Bits & Pieces

Here is a quote of what Cheney said over the weekend on national TV:

I was a big supporter of waterboarding.

Jonathan Turley points out this is a very dangerous thing to say, since waterboarding is a crime under international law.

We have now come to this: a Vice President who feels perfectly comfortable in bragging out his support for a torture program. It is a moment that is more of an indictment of Obama than (the unindicted) Cheney. It is fruit that comes from an Administration that chose politics over principle — even at the cost of precedent forged in the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions. Cheney’s statement should be a moment of unspeakable national shame.

Andrew Sullivan has more:

Either this country is governed by the rule of law or it isn’t. Cheney’s clear admission of his central role in authorizing waterboarding and the clear evidence that such waterboarding did indeed take place means that prosecution must proceed.

Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.

And where is the United States Justice Department in all of this? Why are they not enforcing the law or at least investigating whether a crime has been committed, given this admission by the former Vice-President?

Update: More from Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine:

Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. Prosecutors have argued that a criminal investigation into torture undertaken with the direction of the Bush White House would raise complex legal issues, and proof would be difficult. But what about cases in which an instigator openly and notoriously brags about his role in torture?

Did anyone at Human Events notice what year it is? Salon thinks not.

For most people, the year ending now is 2009. That’s apparently not true at the right-wing magazine Human Events; reading it Monday, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Bush administration is still in office.

Update: And Wonkette adds its own take.

The New York Times calls for a full investigation of torture programs conducted by the Bush administration, under the guidance of Dick Cheney.

In Mr. Cheney’s view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush’s Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.

It’s easy to understand Mr. Cheney’s aversion to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it stopping with the interrogators. He’s right.

The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.

Chris Wallace here dismisses the moral argument against torture. This is perfectly consistent with his softball interview of Dick Cheney over the weekend.

Taking a break from his summer vacation, Andrew Sullivan reacts to the recent disclosure about America’s embrace of torture under Bush and the Holder investigation. He is right that the effort to bring to justice those who tortured in the name of America is critical to restoring the traditional values of America.

One political party in this country is now explicitly pro-torture, and wants to restore a torture regime if it regains power. Decent conservatives for the most part simply looked the other way. Unless these cultural forces in defense of violence and torture are defeated – not appeased or excused, but defeated – America will never return the way it once was. Electing a new president was the start and not the end of this. He is flawed, as every president is, but in my view, the scale of the mess he inherited demands some slack. Any new criminal investigation which scapegoats those at the bottom while protecting the guilty men and women who made it happen is a travesty of justice. If it is the end and not the beginning of accountability, it will be worse than nothing.

But it need not be the end of the story. Indeed, it can be the beginning if we make it so. We cannot stop this sad and minuscule attempt to restore a scintilla of accountability to some individuals low down on the totem pole. Eric Holder is doing what he can. But we can continue to lobby and argue for the extension of accountability to the truly guilty men who made all this happen and still refuse to take responsibility for war crimes on a coordinated scale never before seen in American warfare, and initiated by a presidential decision to withdraw from the Geneva Conventions and refuse to abide by their plain meaning and intent.

The Bush administration seriously considered using the military to arrest terrorism suspects in the United States. Highly questionable from a Constitutional perspective, and also illegal under law.  The legal “basis” for this approach was, of course, developed by John Yoo and the proposal was spearheaded by Dick Cheney. It wasn’t actually done but it was yet another attempt to end run the Constitution in the name of greater executive power.

Still, at least one high-level meeting was convened to debate the issue, at which several top Bush aides argued firmly against the proposal to use the military, advanced by Mr. Cheney, his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials.

Among those in opposition were Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

Update: Jonathan Turley offers his thoughts. Money quote:

What is truly frightening is how close we came. A single person stood in the way of tearing down one of our most important legal and political traditions. The bar on domestic law enforcement activities distinguishes this country from other countries where the military holds tremendous power like Iran. The recent military takeover in Honduras is an example of the dangers. We have long believed that people raised under our freedoms (and particularly trained in our laws) would be opposed to such attacks on our traditions and values. Yet, a vice president and top legal advisers facilitated an effort that was not just unlawful but unnecessary. It shows that, even in the most successful democracy in history, we can still stand just one vote away from a path of abuse or even tyranny. The alarm over this story is magnified by the utter failure of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to exercise checks and balances during this period. We came down to George Bush — no civil libertarian — to block this effort — though this may have been more of a political and legal calculation.

Update 2: Perhaps less thoughtful (yet more pungent) comments at Wonkette:

Anyway, made much more sense to just deploy the military to scoop ‘em up—tanks, guns, fuckin’ you know, whatever else, but definitely, definitely tanks—and just do whatever with them, and not even bother with the F.B.I. and their questions, because what’s going to retroactively prevent 9/11: a tank or a question?

Finally. According to the Washington Post, Eric Holder is seriously considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigation whether US personnel tortured terrorism suspects in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The leak of his consideration is likely a trial ballon to test the political waters. Hopefully, the Obama administration will stand tough on this issue, and Eric Holder will proceed to do the right thing.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

Naming a prosecutor to probe alleged abuses during the darkest period in the Bush era would run counter to President Obama’s oft-repeated desire to be “looking forward and not backwards.” Top political aides have expressed concern that such an investigation might spawn partisan debates that could overtake Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda.

The White House successfully resisted efforts by congressional Democrats to establish a “truth and reconciliation” panel. But fresh disclosures have continued to emerge about detainee mistreatment, including a secret CIA watchdog report, recently reviewed by Holder, highlighting several episodes that could be likened to torture.

Update: Here is an excellent view on the matter from Tim F. at Ballon Juice:

To put it bluntly, this strategy is a goddamn disgrace. We called it whitewashing when the Bush administration made a few grunts pay for the orders they followed at Abu Ghraib. We called it a disgrace because that’s what it was. What do you think we should call it now? I don’t feel much sympathy for the sadistic creeps who will pay for their superiors’ sins this time any more than than I feel for Chuck Graner and Lynndie Englund. Interrogators who took it on themselves to surpass even the sick boundaries of Yoo’s torture memos deserve to answer in court. Nonetheless, to stop there and call it justice makes me physically ill.

Update 2: Much more from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.

Holder’s likely decision makes no more sense from a purely utilitarian perspective. The kind of investigations that are worth a major prosecutor’s time start at the grunt level so they can build a case against bigger fish. Handling it like this looks almost exactly the same as asking a mafia prosecutor to focus exclusively on the goons who got a little too enthusiastic when they beat up card players behind on their debts. Ordinary citizens would have a hard time seeing that as a terribly serious effort to bring down organized crime.

According to the New York Times, Dick Cheney personally ordered that a CIA clandestine program be kept secret from Congress for eight years. The investigation of what happened has to occur. This was the program the Leon Pannetta, current CIA director, canceled last month when he first learned of its existence.

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

It appears that there may finally be some progress on investigation into Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. There is an unclassified summary written by five inspectors general, according to the Washington Post.

The inspectors general from the Departments of Justice and Defense, as well as the CIA, the NSA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence, said they reviewed thousands of documents and interviewed more than 200 people in connection with the report, including Bush era officials John Negroponte, who served as director of national intelligence, National Security Agency Director Michael V. Hayden, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

But other key figures such as Bush White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, former Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and former CIA director George Tenet declined interview requests, investigators said. The inspectors general lack the authority to compel them to talk.

Update: Here is a link to the full unclassified report.

It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.

–Leon Panetta on Dick Cheney’s warnings that Obama is making the country less safe.

The New York Times fails to call torture torture. In addition, the continue to participate in misstating the facts regarding the clear pro-torture policies of the prior administration. The article implies, incorrectly, that all the involved lawyers at the DOJ were satisfied with the torture policies. They were not.  This is very much like the falsities promoted as truth by the New York Times in the build-up to the Iraq war.

Andrew Sullivan provides the analysis (worth reading in full):

The gist: if you actually read the leaked memos, and absorb the details of the NYT piece, you find the actual story: that the OLC lawyers were under enormous pressure to approve whatever Cheney wanted, were denied time to get the whole thing right, (Bradbury was even kept on probation until he spat out the “legal” approvals they wanted), were told that the president himself was pushing hard, and that a couple of them, Comey and Goldsmith, believed that the torture techniques, although technically “legal” in their judgment, were “simply awful” and would come back to haunt them.

Update: More from Talking Points Memo here.

Well, on one thing anyway. He believes that the definition of marriage should be set at the state level and that everyone should be free to make the arrangement they want.  This is a better and stronger position than Obama’s. (video via Andrew Sullivan)

Update: Jonathan Turely offers his take on the Cheney position.

Frank Rich, in today’s New York Times:

The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.

The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.

As Rich also notes, the mainstream so-called liberal media once again refused to question the claims made by Cheney in his speech designed to play on fear rather than truth. Only McClatchy newspapers prepared a point-by-point analysis of the falsehoods in Cheney’s speech. Recall that McClatchy was one of the very rare media outlets that seriously questioned the run-up to the Iraq war, prepared by the same reporters as this story, back when McClatchy was Knight-Ridder.

Via Newshoggers:

Major Matthew Alexander says that torture doesn’t work, that it creates terrorists and that Dick Cheney doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Major Alexander is a credible witness – he was a U.S. military interrogator for 14 years and recieved a Bronze Star for leading the team that got the information that led to the capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi without using torture.

The two speeches are those last week by President Obama and former Vice-President Cheney. Toobin is Jeffrey Toobin, writing for The New Yorker. He notes the relative differences in credibility between the two men and warns of Cheney’s ability to cause problems. The full article is here. Read it.

At a minimum, Obama seemed alive to the moral and legal ambiguities implied by the issue. Not so the former Vice-President, who chose to speak in a chilling code, in which methods of torture such as waterboarding became “enhanced interrogation,” in the way that death might be called “enhanced sleep.” Cheney delivered his indictment of the current Administration in the same tone of certainty that he once used to inform the nation of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; of the connections between the government of Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers; and of the prospects for quick victory in Iraq. In light of this, it’s hard to take seriously the claims that Cheney asked us to accept: to name just two, that the information obtained by torture saved lives; and that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was solely the work of “a few sadistic prison guards,” and not the result of interrogation practices approved by Cheney himself.

Even worse than Cheney’s distortions was the political agenda behind them. The speech was, as politicians say, a marker—a warning to the new Administration. “Just remember: it is a serious step to begin unravelling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11,” Cheney said. “Seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.” Cheney’s all but explicit message was that the blame for any new attack against American people or interests would be laid not on the terrorists, or on the worldwide climate of anti-Americanism created by the Bush-Cheney Administration, but on Barack Obama. For many months after the 9/11 attacks, Democrats refrained from engaging in the blame game with the Bush Administration. Cheney’s speech makes it clear that, should terrorists strike again, Republicans may not respond in kind.