Adventures in hubris

Dick Cheney has endorsed Marco Rubio in the Florida Senate race over Florida governor Charlie Crist, now deemed an insufficient conservative in today's Republican witch-hunt climate.

Now read Cheney's statement in support of Rubio. Think about what he's saying. This man, who irrevocably altered America in ways too numerous to name at this point in the day, has the unbridled, runaway ego to say the following.

“Our country is at a crossroads facing threats from abroad and attempts from within to restructure the very foundation of our freedoms. America requires leaders to face down these challenges who are confident in who they are and what they stand for. Leaders who know that public service is about something bigger than climbing the political ladder and amassing greater political power…

“We can trust Marco to stand up to the Obama agenda that threatens our freedom, and promote clear conservative alternatives…Charlie Crist has shown time and again that he cannot be trusted in Washington to take on the Obama agenda because on issue after issue he actually supports that agenda. Lately it seems Charlie Crist cannot be trusted even to remain a Republican. I strongly urge him to either stay in the Republican Primary or drop out of the race.”

“Our country is at a crossroads facing threats from abroad and attempts from within to restructure the very foundation of our freedoms." Fear, paranoia, denial, self-loathing, it's par for the course for Dick.

"Public service is about something bigger than ... amassing greater political power." Laughable. This is the man that drove an unprecedented level of executive power.

And he says don't trust those that aren't one of chosen. Sounds like McCarthyism. What vicious dirtbag.

Our little Iraq is all grown up and torturing on its own

Freedom is on the march.

LA Times:

Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country's Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say.

The men were detained by the Iraqi army in October in sweeps targeting Sunni groups in Nineveh province, a stronghold of the group Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militants in the north. The provincial governor alleged at the time that ordinary citizens had been detained as well, often without a warrant.

[...]

Commanders initially resisted efforts to inspect the prison but relented and allowed visits by two teams of inspectors, including Human Rights Minister Wijdan Salim. Inspectors said they found that the 431 prisoners had been subjected to appalling conditions and quoted prisoners as saying that one of them, a former colonel in President Saddam Hussein's army, had died in January as a result of torture.

"More than 100 were tortured. There were a lot of marks on their bodies," said an Iraqi official familiar with the inspections. "They beat people, they used electricity. They suffocated them with plastic bags, and different methods."

[...]

Maliki vowed to shut down the prison and ordered the arrest of the officers working there after Salim presented him with a report this month. Since then, 75 detainees have been freed and an additional 275 transferred to regular jails, Iraqi officials said. Maliki said in an interview that he had been unaware of the abuses. He said the prisoners had been sent to Baghdad because of concerns about corruption in Mosul.

"The prime minister cannot be responsible for all the behavior of his soldiers and staff," said Salim, praising Maliki's willingness to root out abuses. Salim, a Chaldean Christian, ran for parliament in last month's elections on Maliki's Shiite-dominated list.

Maliki defended his use of special prisons and an elite military force that answers only to him; his supporters say he has had no choice because of Iraq's precarious security situation. Maliki told The Times that he was committed to stamping out torture -- which he blamed on his enemies.

"Our reforms continue, and we have the Human Rights Ministry to monitor this," he said. "We will hold accountable anybody who was proven involved in such acts."

Reading the whole story, I had to laugh at the eerie symmetry in which the torture, denial and cover-up mirror America's own treatment of Iraqis (at Abu Ghraib) and other detainees. Too bad the U.S. has no moral authority to legitimately condemn these actions.

This is your legacy Dick Cheney.

Yoo and Bybee: Innocent until proven sane

Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis concludes that torture memo conspirators John Yoo and Jay Bybee may have been grossly incompetent and viciously off base, but what they authorized was not *technically* illegal.

Jack Balkin (read the whole spot-on indictment of this decision):

Margolis concludes that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment and made bad legal arguments. But lawyers often make arguments that are bad or even laughably bad, and this by itself does not violate the very low standard set by rules of professional responsibility. These rules are set up by jurisdictions to weed out the worst offenders, leaving the rest of the legal profession to make entirely stupid, disingenuous and asinine arguments that normal people with functioning moral consciences would not make. That is to say, rules of professional misconduct are aimed at weeding out sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems; they do not guarantee that lawyers will do right by their clients, or, in this case, by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. In effect, by setting the standard of conduct so low, rules of professional conduct effectively work to protect all those lawyers out there whose moral standing is just a hair's breadth above your average mass murderer. This is how the American legal profession simultaneously polices and takes care of its own.

Scathing.

And Dick Cheney will go on bragging about being a war criminal.

Obama administration still insists they care about civil liberties

Stay with me.

The Washington Times' Eli Lake today:

President Obama is coming under pressure from Democrats and civil liberties groups for failing to fill positions on an oversight panel formed in 2004 to make sure the government does not spy improperly on U.S. citizens.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, or PCLOB, was recommended initially by the bipartisan September 11 commission as an institutional voice for privacy inside the intelligence community. Its charter was to recommend ways to mitigate the effects of far-reaching surveillance technology that the federal government uses to track terrorists.

The panel was established in 2004 under President Bush as part of the executive office of the president. Its independence was unclear for several years. Congress responded by increasing the board's budget, expanding its powers and moving it outside the presidential executive office in 2007.

Since taking office, Mr. Obama has allowed the board to languish. He has not even spent the panel's allocation from the fiscal 2010 budget.

SOME lawmakers are pushing the administration to act. Then Lake gets a comment from the Obama team.

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, defended the administration's record in general but acknowledged the Democrats' criticisms and said the White House would soon act on them.

This president has made clear his commitment to civil liberties through the actions of his administration, and appreciates the congressional interest in this important issue. The White House has allocated funding for the PCLOB, and looks forward to appointing its leadership soon, he said.

(Emphasis mine)

That's beyond rich. Obama tried to peddle that line of thought in his State of the Union too.

Lake begins to chronicle proof that Rhodes is brimming with deception:

For example, the Obama administration pressed a British court last year to keep secret details of how terrorism suspect Binyam Mohammed was treated while in U.S. and Pakistani custody. The administration has also embraced in some cases the concept of indefinite detention for some terrorism suspects apprehended during the Bush presidency, and it has increased the practice of targeted killings in Pakistan and Yemen through unmanned aerial vehicles.

On the issue of surveillance, Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign voted for reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a bill criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union for providing only minimal court oversight to expansive electronic intelligence-collection programs.

It goes on.

Outside of authorizing torture (and we have no proof torture isn't still going on since no one's allowed to observe overseas prisons), Obama is a direct heir of the Bush/Cheney legacy. The constitutional law professor and his own attorney general, in refusing to hold those guilty of what we'd call war crimes if another country did it, are beyond being accessories to the ugliness and are now the prime drivers of this illegal, shameful and immoral activity.

Gouge Away

Andrew Sullivan characteristically explains the world we live in, the age of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin:

They represent a real populist and authoritarian option for a declining power. In the face of a bewilderingly changing world, they stand for white America, the extension of its power across the globe, the elevation of torture as a core American value, the permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and American occupation of client states like Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent a contempt for addressing climate change, and an indifference to debt - both Palin and Cheney have records of appalling fiscal profligacy. They also represent religious fundamentalism as the core Republican political philosophy. Cheney supports a party that would strip his own daughter - and has stripped his own daughter - of basic civil rights. Palin would criminalize all abortion.

The appeal of populist simplicity in complicated, demoralizing times is real and eternal. Obama has not in office been able to muster a scintilla of popular energy the way this rump right has. In fact, his moderate conservative governance has defused the energy of his campaign in ways that remain quite stunning. In this emotional game, the far right has the advantage of "us" vs "them." There are no real solutions to deep problems - no actual spending cuts proposed, nothing but the use of force abroad, nothing in energy policy but more carbon exploration, no immigration policy that isn't obsessed with resisting any sort of amnesty, and on and on.

One imagines that the American people - when they have to decide on a president who will actually have to govern - will turn away from a Palin. But that such a farce remains the most powerful figure on the right should sober anyone with complacency.

We live in a fundamentalist age. And there is only one fundamentalist party. Unless it is beaten repeatedly at the polls, it will at some point govern again.

And he's spot on about Obama. I never imagined the deflation of so much energy from his support group. No, it's not feasible to match that campaign's fervor -- Obama's historical run plus the national disdain for Bush was a powerful combo. But he's not leading the way he pledged during the campaign. Adopting way too many of Bush's most egregious policies is no change.

Letting the trolls out

Andrew Sullivan on the Gitmo-cheering Cheney family M.O. at this point, as exemplified by Liz's demagoguery of the prisoner transfer "debate":

It's so bizarre that transferring prisoners to mainland jails in order to shut down the objective black eye of Gitmo is receiving so much resistance from the pro-torture right. We can argue about how to try these suspects, but their location should surely be a non-issue.

What Cheney fears, I suspect, is that Gitmo will be shut down, that history will record it as the lowest point in US human rights ever, that the Cheney family will be tarred as the brand that destroyed America's moral standing, and that Dick Cheney will become one of the darkest figures in modern American history.

But if you can keep Gitmo open, if you prevent detainee transfer, if you can spin the next terror attack as caused by the refusal to torture ... you have a chance to rescue the narrative again. And so America's cold civil war continues ...

To rescue the narrative, they would need the media. And surely the media has no qualms about letting these trolls out of the cellar to spew pro-torture bile all over airwaves.

One step closer to the disappearance of those detainee photos

The Senate passed the Homeland Security appropriations bill (with the Lieberman amendment that will usurp Congress's power to hold prerogative over detainee abuse photos, giving it to the Defense secretary.) by a margin of 79 to 19 yesterday.

And of course, I have to read about this on the Web site of The Reporters Committee of Freedom of the Press. No disrespect for them, but when RCFP and the ACLU are the only voices pushing against this, it's a sad state of affairs in the press. RCFP:

In a letter to Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the ACLU urged him to "not invoke your new and discretionary authority to suppress images of abuse."

[...]

"We are deeply disappointed that Congress has voted to give the Defense Department the authority to hide evidence of its own misconduct,” said the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer in a release. “Secretary Gates should be guided by the importance of transparency to the democratic process, the extraordinary importance of these photos to the ongoing debate about the treatment of prisoners and the likelihood that the suppression of these photos would ultimately be far more damaging to national security than their disclosure.”

I wonder what Republicans think of such executive power, something they suddenly rail about after supporting unprecedented presidential power for George W. Bush? I wonder how Democrats feel, being the majority and all, exposing themselves once again as frauds and hypocrites after railing against Bush's similar excesses while they were a minority? I can't imagine Gates doing what Obama doesn't want. And Obama seems to want to suppress this proof of American war crimes. Torture and murder of detainees is not America. But Dick Cheney made it the centerpiece of our global policy. Or at least that's how our "friends and enemies" see it. Now Barack Obama covers it up. I don't know how the Cheneyites could have it any better than complicity, cover up and a blind eye.

Desperation, the Preferred Human Emotion of the Cheneys

I like how the Cheney name has become synonymous with "dark fatalistic scowl."

A new non-profit org, Keep America Safe, is the brainchild of Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol that attempts to drive home the idea that Obama has made us less safe (when in actuality, he's not de-escalated much of anything George W. Bush's military did ... troops have left Iraq, but more have and will go to Afghanistan).

Scott Horton from Harper's:

I’d reduce the real purpose of Keep America Safe to this: “Please don’t prosecute my father!” It’s increasingly clear that Dick Cheney was the author of the Bush-era torture policies, and my hunch is that when the Justice Department releases the OPR report on the torture memos, we’re going to find more evidence of the invisible hand of Dick Cheney behind the whole project. Any fair-minded federal prosecutor looking into the matter would shortly be preparing to do what Patrick Fitzgerald probably wishes now he had done: indict Dick Cheney.

Again, this is some monumental scrambling on the family's part. Liz is the most passionate (or just most comfortable with a camera), though the rest are probably working their own preferred back channels underground and in assorted sinister places the Cheneys go at night.

The Dark Side

This guy....

No shame:

"I'm very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully," Cheney said....

No regret. Soulless:

"I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly ... is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaida," Cheney said. "The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, 'How did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?'"

Whereas I imagine George W. Bush falls into deep moments of reflection and doubt in his suburban Dallas home these days as he works on his memoir, I can't fathom that this black-hearted fearmonger does anything of the sort. Then again, we do know he's a master liar capable of selling wars and unlawful conduct on many levels, so maybe there's a possibility that he agonizes over his defense of torture on a very personal level. But, again, I lean toward the former, the total embrace of the abuse of executive power to reach a perceived end. Not only do the means not justify the end that Cheney wanted (reliable, surefire intelligence gained from detainees on terror plots), but the end doesn't even exist.

Bushies are resorting to excessive distortion. They're scrambling. Dick Cheney, despite his eerie resolve, is scared to death. Scared not of this lame preliminary review from the Justice Dept. that will only punish those who were given unlawful orders from Bush hacks at DOJ. Not of the Obama administration, who refuses to uphold the law in what may be the most important series of implications for our country's affirmation of a two-tiered justice system since, well, the bank bailouts, which wasn't that long ago. Our rubber stamp of torture is recognized throughout the world. We're now the gold standard for torture, simply because it came from America.

What Dick Cheney is scared of is what will inevitably continue to trickle out through the work of the ACLU, a few journalists (notice not the mainstream media or Congress) and other former Bush officials that are just waiting to divulge what they know, when the time is right. I think we'll get confirmation that he was intimately involved (I mean on the phone multiple times a day), receiving intel from Gitmo and elsewhere and giving direct orders, laws be damned. And we'll find out that he pushed for the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. Explicitly.

No matter how much he lies to us and himself, he knows.

------

Update: And in a related, embarrassing.

Cheney in Hooves

How come it's always Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and The Onion that are best left to articulate the absurdities of our politicians and media establishment? The Onion does a number on the torture debate here:

Fake right-wing pundit: "I think it's sad that the word 'neverending labyrinth of pain' are synonymous with the errors made by one loose-cannon minotaur who, yeah, admittedly went too far."

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

So is an ax-wielding minotaur where we draw the line? Or is it more realistic to draw that line at the death of detainees while in our captivity?