No, that's not a typo of "MEMO." It's an acronym, for "Means, Motive and Opportunity," the three-legged stool upon which rests a successful prosecutor's argument to a jury. When you can factually demonstrate how a crime was committed, why the accused had reason to commit it and how it came to pass that the accused was able to do so, you're well on your way to a conviction.
Sometimes proving MMO becomes unnecessary when a defendant confesses to a crime. Often juries can be convinced of a case without a known motive. But wrapping MMO around an accusation is a quick road to putting a criminal in jail.
Today we are at the beginning of a long process which, we hope, will end in the conviction of one Richard B. Cheney for the crime of torture. Our work is made much easier by the accused's own confession. Still, having the accused's own words confirming the crime is insufficient for a full understanding of what has happened. Indeed, the accused's confession, and the motive he claims for his crime ("keep Americans safe") may be a cover for uglier deeds.
Before speculating on the real motives for Cheney's authorizing torture, let us quickly dispose of his own declared reason: that he was doing what he felt he had to do to protect America from attack.
In law, good intentions mean squat. It doesn't matter whether you did what you did to save humanity or simply to ameliorate boredom. Crime be crime, mon. Or, to fancy it up with a bit of Latin, Non facias malum ut inde veniat bonum ("You shall not do evil that good may come of it"). (Note: Not quite squat. Tejas Geek set me straight on mens rea in the comments.)
It can be assumed that Mr. Cheney or someone close to him is aware of this maxim and that he's not idiot enough to think that having "good reasons" to authorize torture will mitigate his possible punishment. It is my belief that Mr. Cheney's insistence that his actions sprang from noble (or fearful) impulses is merely to keep us from asking what other reasons he might have had.
Last month, we learned, through the reporting of the McClatchy newspaper group, of a Senate Armed Services Committee report (pdf) in which a former senior intelligence official and an Army psychiatrist present during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay testified of steady pressure from Mr. Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to extract from detainees information about al Qaeda/Iraq connections.
Those claims are bolstered by the timing and intensity of the torture of al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Muhammed. We are all stunned at the news that Muhammed was waterboarded over 180 times in a single month. Less often has it been mentioned just which month that was: March 2003, just weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
Even after the war had begun, US interrogators kept pressing for a Saddam/al Qaeda link, mock-burying Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi until he claimed that Saddam had helped train al Qaeda members in chemical weapons, a claim al-Libi later recanted. Just what other tortures were perpetrated on al-Libi to gain that false link we will never know, as al-Libi was recently "found dead of suicide in his cell" in Libya.
The Armed Services Committee report isn't unshakable evidence, but it certainly leads one to reasonably suspect that the real reason intelligence and military personnel were ordered to torture was to bolster the argument for war with Iraq.
But that supposition leads us again to ask, "Why?" Why was invading this pissant little country so desperately important. We've heard every argument from WMD to PNAC to "He tried to kill my dad" and none of them satisfy.
I believe that we can't really understand the reason why we have devolved to the level of our basest historical enemies until we can read the meeting minutes of Mr. Cheney's first great project of 2001, the Energy Task Force.
While Judicial Watch's lawsuit to reveal the participants and discussions of the Task Force was unsuccessful, it is known that the most prominent attendees were representatives of the oil and gas industry. It has also been revealed that an item of great interest to the group was a map of Iraqi oil fields and promising exploration areas, an odd detail, as Western companies were at the time forbidden to drill in the country.
Aside from his close connections to other energy companies, Mr. Cheney retained at least 433,000 optioned shares of Halliburton when he ascended to the vice-presidency. Due to his decision as the company's CEO to purchase Dresser Industries, with its massive liabilities in asbestos judgements, that stock was at one time damn near worthless. To save the company, and make the stock worth owning, would take a miracle or two.
Miracle one would be a sharp and sustained rise in the price of oil, which, through 2002, was bumping along in the high teens and low twenties.
Miracle two would be some sort of long-term, cost-plus construction contract that would fill the company's coffers no matter what the oil market did.
Through his control of the Executive Branch of the government, Mr. Cheney was able to bring forth both miracles.
Halliburton subsidiary KBR was re-awarded the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program contract that Cheney had steered its way in 1992, when he was Secretary of Defense. After George H.W. Bush was defeated and Cheney was hired as Halliburton CEO, the Department of Defense "fired" Halliburton for fraudulent billing practices and awarded the service-wide contract to DynCorp. Once Cheney was back in power, DynCorp got the ax and Halliburton was back in.
The other miracle, a long, strong oil price hike, was inevitable once US forces crossed the border between Kuwait and Iraq.
Going back to the original question--what was Dick Cheney's motivation in ordering the torture of detainees--a possible answer emerges, one far less noble than a desire to protect the nation from attack, more shameful even than understandable, human cowardice.
Dick Cheney ordered people tortured to start a war that killed thousands of Americans and likely a million innocent Iraqis. . .
. . . and made him rich.
MMO is often used as a yardstick of how to argue a prosecution's case, but long before any crime is discussed in court, suspects must be found and cases built. A question often asked by investigators is "Cui bono?" Who benefitted from this crime?
Well?
Note: Sorry for rambling on here, and for repeating things that have been covered in excruciating detail on this site for years. I felt it would be of some value to put the issue of torture, war and Mr. Cheney's motivations in a clearer context. I hope I've had some success.
A brief Update: Thanks for rec'ing this, not because I like the strokes (but don't stop), but because no one seems to have connected the naked dots here. It's long overdue.
When I look out over the hell we have created in the world and in our own institutions, I feel like Marge Gunderson:
And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.