May 5 (Bloomberg) -- As arguably the most powerful vice- president in the history of the White House, Dick Cheney did a lot of damage to the image of the U.S. abroad.

What’s weird is that even now, without the power or the office, he’s still at it, shamelessly undercutting the incumbent president on sensitive issues of national security.

Maybe we should be grateful. How else would we be reminded of the specious logic and mental contortions that prevailed during the Bush administration?

Take the debate on torture. A majority of Americans agree with President Barack Obama that torture is wrong. Most of us find it unacceptable that U.S. interrogators subjected prisoners, however heinous their alleged crimes, to repeated waterboarding in violation of international conventions, U.S. laws and our core values.

Then along comes Cheney, sounding like the old Bolshevik Lenin, arguing that the ends justify the means. In Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News on April 20, he said torture should be allowed if it yields good intelligence. Remember: This is the same man who in 2002, helped manipulate intelligence to justify going to war.

So there we have it. In the world according to Cheney, good information is worth any price -- including torture -- provided it gives cover for what he wanted to do anyway: In 2002, it was to invade Iraq.

‘Good’ Information

We can leave aside the whole debate about how to measure “good” information: No one will ever know if that same information could be had by other means. Take the case of Major Matthew Alexander, who was able to pinpoint the location of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq later killed by U.S. smart bombs in 2006 -- by establishing a relationship of trust with captured prisoners. (Alexander has since said that by resorting to torture, the U.S. only helped al-Qaeda recruiters.)

Let’s ignore the obvious questions about the efficacy of a near-drowning technique that had to be repeated 183 times against a single prisoner.

The damage has been done. It began with the photographs from Abu Ghraib; the newly released Office of Legal Counsel memos only confirm and amplify information that had already leaked out about “the enhanced interrogation techniques” endorsed by the Bush administration.

Obama Compromise

In a cynical world, where autocracies dress up like democracies, and corrupt dictators give lectures on human rights and conflicts of interest, it is important that the U.S. stand by its principles. The Bush administration let us down.

Obama, who authorized the release of the memos, is now being criticized for his promise not to prosecute the lawyers who wrote them, or the interrogators who implemented them. His compromise is purely political, but at least it is forward- looking. His focus is on restoring the U.S. image as a country where laws do matter.

That brings us back to Cheney, who in appearances on Fox News and on CNN, hasn’t been content to defend his policies. He has gone further, saying that the U.S. president is putting the country at risk, a truly astonishing thing for an ex-vice president to say.

Barton Gellman, author of “Angler,” a book about Cheney’s role in the Bush presidency, says Cheney is defending a war that he fears is being abandoned. “With that kind of urgency, he’s not going to give top priority to observing the niceties of protocol for just departed presidents and vice presidents,” Gellman says.

‘Not a War’

Cheney’s exact words are worth noting. Obama’s renunciation of torture, Cheney said on Fox News, “says to the world out there that this is not a war, this is law enforcement. And our most important obligation, responsibility, is to read their rights to people we capture, that we’re going to treat them, that we’re going to mirandize them before we do anything else.”

Mirandize? There’s a verb from the distant past, when politicians ran on “law and order” platforms, and talked about coddling criminals. No, Mr. Cheney, the decision to ban the practice of waterboarding isn’t about reading prisoners their Miranda rights; it is about abiding by the Geneva Conventions, the United Nation Convention Against Torture and other agreements signed by the U.S.

Maples Testimony

That isn’t just the opinion of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, Senator John McCain and the Obama administration; that is the view stated in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee by Lieutenant General Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, on Feb. 27, 2008, when Cheney and Bush were still in the White House.

When Cheney justifies torture by invoking “national security,” he is crossing the same line as former President Richard Nixon. In his last interview with David Frost, broadcast on May 19, 1977, returned to us courtesy of the movie “Frost/Nixon,” Nixon claimed that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

In the original interview, Nixon went on to cite Lincoln, who in his words said actions that would otherwise be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken to preserve the Constitution and the nation.

It was bad enough when Nixon tried to put himself in Lincoln’s shoes. But Cheney?

You can’t say he didn’t warn us. Just after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said the government would have to “work through, sort of, the dark side. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.”

Now that he has made a couple of forays into the light, maybe it is time for Cheney to step back into those shadows, where he clearly feels more comfortable. He made his point: Now we remember why we don’t miss him.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own)

To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 4, 2009 18:00 EDT