From Ross, who’s smart:

Obviously the words “public and detailed case” and “Dick Cheney” don’t exactly go hand in hand. Obviously the notion that the American Presidency needs to operate secretly in many of these matters is central to the now ex-veep’s political worldview. “A lot of the details are still obviously classified,” he said, when pressed by Jim Lehrer to describe exactly what sort of information we gained from the “high-value” interrogations, and it’s clear that he expects to be offering that answer for many years to come. But at the moment, it also seems clear that by avoiding a deep and detailed public engagement with the argument over torture, he’s ensuring that his side will lose it. And based on his own accounting of the stakes involved, he ought to be willing - nay, eager - to compromise his beliefs about what information from the Bush years can and should be made public in the short term in order to win the political argument about whether the administration’s policies should be continued.