He has confessed to war crimes, without any of the shame or reticence that word usually conveys. In an interview with ABC News the other week, he made it clear that he had supported "enhanced interrogation techniques" from the beginning, and still does.
He's not making it easy to not hate him. He's even making life difficult for the people in the Obama administration who don't want him or his cronies prosecuted. From the article:
Those statements, both on Sunday and in his December 2008 interview with Karl, destroys a key line in the Bush administration's defense against war crimes charges. For years, Cheney and other Bush administration officials pinned their defense on the fact that they had received legal advice from Justice Department lawyers that the brutal interrogations of “war on terror” detainees did not constitute torture or violate other laws of war.
Cheney's statements, however, would suggest that the lawyers were colluding with administration officials in setting policy, rather than providing objective legal analysis.
Obama's not doing too great on this front. Even with Cheney spewing toxicity and lies to the media (if you'd like to consider Fox News "media"), the Obama administration has consistently resisted calls for government investigations. It has gone to court to block lawsuits that demand release of torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture (and yes, waterboarding was, and has always been, torture). A final word on this, from Rahm Emanuel:
"Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community..." [...] "Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, 'Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?'"I understand the impulse to put ugliness behind you. But there are boils that need lancing, and the longer they fester, the uglier they get. I expected better.
What a mess.
Wow. The misanthropist in me doesn't want to care about war criminals being tortured, but the politicophobe in me is screaming for justice. There's a couple of things I don't understand here, and one that I understand all too well.
ReplyDelete"'If there is somebody captured,' President George W. Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, 'I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals.'"
"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..."
One almost has to admire the sheer brazenness of politicians. I can't think of a single one that hasn't been caught in their own web of lies and hypocracy like this (although this instance is much more severe). Why do we continue to elect these people? I think we are to blame for intances like this.
Two things really stick out though that confuse me. The first is, why is Dick Cheney doing this? I read some of the transcription, and it just seems too... what's a word that's stronger than arrogant? It almost seems like he wants to be tried for his crimes. Perhaps he is trying to martyr himself... but I can't figure out why (or what anyone could gain from that). The second thing that strikes me as incredibly odd is that I hardly heard about this. Why was this swept under the rug of the mainstream media? Wouldn't you think that the masses of liberally biased news outlets would have run with this? Even the Times and the Post omitted some of the most incriminating statements. I wonder why.
On an ending note in hypocracy (from the transcript):
Cheney: "We took down his government, a man who'd produced weapons of mass destruction, a who'd started two different wars, a man who had a relationship with terror."
When the U.S. has the largest concentration of weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush administration started seven wars...