Why Jesse Ventura Matters

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recent run of television appearances defending the Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” has received much media attention in recent weeks.  Some in the media have questioned Cheney’s motives as being overtly partisan, designed to keep pressure on President Obama to continue the policies that Bush and Cheney put into place during the early days of the “Global War on Terror”.  Others have excused Cheney’s unprecendented number of appearances on television as necessary to protect his legacy.  Whatever the reasons for Cheney’s sudden ubiquity, his pointed defense of post-9/11 policies deserves a counterweight, especially as the American political establishment closes ranks on the issue of torture.

Into the void steps Jesse Ventura, who, like Cheney, has been making the rounds on television talk-shows in recent weeks.  The former Minnesota governor brings a unique perspective to the current debate on torture.  As a Navy Seal, Ventura underwent torture at SERE (Survival Escape Resistance Evasion) school.  As Ventura told Larry King last week on CNN,

“It was a required school you had to go to prior to going to the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam.  I was waterboarded, it is torture…You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and an hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”

That jab at Cheney also distinguishes Ventura from other politicians past or present who decry torture but tend to soften their rhetoric in the name of decorum.  Ventura pulls no punches in the debate over torture and his credentials as a Navy Seal who underwent torture in training make his arguments wholly unassailable.  Contrasting his own service to his country to Dick Cheney’s, Ventura told King,

“Here’s a guy who got five deferments from the Vietnam War.  Clearly, he’s a coward. He wouldn’t go when it was his time to go and now he’s a chickenhawk.  Now he’s this big, tough guy who wants this hardcore policy and he’s the guy who sanctioned all this torture by calling it ‘enhanced interrogation’.”

Monday morning, Ventura went on “The View” and sparred with Elizabeth Hasselbeck, the show’s resident right-wing ideologue.  Hasselbeck asked Ventura what he thought of Nancy Pelosi’s saying that the CIA lied to her about what interrogation techniques were being used at Guantanamo Bay.  Ventura replied,

“If we hadn’t waterboarded in the first place, none of that would be a controversy, would it?  Torture is torture.  If you’re going to be a country that follows the rule of law, which we are, torture is illegal.”

Apparently, Hasselbeck believes that anyone who opposes torture is on the “left” and asking about Nancy Pelosi is a clever question. 

These days Ventura lives in Mexico and surfs obsessively.  He follows American politics from afar, but is still a dynamic, powerful voice in American political culture.  At a time when Dick Cheney can make huge sums of money speaking at conferences like next week’s American Enterprise Institute gathering, defending torture and slamming the rule of law along the way, it’s refreshing to have a counterweight, a heavyweight, like Jesse Ventura.