Tag Archives: Cheney

The one issue GOP

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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.

Another military voice against torture

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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.

Toobin on two speeches last week

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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.

Cheney attacks Bush

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David Brooks writes in today’s New York Times, the the policies that Cheney is attacking were largely implemented in the Bush administration after 2003. He has a point. But George Bush never acknowledged that torture in fact had occurred under his watch.

From 2003 onward, people like Bellinger and Goldsmith were fighting against legal judgments that allowed enhanced interrogation techniques. By 2006, Rice and Hadley brought Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in from a secret foreign prison to regularize detainee procedures. In 2007, Rice refused to support an executive order reviving the interrogation program. Throughout the second Bush term, officials were trying to close Guantánamo, pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners, begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil. (It didn’t occur to them that they could announce the closure of Gitmo first, then figure out what to do with prisoners.)

Cheney and Obama might pretend otherwise, but it wasn’t the Obama administration that halted the practice of waterboarding. It was a succession of C.I.A. directors starting in March 2003, even before a devastating report by the C.I.A. inspector general in 2004.

When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way.

A message from the dark side

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Dick “Dark Side” Cheney spoke again today in defense of torture. You can read it here and watch it here.  One of his more telling remarks was this:

In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.

So Dick Cheney draws a distinction between Abu Ghraib and his and Rumsfeld’s carefully designed program of torture. What does he characterize as the major difference? Well his operation was handled by trained CIA personnel.  He claims his program was lawful and skillful and honorable. I beg to differ torture done by trained personnel remains torture. The fact that low level personnel at Abu Ghraib picked up and ran with some of the approved techniques (but by no means the worst) doesn’t make their actions illegal and his legal. No justification warranted torture, in either case. In each case, the activities were in fact illegal under United States law, and no repetition of claims to the contrary change that fact. In each case the activities violated simple human decency.

By the way, that “strange conflation” that he refers to was the following conclusion in the report prepared by Senate Armed Services Committee, released on April 21, 2009. (If you haven’t read this report, you should read it all.) Among other conclusions in the report is the following:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.  Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Mr. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in [Guantanamo's] October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq. [Conclusion 13, on page vxii]

This is no “strange conflation.” The entire apparatus of government, at the highest levels, sent a strong green light to do whatever it takes, lawful or unlawful, to get information.  This is tyranny, not democracy and the rule of law.

By the way, the same report reached this conclusion regarding the “entirely honorable” work of the CIA:

The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) interrogation program included at least  one SERE training technique, waterboarding.  Senior Administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and David Addington, Counsel to the Vice President, were consulted on the development of legal analysis of CIA interrogation techniques.  Legal opinions subsequently issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interpreted legal obligations under U.S. anti-torture laws and determined the legality of CIA interrogation  techniques.  Those OLC opinions distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws,  rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody and influenced Department of Defense  determinations as to what interrogation techniques were legal for use during interrogations  conducted by U.S. military personnel.

Let Cheney keep talking, but bring out all the facts, documents and records. Don’t let his constant repetition of lies cloak the truth.

More pithy comments from the former Vice President are here at TPM.

MoDo on Cheney and Pelosi

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73954997MW001_Vice_PresidenYesterday, I posted a piece that argued that whatever Pelosi was or was not informed about in terms of United States torture policies and procedures, any wrongdoing tied to her failure to speak out about it pales in the face of the orders to torture from the principals in the Bush administration.

Today, Maureen Dowd’s piece agrees:

Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time. They relished casting Pelosi as contemptible for not fighting harder to stop their contemptible depredations against the Constitution. That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.

…

Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.

And she even comes around in favor of a full accounting:

I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism. Even if it only makes one ambitious congresswoman pay more attention in some future briefing about some future secret technique that is “uniquely” designed to protect us, it will be worth it.

Was torture for political purposes?

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There is increasing talk that waterboarding and other forms of torture were undertaken not to protect us from another attack, but at the urgings of the Office of Vice President as part of a program to try to force evidence that Iraq was in an alliance with Al Queda. This was the major basis on which the invasion of Iraq was sold to the American public. It wasn’t true.

But were detainees tortured to force false information supporting the claims made to support the war? It is beginning to look as though this may be the case. If so, the entire basis of attempts to justify torture go out the window.

And more from Andrew Sullivan. Read it. As he points out, the reason torture has been used over the centuries is not actually to discover the truth, but rather to force confessions of those “known” to be guilty by the torturers. Torture does not produce accurate information; it produces what the torturer demands to hear from the tortured. And this by Lawrence Wilkerson adds more background and detail. Torture for these purposes is consistent with past use of the immoral approach.

Jesse Ventura on Dick “Dark Side” Cheney

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Good for Jesse.

Jesse Ventura: I would prosecute every person who was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it, I would prosecute the people that ordered it, because torture is against the law.”

Larry King:  You were a Navy S.E.A.L.

Jesse Ventura: Yes, and I was waterboarded [in training] so I know… It is torture…I’ll put it to you this way:  You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Jesse Ventura on Dick "Dark Side" Cheney

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Good for Jesse.
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Jesse Ventura: I would prosecute every person who was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it, I would prosecute the people that ordered it, because torture is against the law.”
\

\
Larry King:\’a0 You were a Navy S.E.A.L.
\

\
Jesse Ventura: Yes, and I was waterboarded [in training] so I know… It is torture…I’ll put it to you this way:\’a0 You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

\

Anti-torture does not equal pro-terror

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Matt Taibbi is fed up. Fed up with being called a traitor for taking a firm stand against torture of prisoners.

There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that torture opponents are “not upset” about things like 9/11 or the beheading of American hostages. The idea that “no one complains when Americans are murdered” is crazy — of course we “complained,” and of course we’d all like to round up those machete-wielding monsters and shoot them into space — but these people really believe this, they really believe that torture opponents are secretly unimpressed/untroubled by Islamic terrorism, at least as compared to American “enhanced interrogation.” For them to believe that, they must really believe that such people are traitors, nursing a secret agenda (an agenda perhaps unknown even to themselves, their America-hatred being ingrained so deep) against their own country. Which is really an amazing thing for large numbers of Americans to believe about another large group of Americans, when you think about it.

The reason it’s possible is that it’s been drilled into their heads to instinctively perceive opposition to their point of view as support for their enemies. They’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real, honest-to-God enemies (al Qaeda, Kim Jong-Il) and people they simply disagree with or dislike (Boston liberals, the French, gays, the ACLU, etc).

Cheney: We need more of the circular firing squad

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This is pretty amazing. Apparently Dick Cheney doesn’t think that Colin Powell is really a Republican.

CHENEY: Well, if I had to choose — in terms of being a Republican — I’d go with Rush Limbaugh, I think. My take on it was that Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican. [...]SCHIEFFER: And you said you’d take Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell?

CHENEY: I would. Politically.


If the GOP doesn’t want Colin Powell, there is another place he would be more than welcome.

Cheney for president

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Ross Douthat has an interesting hypothetical in today’s NYT.  What if Dick Cheney had run for president? If he had lost to Obama it might have actually helped the Republican party to realize that the “true conservatism” that Cheney represents is not a road to the White House.

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

Cheney calls for release of more torture info

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Dick Cheney has apparently called for the release of the “results” from the torture of detainees. This is a good idea. The full details regarding the torture activities should be released and studied. This would include the details of the activities conducted in our name, and also detail the results from such activities. The planning details should be determined, and the participants should be fully identified.

After that is done, then decisions about prosecutions, pardons, or clearance can be made with all the facts out in the open, which is the way that justice is supposed to occur in this country.