By Michael Duffy / WASHINGTON Wednesday, May. 13, 2009
... What's quite clear about Cheney's sudden chatty spree is that he wants to refocus the question about waterboarding and other interrogation techniques from whether they were legal to whether they worked. After eight years on the front lines of the war on terrorism, perhaps that is all a man can see. It certainly might explain why Cheney is making such a fuss about asking Obama to release a pair of after-action memos — which he says offer proof that the controversial methods produced evidence that, as Cheney claimed on Sunday, "saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives."
A far darker explanation for the spring offensive isn't about the past but the future. Obama officials have spied something like a set-up in Cheney's latest gambit. One of the Bush team's biggest talking points in its final days in office was an insistence that its greatest accomplishment was preventing a second attack in the years after Sept. 11. By laying down the charge now that Obama has made the country less safe, the Bush team may be able to point fingers of blame if a second attack ever comes.
Cheney has never had great political instincts, but it's possible that with the Republican Party scattered and adrift, he sees little to lose and perhaps something to gain from stating his case now. Cheney briefly ran for President in 1996, and though he is unlikely to make that mistake again, he may see a chance to boost his dismal approval ratings at least within the battered ranks of the GOP. The argument against this is that it's difficult to believe that even the former Vice President thinks a personal campaign for waterboarding is a good political move ...
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1897850,00.html
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