Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been appearing in interviews to convince America that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding have kept us safe. In other words, to prove that torture works. But his “proof” amounts to nothing more than asserting: we did it, and nothing happened, so therefore it worked.
Everybody knows that just because two things happened together does not mean one caused the other. Yes, the United States tortured alleged terrorists in the past seven and a half years. And yes, America was not attacked for seven and a half years. But America has also had the TV show "24" playing for the last seven and a half years – maybe that’s the reason!
And it is not even true that Americans have not been attacked. American soldiers in Iraq have certainly not felt the bounty of safety acclaimed by Cheney. According to the Department of Defense, Operation Iraqi Freedom has resulted in 4,287 U.S. military casualties (as of May 11, 2009). Why didn’t torture protect them?
And as soon as you consider that America might not have been attacked even without torturing, you realize that Cheney’s repeated assertions contain one final fallacy. It’s never been enough just to avoid catastrophic attacks, which he is so thrilled about. Compare a world in which America does not get attacked but many nations despise it to a world in which America does not get attacked but all nations love and respect it. It is not enough to say, “We were safe for this limited period of time.” We can always be safer.
One way we can start: not surrendering our powers of logic when someone assaults us with faulty reasoning.
[CBS News, Department of Defense]
Jeff Dubbinis a TheSequitur.com senior editor.
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