Torture

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What is Dick Cheney Up To?

I couldn’t sleep after something woke me up at 4:15 this morning and I started thinking about Rachel Maddow’s piece last night about former Vice President Dick Cheney.  She presented a video montage of his “torture saves lives” tour of news talk shows.  It is really quite remarkable when you see them one after the other.  Maddow’s piece ends with an interview of Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson who served as Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff when Powell was Secretary of State.  Wilkerson wondered out loud if Cheney realized that he may be making revelations that could provide evidence which could eventually lead to his, Cheney’s, prosecution. 

Then when I finally got out of bed and turned on the computer, there was Maureen Dowd’s column Rouge Diva of Doom.

When Bush 41 was ramping up to the Gulf War, assembling a coalition to fight Saddam, Jimmy Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them not to rush into conflict without further exploring a negotiated solution.

The first President Bush and other Republicans in Washington considered this treasonous, a former president trying to thwart a sitting one, lobbying foreign diplomats to oppose his own country on a war resolution. In 2002, when Bush Junior was ramping up to his war against Saddam, Al Gore made a speech trying to slow down that war resolution, pointing out that pivoting from Osama to Saddam for no reason, initiating “pre-emptive” war, and blowing off our allies would undermine the war on terror.

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Asked by Bob Schieffer on Sunday how America could torture when it made a mockery of our ideals, Cheney blithely gave an answer that surely would have been labeled treasonous by Rush Limbaugh, if a Democratic ex-vice president had said it about a Republican president.

“Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America,” Doomsday Dick said.

Cheney has replaced Sarah Palin as Rogue Diva. Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

So, back to my question:  What is Cheney up to?  Is he on some long term campaign to get Americans to be afraid so we will elect Republicans again?  Is he trying to influence public opinion so that we don’t think torture is all that bad and we won’t want to bring him to trial?  Or is he just stupid?  Here’s Dowd again

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here — and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable — Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

According to Dowd, even the Bush Family doesn’t like what he is doing.  What scares me is that there is a small segment of the population that will believe everything Cheney says and a larger one that can be influenced by his scare tactics.  But maybe the Bushes would like to silence him before he implicates George W. Bush in a way that will be impossible to ignore.  I think his remarks will lead to more documents being revealed.  Perhaps we should keep Cheney talking.

Rachel Maddow has said several times she would like to interview Cheney and last night issued her invitation again with a twist.  She would have Col. Wilkerson help her to do the interview.  I’d say the odds are not good he will accept.

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The Slow Drip of Torture Revelations

Sometimes it feels like torture.  Everyday it feels as if there are new revelations.  Everyday there is more speculation about why President Obama doesn’t come out and say he will or will not support prosecution of Bush administration officials.  I have said before that I think he is waiting to see what Congress does and what the Justice Department finds in various investigations.  I think he doesn’t want to be seen as too eager and too partisan.  I understand why many are frustrated.  After all, the Republicans brought impeachment procedings and had a multi-year investigation by a special prosecutor about what was essentially a personal crime by President Clinton.  The whole thing sapped energy from things that Clinton could have been doing and I can understand that Obama wants to pass some of his real agenda first.  I want to see criminal prosecutions in the courts, although Judge Jay Bybee is an exception who needs to be impeached.

John Nichols writing in the Nation says

And President Obama, who erred on the side of the transparency demanded by the American Civil Liberties Union in its long campaign to obtain the memos, gets points for ordering an end to the use of the torture techniques they outlined and for expressing at least a measure of openness to a “further accounting” and perhaps prosecution of wrongdoers. But Obama’s fretting about inquiries “getting so politicized” and suggesting a preference for shifting responsibility to a bipartisan independent commission are unsettling.As a former constitutional law lecturer, Obama should have a firmer grasp of the point of executive accountability. It is not merely to “lay blame,” as he suggests; it is to set boundaries on presidential behavior and to clarify where wrongdoing will be challenged. Presidents, even those who profess honorable intentions, do not get to write their own rules. Congress must set and enforce those boundaries. When Obama suggested that CIA personnel who acted on the legal advice of the Bush administration would not face “retribution,” Illinois’s Jan Schakowsky, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, offered the only appropriate response. “I don’t want to compare this to Nazi Germany, but we’ve come to almost ridicule the notion that when horrific acts have been committed that people can use the excuse that, Well, I was just following orders,” explained Schakowsky, who has instructed aides to prepare for a torture inquiry. “There should be an open mind of what to do with information that we get from thorough investigations,” she added.

There must also be a proper framework for investigations. Gathering information for the purpose of creating a permanent record is only slightly superior to Obama’s banalities about wanting to “move forward.” Truth commissions that grant immunity to wrongdoers and bipartisan commissions that negotiate their way to redacted reports do not check and balance the executive branch any more than “warnings” punish speeding motorists.

Impeaching Bybee, as recommended by Nadler and Common Cause, would send the right signal. But it cannot be the only one. The House Judiciary Committee should examine all available avenues for achieving accountability–including the prospect of formal action against former officeholders, up to and including the sort of impeachments imagined by Mansfield and his compatriots in 1974. And Nadler and Feingold should use their subcommittees to begin outlining statutory constraints on the executive branch. The point, again, is not merely to address Bush/Cheney-era crimes but also to dial down the imperial presidency that has evolved under the unwatchful eye of successive Congresses.

“Congress…must be vigilant to the perils of the subversive notion that any public official, the president or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent power to set the Constitution aside whenever he thinks the public interest or ‘national security’ warrants it. That notion is the essential postulate of tyranny,” California Congressman Don Edwards warned thirty-five years ago, when too many of his colleagues thought Nixon’s resignation had caged the beast of executive aggrandizement. That vigilance, too long delayed, is the essential duty of every member of Congress who swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution.

Here’s most recent example of the drip of revelations.  It appears that former Secretary of State Condi Rice might also be implicated in a conspiracy.  Keith Olbermann ran this tape  of her trying to defend torture.

So I say the Congress should begin impeaching Jay Bybee and we should let the relevatiions continue.  I’m not sure when enough will be enough to begin criminal proceedings but I’m sure Eric Holder will figure that out.

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The Torture Memos Released

President Obama did the right thing by releasing the Bush Justice Department memos providing a legal justification of torture and in deciding not to prosecute the interregators.  The ones who should be prosecuted are the memo writers who, rather than upholding the Constitution, international law, and basic American values, caved in to people like Vice President Cheney – and perhaps even Cheney, Rice, Rumfeld and Bush.

In his statement accompanying the release, President Obama said

The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. These memos speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period, and their release is required by the rule of law.

My judgment on the content of these memos is a matter of record. In one of my very first acts as President, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer. Enlisting our values in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure. A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.

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The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.

It will no doubt be argued that this may, in fact, leave President Bush and other high ranking members of his administration open to prosecution in international criminal courts such as the one in Spain which as already begun an inquiry.  These, memos, people will argue, only add fuel to the fire.  We can’t have our elected officials held accountable for actions they thought were legal they will argue.

To them I say:  The high ranking officials in Hitler’s government also thought they were acting under the cover of law.  Maybe they didn’t have Justice Department lawyers writing the justifications, but those brought to trial at Nuremburg did not believe they had done anything wrong either.    This is why we now have United Nations Convention on Torture. 

  1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

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  1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
  2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
  3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

I haven’t read the entire test of the memos, but did not we commit war crimes?  Certainly the international agreement about torture was violated.

If we are a great nation, and I believe we are, we must lead not only by words, but also deeds.  I understand the political reasons why President Obama cannot be seen as bringing members of the previous administration to trial, but I see no reason why others, like Congress,  cannot do the ground work and present evidence to prosecutors and the courts.  It is probably better to do it ourselves than to leave it to Spain. 

At the very least, none of those Bush officials can travel outside of the United States without risking arrest.  Oh, I forgot, they better not set foot in Vermont either.

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Making Change

There is a new sheriff in town and his name is Barack Obama.  I think he made that clear yesterday when he told the Republican Congressional leaders (after listening to their laundry list of what was wrong with his Recovery Act proposal), “I won.”

So far President Obama seems to listen to lots of points of view and then make a decision.  I saw an interview with General Powell recently in which he described Obama’s leadership style:  Lots of internal discussion and disagreement.  Then Obama makes a decision and the drama is over.  At least this is what happened during the Transition and the campaign.  There is no reason not to think this will continue.  So “no drama Obama” seems to apply only to what we see in public and there are lots of dissenting voices before decisions are made.  There is nothing like former President Bush’s  (I love writing that!) way of decision making.  In one of his exit interview, Bush was asked if he called people like General Powell before he made a decision after 9/11 and he basically said, “no.  I knew what they thought.”  I can’t imagine this happening with President Obama.  A change.

People can quibble about whether he’s going far enough to end torture and certainly whether his immediate waiver of this lobbying executive order for a former Raytheon lobbyist was a good thing, but I say, so far so good.

I am on the side of those who would like to see prosecutions of those who ordered torture.  But I think (I hope) I see the tactic.  Don’t come out and say you are going to prosecute before Congressional investigations are completed and before there are reports about what Justice, Defense, the NSA and CIA find in internal memos.  Collect the evidence first.

David Sirota wrote

Cut through the meaningless platitudes describing our new president as a post-partisan, post-racial pragmatist, and you find an inspiring leader who organized us around optimism. Then consider that leader’s behavior since the election, and you run into that nagging speck of doubt. His less-than-inspiring Cabinet appointments, his support of Bush’s Wall Street bailout, his embrace of nonsensical corporate tax cuts – these moves raise questions about whether Obama is willing to differentiate between his two campaign themes: hope and change.

While both those things have lately been in short supply, the distance between them on policy is the gulf separating ambition and realization. Hope is a bill peppered with “may” – the word that merely asks banks or polluters to regulate themselves. Change is a statute teeming with “shall” – a term forcing its targets to comply. Hope is telegenic glamour, winning smiles, and poignant one-liners. Change is all the grinding work and uncomfortable confrontations that come with challenging power and enacting transformative laws.

The reason so many cried this week is because we can finally glimpse that change in the distance. And yet, those pangs of concern linger. They don’t undermine the euphoria or diminish Obama’s promise. But they do recognize that we worry about hope’s mirage – and pray there are no illusions this time.

Amen.