Nevermind that the documents prove no such thing, and leave aside for the moment that Durham’s investigation, taking off from low-level “interrogators,” could rise up the chain of command to Cheney’s own office. Cheney’s real vindication may lay not in what he said, or in what Durham finds, but in what else the Obama administration did this week—which was to announce the continuation of “rendition,” or the dispatching of detainees to third countries for interrogation. Rendition is a policy that, until now, most thought only Cheney could truly love. Think of Maher Arar, the Canadian whose story Jane Mayer told in The New Yorker. While changing planes between Tunisia and Canada at JFK in New York, Arar was seized and secretly shipped off by an American “special removal unit” to his native Syria, where he was held for months and tortured—and ultimately set free, uncharged, to sue the U.S. government. America is finally reckoning with itself as a torture nation, but to find Cheney at the center of this historic juncture is, well, déjà vu all over again. For more than a generation, the nation’s great moral turning points have pivoted on Dick Cheney, always for the worse…

The Obama administration insists that its version of rendition will be supervised and handled legally, if not necessarily humanely. But rendition is itself the revelation: a mechanism that allows for torture means torture lives on. No matter how you cut it, this bypassing of U.S. jurisdictions, protections, and official American standards of conduct and accountability, even for the sake of urgent information, reeks of ends-justify-means moral bankruptcy. Score one for Dick Cheney—a final victory.