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Advertising the Dark Side
Five days after 9/11, Vice-President Cheney appeared on ‘Meet the Press’ with Tim Russert, and made a point of mentioning certain measures that he couldn't talk about openly.
I'm going to be careful here, Tim…. We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion…You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters, if, in fact, you're going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business.
Cheney's meaning could hardly have been clearer: the administration had adopted a torture policy. It was part of a secret program whose details were being worked out at the CIA as Cheney spoke, to which President Bush affixed his signature the next day. Yet, Cheney disavowed what he was saying in the act of saying it.
Cheney's double-talk is a clue to the complicated impulses that were summoned to life within the White House leadership, and the public at large, by the humiliation 9/11 inflicted. To the end of the Bush Administration the torture program remained an official secret, yet its existence and much of its character was common knowledge.
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