choose five or ten statements the Vice President has made that best exemplified the values of the people who ran our country from 2001 to 2009, the above statement would almost certainly make that list. It really does say a lot about how our leaders have decided to respond to the challenges presented to us as a result of the attacks of September 11, 2001.