Dick Cheney, torture and teshuvah
According to press reports, Dick Cheney’s memoir, set to be released this week, is one long exercise is not regretting any decision he made while serving as Vice-President of the United States. This is a shame. The first step in teshuvah, repentance, is recognizing the wrongs that one has committed. Cheney, rather, articulates his continued support for interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, extremes of heat and cold, sleep deprivation, long-term isolation, sensory deprivation and stress positions. It’s clear he will continue to defend his authorization of such torture and has no remorse for the criminal acts of torture he authorized. Cheney could have helped in the effort to repair the harms caused by torturing prisoners by expressing some regret for his actions. He has not.
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Good piece overall, but it’s not clear why one would expect Cheney to repent: from within the moral system he appears to be working in, he *hasn’t* done anything wrong. Yes, that moral system itself is pretty twisted, and a far cry from a concern for the image of God in the human being, but that is a different issue.
That is, what would be necessary here is getting him to see that his moral system itself is twisted, rather than a case of him acknowledging that he ‘missed the mark’ by doing something that is wrong within his own system. Maybe he honestly thinks torture is a good thing, and really isn’t losing any sleep over it.
—ben azzai · September 4th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Just curious when Obama will repent for all the drone strikes, keeping Guantanamo open, fast and furious on the southern border,etc.
—israel · September 4th, 2011 at 9:42 pm
Yes, maybe since Obama hasn’t repented, Cheney figures that he doesn’t need to either! It’s clearly not the ‘in’ thing to do.
—ben azzai · September 5th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
I’d like to hear about Cheney getting water-boarded. However, this negative impulse is immoral. I shall spend part of YK repenting.
—Jew Guevara · September 6th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
How convenient! Yes, let’s put the sin of all our complicity in the murder and torture of countless Muslims on Cheney’s back, and send him to Azazel!
We should have demanded more answers, we should have fought harder once we knew what was going on. Still today the renditions, the wars, the torture and assassinations continue.
We must stop it, because it is destroying us, slowly but surely. Beat your chest and fast as you please, but don’t imagine yourself clean: there is blood on our hands.
—shmuel · September 8th, 2011 at 10:22 am