Cheney Spouts 'Red Herrings and Lies'

Today's speech was "classic Dick Cheney," writes Fred Kaplan in Slate, and he doesn't mean it as a compliment. The former VP "built a case on straw men, red herrings, and lies" and put his "Manichean worldview" on full display. Kaplan labels as "blatant evasion" a core part of Cheney's argument: that harsh interrogations were an essential part of a post-9/11 strategy that kept the country safe.

"The debate—or one of the debates—is, in fact, over whether or not the war on terror required 'tough interrogations,' as Cheney called them. Does he believe—should anyone else believe—that removing one chunk of this strategy would cause the whole edifice to topple? If these interrogations are so essential, why did President Bush stop them in 2004? And why haven't we been attacked since?" (More Dick Cheney stories.)