Wow! This is simply amazing. A new video has leaked out. It appears to briefly show Dick Cheney directly involved in torture. You have to look very closely as he appears for a second or so.
Tag Archives: Cheney
Quote of the day
The US is a banana republic if this stuff is allowed to go unpunished. A banana republic with a torture apparatus.
The torture memos are out…
… and they are available here. They should be required reading. More to come on this as I am still reading them. But from what I have read so far, I think Andrew Sullivan summarizes it very effectively:
Perhaps you are reading these documents alongside me. I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true. These memos form a coda to the Red Cross report, confirming its evidentiary conclusions, while finding exquisite, legalistic and preposterous ways to deny the obvious.
Cheney assasination squad
In an earlier post, I referred to Seymour Hersch’s statements that Cheney authorized an assasination squad to take out America’s enemies. One of his aids seems now to confirm the story.
Earlier this month the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh claimed that his research for an upcoming book uncovered evidence of a secret special operations unit unmonitored by Congress with authority to assassinate high-value targets in a dozen countries.
“They’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving,” Hersh said.
Enter John Hannah. The former Cheney aide told CNN on Monday that Hersh’s claim “is not true.”
But when asked about possible assassination targets, Hannah seemed to reverse himself, saying that “troops in the field” are given “authority” to “capture or kill certain individuals” who are perceived as a threat. “That’s certainly true.”
A new Cheney attack on Obama
Well, not new chronologically, but new to the media. According to The New Yorker, Cheney disparaged President-Elect Obama to the Israelis during the transisition period, claiming he was “pro-Palestinian.”
The Obama transition team also helped persuade Israel to end the bombing of Gaza and to withdraw its ground troops before the Inauguration. According to the former senior intelligence official, who has access to sensitive information, “Cheney began getting messages from the Israelis about pressure from Obama” when he was President-elect. Cheney, who worked closely with the Israeli leadership in the lead-up to the Gaza war, portrayed Obama to the Israelis as a “pro-Palestinian,” who would not support their efforts (and, in private, disparaged Obama, referring to him at one point as someone who would “never make it in the major leagues”). But the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of “smart bombs” and other high-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel. “It was Jones”—retired Marine General James Jones, at the time designated to be the President’s national-security adviser—“who came up with the solution and told Obama, ‘You just can’t tell the Israelis to get out.’ ” (General Jones said that he could not verify this account; Cheney’s office declined to comment.)
It simply doesn’t work
Torture, that is.
It simply doesn't work
Torture, that is.
Sullivan on Cheney
Andrew Sullivan, from his piece in this weekend’s Times of London, argues that Cheney’s attacks on President Obama arise out of a growing fear on Cheney’s part that he may face torture or war crimes charges.
My guess is that he [Cheney] fears he is in trouble. This fear has been created by Obama, but indirectly. Obama has declined to launch a prosecution of Cheney for war crimes, as many in his party (and outside it) would like. He has set up a review of detention, rendition and interrogation policies. And he has simply declassified many of the infamous torture memos kept under wraps by Bush.
He has the power to do this, and much of the time it is in response to outside requests. But as the memos have emerged, the awful truth of what Cheney actually authorised becomes harder and harder to deny. And Cheney is desperately trying to maintain a grip on the narrative before it grips him by the throat.
The threat, however subtle, is real. Eric Holder, the new attorney-general, while eschewing a formal investigation, has told Republicans “prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law”. The justice department is also sitting on an internal report into the calibre of the various torture memos drafted by Bush appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel. The report has apparently already found the memos beneath minimal legal credibility, which implies they were ordered up to make the law fit the already-made decision to torture various terror suspects.
But the big impending release may well be three memos from May 2005, detailing specific torture techniques authorised by Bush and Cheney for use against terror suspects. Newsweek described the yet to be released memos thus: “One senior Obama official . . . said the memos were ‘ugly’ and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a ‘truth commission’ on torture.”
Torture investigation starts in Spain
This is good news.
Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo. The criminal complaint can be examined here. Público identifies the targets as University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.
Why am I not surpised?
Dick Cheney speaks:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney gave a long interview to CNN’s John King this morning. Cheney repeated his previous assertions that President Obama’s policies on terrorism have made the country less safe.
The truth about torture
After President Bush acknowledged that he had ordered certain detainees to be held outside Gitmo and under the control of the CIA in a secret locations and interrogated using an “alternative set of procedures,” no one could doubt that torture had occured. After these prisoners were transferred to Gitmo, they were interviewed by the International Red Cross. Their stories are horrifyingly consistent, and therefore likely to be true. A confidential report prepared by the Red Cross reaches this conclusion.
Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”
Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Seymour Hersh: Cheney ran assasination ring
Seymour Hersh (reporter for The New Yorker) has publicly claimed that an assasination ring was run out of Vice President Cheney’s office.
At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”
Replied Hersh:“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.”
We need a full investigation of what happened under Bush. Now.
Cheney’s statements on torture
The Washington Post issue an editorial properly calling out Cheney’s statements in a recent interview regarding torture.
Characteristically self-assured, Mr. Cheney perpetuated the myth that abiding by the rule of law puts the country in danger. In a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration, he scoffed at those who are “more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans.” This is not only a mischaracterization of Mr. Obama’s position, it is a false choice.
Cheney's statements on torture
The Washington Post issue an editorial properly calling out Cheney’s statements in a recent interview regarding torture.
Characteristically self-assured, Mr. Cheney perpetuated the myth that abiding by the rule of law puts the country in danger. In a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration, he scoffed at those who are “more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans.” This is not only a mischaracterization of Mr. Obama’s position, it is a false choice.
A real class(less) act
Former Bush administration officials, from Dick Cheney down, are busy making public criticisms of the Obama administration. These types of attacks are unusual from a departing administration and are, quite simply, in bad taste. They are also a form of defense from possible criminal prosecution for some former officials.
The knives are already out just two weeks after Bush left the White House, as some of his closest friends and former aides begin lobbing sharp criticisms at the Obama administration.
The comments mark a departure from the general rules of decorum that held sway during the final weeks of the Bush administration, when the departing president and his aides made a point of fostering a cordial relationship with the Obama team. Bush himself has refrained from criticism so far, making no public remarks since returning to Texas.
“It’s certainly unbecoming, especially for a former vice president,” Thomas E. Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, said in reference to the remarks by Cheney and others. “It reinforces the fact that there’s a lot of bitterness about the low public standing of Bush and the administration as they left office, and the soaring standing of Barack Obama. A lot of these people are still caught up in these ideological battles and can’t let go.”