The history-be-my-judge interviews President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving help me understand why they acted with such contempt for our Constitution and our values -- while also reinforcing my confident belief and my fervent hope that history will throw the book at them.
The basic argument they're making can be summed up in one sentence: We did what we did to keep America safe.
In a not-for-attribution chat with a member of the Bush Cabinet a couple of years ago, conversation turned to Sept. 11. I said something like, "I can imagine what that day must have felt like for you." The response was immediate: "No, you can't." The official went on to describe the chaos and anguish, the shock of seeing the 110-story World Trade Center towers collapse into rubble, the fear that other hijacked planes might still be in the air, the gut feeling that the president and those around him were personally under attack. I doubt anyone in the Situation Room actually quoted Malcolm X, but essentially a vow was taken to protect the country from another assault "by any means necessary."
Initial reactions are supposed to give way to reasoned analysis, however. For Bush and most of his top aides, this didn't happen until far too late.
For Cheney, it apparently never happened. In an interview, he told Fox News the public has become "complacent" even as the administration's actions have "produced a safe seven and a half years, and I think the record speaks for itself."
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That record, admirably, includes the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the dismantling of al-Qaeda's infrastructure and the killing or capture of some of the terrorist organization's most important operatives. Shamefully, however, it also includes the violation of international and U.S. legal norms by subjecting terrorist suspects to indefinite detention and cruel, painful interrogation; the creation of a mini-gulag of secret CIA-run prisons abroad; and unprecedented domestic surveillance without court supervision -- all justified, Cheney maintains, by a state of "war."
The Bush-Cheney record also includes the invasion of a country -- Iraq -- that had nothing to do with Sept. 11. This misadventure claimed more than 4,000 American lives, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and grievously damaged our strategic position in the Middle East.
In an interview with ABC News, Bush claimed credit for vanquishing al-Qaeda's forces in Iraq. When it was pointed out there were no al-Qaeda in Iraq until after the U.S. invasion, the president answered, "Yeah, that's right. So what?"
Here's so what: Bush and Cheney, understandably shaken by an unprecedented act of terrorism, declared and prosecuted a "war" without specifying the enemy. Rather than focus on the architect and sponsor of Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden, they turned away to lash out at others in pre-emptive blows that dishonored our nation's most precious ideals.
History will note that the point of the Constitution is that the ends don't always justify the means -- and that nowhere in the document can be found the phrase "so what?"
Eugene Robinson is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group.
