Cheney, Part II

Here we learn that Cheney was at the heart of the soul-deadening practice of torture to extract information from our enemies.

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

A backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of abuse leaked out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to be sharp reversals in courts and Congress -- for both Cheney's claims of executive supremacy and his unyielding defense of what he called "robust interrogation."

But a more careful look at the results suggests that Cheney won far more than he lost. Many of the harsh measures he championed, and some of the broadest principles undergirding them, have survived intact but out of public view.

Yes folks, even when the forces of justice and democracy feel they have won, behind the scenes they have not. Because Cheney is like a marionette at controlling levers of power. He uses some of the most skillful lawyerly tactics to give the appearance of staying within the law while essentially gutting it:

Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony [Read the act]. The best defense against such a charge, Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential direction for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

And so we get a definition of torture that equates it only with organ failure or death, enabling any over treatment to be allowable. As it turns out, Cheney had his fingers all over this redefinition, and his own lawyer, David Addington, was the ghost writer of the infamous "torture memo":

The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA -- including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

Apparently, everyone in the White House is afraid of Cheney, so when they have a problem with what he's done, they go beat up on Fredo:

On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.

Rice "very angrily said there would be no more secret opinions on international and national security law," the official said, adding that she threatened to take the matter to the president if Gonzales kept them out of the loop again. Powell remarked admiringly, as they emerged, that Rice dressed down the president's lawyer "in full Nurse Ratched mode," a reference to the ward chief of a mental hospital in the 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Neither of them took their objections to Cheney, the official said, a much more dangerous course.

What kind of mutated government have we constructed where the Vice President not only walls off his office to the snooping eyes and ears of Congressional and executive oversight, but his own peers are too afraid of him to confront him, and so take out their frustrations on lower-level functionaries while Cheney goes behind all of their backs and essentially runs the government, his hand up the back of his empty-suit ventriloquist's dummy called the President? More than anything, this is an exposure of the cracks in the Constitutional fabric, demanding that the entire structure of it be reviewed to prevent this kind of unaccountability from ever happening again.

The Vice President was writing our intelligence laws. He was determining how far military interrogators and the CIA could go to attempt to extract information. He was fighting, and winning, turf battles with practically every federal agency in the government.

The other problem with this, of course, is that Cheney is a dangerously stupid man, who has constructed a view of executive power that doesn't exist, and has convinced himself and his acolytes that it gives him unllimited control. So when these theories are brought into court, like in Hamdi or Hamdan or Rasul they are always overturned. However, Cheney could always fall back on his secret maneuvering inside the government to come up with ways to circumvent any restriction.

On Oct. 5, 2005, the Senate voted 90 to 9 in favor of McCain's Detainee Treatment Act, which included the Geneva language. It was, by any measure, a rebuke to Cheney. Bush signed the bill into law. "Well, I don't win all the arguments," Cheney told the Wall Street Journal [...]

The final measure confined only the Defense Department to the list of interrogation techniques specified in a new Army field manual. No techniques were specified for CIA officers, who were forbidden only in general terms to employ "cruel" or "inhuman" methods. Crucially, the new law said those words would be interpreted in light of U.S. constitutional law. That made a big difference to Cheney [...]

Eager to put detainee scandals behind them, Bush's advisers spent days composing a statement in which the president would declare support for the veto-proof bill on detainee treatment. Hours before Bush signed it into law on Dec. 30, 2005, Cheney's lawyer intercepted the accompanying statement "and just literally takes his red pen all the way through it," according to an official with firsthand knowledge.

Addington substituted a single sentence. Bush, he wrote, would interpret the law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief."

Yep, the familiar signing statement language comes from Cheney.

Read the whole thing and weep for our country.