DICK Cheney’s return from the political graveyard where he rightfully belongs offers some fodder for conspiracy theorists: could his resurrection have surreptitiously been engineered by the White House as a means of enhancing the significance of Barack Obama’s modest deviations from some of the Bush regime’s worst policies? After all, to liberals who supported Obama’s candidacy but are disappointed by his incumbency, Cheney’s interventions serve as a reminder that at least some of the toxic waste accumulated over the previous eight years has indeed been swept aside.

Of course, chances are that Cheney’s return to partisan politics was masterminded by none other than the former vice-president himself. On inauguration day last January, he seemed a bit out of it. Confined to a wheelchair after having sprained his back by lifting a box (whose contents would, no doubt, have been interesting to examine – while clearing out his White House office, he was presumably headed for retirement in Wyoming.

No one could have suspected back then that within months the deeply unpopular and thoroughly discredited Cheney would be back in the public eye as a wannabe leader of the opposition. No such post formally exists in the United States, and in recent months the charge against the new government has been led not by an elected representative but by a radio talk-show host who leans so far to the right that he’s forever at risk of going over the edge. However, it wasn’t alarm over Rush Limbaugh’s wackier pronouncements that persuaded Cheney to return to the fray: he has been quoted as saying that he considers Limbaugh a far more valuable Republican than his long-standing bete noire Colin Powell.

After the Obama White House decided to release some of the Bush administration’s memos that justified what were euphemistically referred to as harsh interrogation methods, Cheney – one of the most secretive personalities to have trod Washington’s  corridors of power – argued that this wasn’t enough, the government should also reveal the results of these interrogations. This was his way of saying: don’t criticize torture, because it is extremely effective. For Cheney’s ilk, there are no moral dilemmas associated with such behaviour. Any number of experts have pointed to the broad futility of torture as a means of obtaining useful information – once Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s resistance was broken by repeated waterboarding, he admitted responsibility for almost everything he could think of barring global warming – but that isn’t what makes it ethically unacceptable.

But then, Cheney and ethics have never marched in lockstep. One of the first scandals to hit the Bush administration was the revelation that the vice-president was framing the nation’s energy policy in close consultation with the heads of corporations such as Enron. And it was no coincidence that the invasion and occupation of Iraq proved particularly profitable for Halliburton, a firm that had enjoyed the dubious privilege of having Cheney as its chairman and CEO until he nominated himself as George W. Bush’s running mate. What’s more, until 2005 he continued to receive "deferred salary payments" from Halliburton that easily outweighed his official pay packet.

The events of September 11, 2001, were a godsend for Cheney, who lost little time in dedicating himself to recouping the executive powers that had been depleted since Watergate. He was also rarely seen in public thereafter; media reports occasionally  mentioned his seclusion in one bunker or another, and it was widely assumed that it was he, rather than Bush, who was running the shock-and-awe show. Cheney and his long-time collaborator Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, were dead keen to respond to Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks by assaulting Iraq right away, but marginally wiser counsel prevailed, entailing a drawn-out charade about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

It is often claimed that Cheney’s star waned somewhat in Bush’s second term, when the president started paying more attention to Condoleezza Rice’s slightly less noxious advice. Rumsfeld’s ouster was a blow to Cheney, and he was less than thrilled by Bush’s refusal to pardon Scooter Libby – the veep’s chief of staff, who went to prison for lying to a grand jury in the context of a White House vendetta against an opponent of the Iraq war. However, Cheney’s activities in the past few weeks suggest that he has no qualms about claiming ownership of the Bush administration in its entirety, and is determined to defend what he sees as his legacy. It’s telling, then, that he has sought to become a walking, talking advertisement for timely torture and the politics of fear

Some observers say Obama’s backtracking on issues such as images of prisoner abuse and military commissions at Guantanamo Bay has been prompted by Cheney’s challenges. That’s unlikely, and it’s also a stretch to suggest that the US Senate’s misguided vote against the funding required to shut down the infamous prison on Cuban soil was prompted by the nonsense peddled by Cheney and others about how imprisoning terrorist suspects on US territory would pose an unacceptable threat to American citizens.

Obama is struggling on the security front, and those of us who would like to see him make a clean break with an utterly deplorable past are bound to be disappointed, but Cheney’s new-found loquacity needn’t be viewed as a hindrance in this context. If anything, it should help to clarify matters: whatever the ex-veep commends with zealous pride is precisely what the US needs to decisively distance itself from. What’s alarming is the notion that a justly reviled figure whose moral standing is not far removed from that of Hannibal Lecter deserves a respectful hearing. The occasion last week when a significant speech by Obama was juxtaposed with yet another bilious tirade from Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute was variously billed by the US media as a "clash of the titans" or a re-enactment of the Ali vs Frazier "Thrilla in Manila". It was an absurd characterization: Obama could conceivably be seen as a potential heavyweight, but Cheney’s self-aggrandizement certainly doesn’t make him a titan.

At the White House correspondents’ annual dinner earlier this month, Obama earned a few guffaws with his quip that Cheney couldn’t be there because he was working on his memoirs, titled How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People. The comedian Wanda Sykes went a bit further, declaring: "He scares me to death. I tell my kids, I say, ‘Look, if two cars pull up and one has a stranger and the other car has Dick Cheney, you get in the car with the stranger’." Given Cheney’s record, that seems like an entirely appropriate attitude for all conscientious Americans to adopt.

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