A Wicked Man Continues to Spout His Wickedness
Emptywheel (aka Marcy Wheeler) examines Dick Cheney’s latest rantings — on missile defense, on Iraq and Afghanistan, on America’s success in keeping its moral bearings while torturing confessions out of prisoners, on how his administration’s policies kept us safe (except for 9/11 itself, of course, and except for the London bombings, and the Madrid bombings, and the murder of UN ambassador Sergio Vieria de Mello in Iraq….. oh, never mind).
The Cheney Family Business
Maureen Dowd gets only one detail wrong in her lacerating take-down of the newest Cheney Family venture — the probable name:
It’s hard to believe that the Bush dynasty, which limped away in disgrace after smashing our economy and the globe, has spawned another political dynasty.
But Jason Horowitz reported in The Washington Post that Mary Cheney, the younger daughter of the former vice president, is starting a consulting firm modeled on Kissinger Associates.
Since it involves the Cheneys, it’s shrouded in unnecessary secrecy. But Mary’s friends say her plan is to make it Cheney cubed, bringing in her dad and big sister, Liz, when those two finish cleaning out the Augean stables of Dick Cheney’s legacy for his memoir.
Horowitz wrote that Mary, who is expecting her second child with her partner, Heather Poe, next month, may be hanging the shingle for the “gruff clan who speak in dour unison when bashing the current president, second-guessing the previous commander in chief and chiding wayward G.O.P. leaders.”
The influence-peddling firm will be wildly successful, no doubt, because if anyone has shown a golden touch, it’s Dick Cheney. And there are bound to be oodles of clients who want coaching on how to make things look totally the opposite of what they are.
Saudis, right-wing dictators and Bernie Madoff calling for image makeovers? Scooter Libby calling to see how to get his career back after taking the fall for his scheming boss? Rush Limbaugh calling to strategize about how to buy an N.F.L. team with black players as he says offensive things about blacks? Rupert Murdoch seeking tips on how to merge Fox and NBC into Brian O’Hannity?
You can hear a receptionist chirping: “Cheney, Cheney & Cheney. Who would you like to target today?”
Never. Never, never, never. No Cheney worthy of the name would ever leave their fingerprints all over their handiwork that way. No, Liz and Mary are much likelier to pick a name like “Solutions for a Safe America” or something like that.
Generals to Dick & Liz: Stop Scaring People!
Josh Gerstein at Politico:
About a dozen retired generals and admirals, trying to add momentum to President Barack Obama’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison, are accusing former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz of scaremongering about the dangers of closing it.
“It’s up to all of us to say these arguments advanced by Cheney and his acolytes are nonsense and that really what they’re doing is undermining our national security by delaying the date at which Guantanamo is closed,” retired Brig. Gen. James Cullen, a former chief judge of the Army’s Court of Criminal Appeals, told POLITICO Tuesday.
“Some of the fear issues that are being raised in this are really unfortunate. It gets people excited about things they shouldn’t be excited about and impedes doing what is critical to this country. Get that damn symbol off the table,” said retired Gen. David Maddox, a former Army commander-in-chief for Europe. “We take a setback every time somebody, whether it’s the vice president or his daughter comes out and says the things that they say….We have to get out there again and just keep pounding.”
The former vice president and his daughter declined comment on the criticism.
The former military officers, whose Washington visit was organized by Human Rights First, argued rather bitterly that the Cheneys have exaggerated the risks of bringing Guantanamo prisoners from Cuba to the United States.
“Can you imagine getting a terrorist from Guantanamo convicted and put in a federal penitentiary in your town?” Maddox asked. “Have you ever checked who the hell’s in there already? Have any of them gotten out? The person who we’re putting in is probably a heck of lot less dangerous than most of them who are already in there.”
Needless to say, Michael Goldfarb — being the big supporter of the military that he is — thinks that 12 former U.S. generals and admirals are addled in the head and don’t know what they’re talking about — because, of course, they are not talking the talk that he likes to hear.
The Man for Whom Democracy Is “Moral Weakness”
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney is making the rounds to promote his upcoming memoirs, in which, apparently, he plans to break his rule about not airing policy disagreements in public and tell us how deeply disappointed he is in his erstwhile boss, for — although I have never thought of George W. Bush along these lines — not being sufficiently dismissive of public opinion:
The Torture Investigation Mystery Show
So there’s been a lot of speculation in blogtopia about Attorney General Eric Holder’s reportedly renewed intentions of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the authorization and use of torture in the previous administration. The speculation — which revolves around the question of who Holder intends to prosecute, more than whether he intends to prosecute — has been fueled by these three articles:
- Daniel Klaidman’s piece, published Saturday in Newsweek, which reported that AG Holder had returned to the possibility of prosecutions.
- Carrie Johnson’s Washington Post article titled “Probe of Alleged Torture Weighed,” published on Sunday, which speculated that any investigation would be limited to CIA interrogators who had gone beyond the “guidelines” prescribed by the Bush lawyers.
- Scott Horton’s “Torture Prosecution Turnaround?” published in The Daily Beast, also yesterday. which suggested that the scope of prosecutions, if they happened, would be wider.
I certainly agree with Tim, Glenn, and Spencer that if investigations and/or prosecutions are going to be limited to low-hanging fruit, it would be better not to do anything at all. But I don’t think it’s at all clear that’s what Holder has in mind.
Keep in mind, first, that — as Glenn himself pointed out – the predictions as to what Holder will do in both articles — Johnson’s and Horton’s — are being made by anonymous sources. I’m not going to take any claims seriously that come from sources without names or identities attached to them. It’s not even that I think these people are unreliable, whoever they are. I’m sure they are high-ranking officials who know Holder well. But no matter who they are, if they are anonymous, they might as well be no one, because there’s no accountability. No other journalist can call them up and confirm what they said. So they can say whatever they want, but it has no gravitas until they are identified.
And that leads me to the other reason I don’t take these claims about Holder’s intentions seriously: They’re not meant seriously. They’re meant to test the waters. Isn’t that what corporate journalism is about these days? Anonymous sources test-driving major decisions by calling reporters at major papers and sending out trial balloons?
It can actually be entertaining sometimes to see how reporters for top national papers parse the reasons for not naming the sources. There’s a whole structure and style to presenting sources anonymously. First, there is the obligatory first mention, “…according to three sources. …” This is usually included in the opening paragraph, but sometimes it’s the second or third. Then, several paragraphs further down in the article, you get the “reason” why these sources are not being identified. And I put “reason” in quotes because, obviously, there’s only one reason. But Carrie Johnson can’t very well tell us that her sources would only agree to speak to her on background “because they don’t want to be held responsible for the information they’re leaking.” So instead, she writes that the sources “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing process.”
Thank you to Digby for inspiring the above rant by saying exactly what I had been thinking (in the first Update to her post about the Brain Trust at This Week With George Stephanopoulos).
Count the Strawmen
I count five, stated in various ways (listed under video).
1. The Democrats still want to blame the Bush administration for the economy.
2. The Democrats want to dismantle the CIA.
3. Nancy Pelosi is looking for political cover.
4. It’s not unusual for president and vice-president to be involved.
5. The CIA is in the secrecy business and Congress wants to know everything.
(And one dodge: “I don’t have enough information.”)
Via Think Progress.
The IG Warrantless Surveillance Report
Here is a roundup of commentary about the report (h/t Glenn), which came out on Friday.
Obama Official Claims Post-Acquittal Right to Detain
I suppose I have to get used to maintaining a nothing-surprises-me attitude toward the Obama administration when it comes to anything related to civil liberties or human rights — just as I had to during the previous administration.
Matthew Alexander: Torture Has Cost Us American Lives
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this video is worth at least a hundred thousand:
Via The Huffington Post.
The Dick and Liz Cheney Traveling Road Show
Steve Benen wrote on Friday about the extraordinary ubiquitousness of Liz Cheney lately. In the past 10 days (as of Friday afternoon) she had appeared on a dozen different tv shows — mostly Fox News and right-wing talk show hosts like Joe Scarborough and Sean Hannity.
The Paul Bunyan of National Security
The trouble with Dick Cheney is that he believes his own tall tales — and he wants everyone else to believe them, too:
Reporting from Washington — In the bitter debate over the nation’s counter-terrorism policies, former Vice President Dick Cheney has introduced an assertion that substantially raises the stakes.
Twice in the last two weeks — including during his speaking duel with President Obama on Thursday — Cheney has said that the Bush administration’s approach may have saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives.
It is a claim that goes beyond anything Cheney or former President George W. Bush said while in office — crediting their approach with preventing casualties on a scale that the United States has not seen since World War II.
But terrorism experts said that though it is possible to envision scenarios that involve casualties of that magnitude, no evidence has emerged about the plots disrupted during the Bush administration to suggest that Cheney’s claim is true.
“It’s an easy thing to say and a difficult thing to prove,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “I think it’s another broadside in this ongoing feud.”
Cheney: Still Cherry-Picking After All These Years
Jonathan Landay of McClatchy goes through the long list of lies, distortions, and convenient omissions in Cheney’s “national security” speech yesterday:
Is Waterboarding Torture? Ask Mancow Muller.
Via Joe Gandelman at TMV:
Kudos to Mancow Muller for his courage and his honesty.
Frank Rich to Pres. Obama: Can’t Stand Athwart History, Yelling “Stop!”
Or, as Bonnie Raitt said, “Can’t stop a river, once it’s burst its banks. …”:
To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
[...]
… The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew…” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
Frank Rich column, here.
Bonnie Raitt, “Storm Warning” lyrics here.
Truth and Dick Cheney Are Not Even Nodding Acquaintances
Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to Colin Powell) has a must-read guest post at The Washington Note. He completely deflates Cheney’s “torture saves lives” argument:
First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney’s watch than on any other leader’s watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the “seven and a half years” after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact.
There was absolutely no policy priority attributed to al-Qa’ida by the Cheney-Bush administration in the months before 9/11. Counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke’s position was downgraded, al-Qa’ida was put in the background so as to emphasize Iraq, and the policy priorities were lowering taxes, abrogating the ABM Treaty and building ballistic missile defenses.
Second, the fact no attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11–much touted by Cheney–is due almost entirely to the nation’s having deployed over 200,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and not to “the Cheney method of interrogation.”
Those troops have kept al-Qa’ida at bay, killed many of them, and certainly “fixed” them, as we say in military jargon. Plus, sadly enough, those 200,000 troops present a far more lucrative and close proximity target for al-Qa’ida than the United States homeland. Testimony to that fact is clear: almost 5,000 American troops have died, more Americans than died on 9/11. Of course, they are the type of Americans for whom Cheney hasn’t much use as he declared rather dramatically when he achieved no less than five draft deferments during the Vietnam War.
Third–and here comes the blistering fact–when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops “the Cheney method of interrogation and torture”, the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.
My investigations have revealed to me–vividly and clearly–that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering “the Cheney methods of interrogation”, simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.
What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama’s having shut down the “Cheney interrogation methods” will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?
Condi’s Deceptive Response to Stanford Student
Remember this? (emphasis added by Cenk, not me):
“The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” (emphasis added)
That’s what Condi Rice told the student at Stanford who was challenging her on the legality of torture. But as it turns out, internal support for the CIA’s interrogation program had begun to come apart around 2003, and Rice was a key player in a series of sometimes sharp conflicts among senior administration officials about the legality of the program:
R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find Out What It Means to Cheney.
At today’s White House presser, Robert Gibbs was asked to respond to Dick Cheney’s CNN interview in which he told John King that Pres. Obama was putting the country at risk of another terrorist attack by announcing his intention to close Guantanamo and to end former Pres. Bush’s pro-torture policy, as well as his regime’s policy of detaining suspected terrorists indefinitely with no legal protections or rights.
Donate to CFLF
Blogroll
Pennsylvania Blogs
The Liberal Media
Blogging Liberally
Advertising
Comments From Left Field is a member of...
Memeorandum
Archives
- 2010: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2009: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2008: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2007: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2006: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2005: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2004: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2003: J F M A M J J A S O N D
Blog Stuff
