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"Toss ‘em in a hole, throw away the key, I gotta pee."
That’s only a slightly irreverent version of Dick Cheney’s technique for identifying "legitimate" prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to an interview by Lawrence Wilkerson, highlighted by Scott Horton.
We had no process to identify whether prisoners captured or delivered to us by local warlords and bounty hunters were worth detaining. We knew nothing about them, except that most of them were innocent. Word is, the White House said keep ‘em anyway, they might know sumpin’. Why not release them? Because to do that would be to admit error. And we all know neither Bush nor Cheney could ever recollect a single act they wanted to do over or differently.
We imprisoned and tortured men and children, killing more than a hundred. Most knew nothing, we knew they knew nothing. We keep them anyway to avoid admitting error and to pick up stray bits of raw data that we might have picked up from a decent map or by getting Juan Cole on the phone for half an hour. But I forgot: neither reality nor the law applied to the Bush administration; they made up their own.
I’m all for a credibly funded, empowered, staffed and operated Truth Commission, whose reports are made public. Prosecutions for serial violations of domestic and international laws? I’m all for those, too. Richard Bruce Cheney would top my list of usual suspects. Who tops Mr. Obama’s?
26 Comments
From the Wilkerson piece (emph. mine):
[snip]
Thank you EoH. Sobering piece.
So far, nobody. Unfortunately.
i have more reapect for wilconson then anyone who served in the bush admin
wrote that from my phone, sorry about the typo on Wilkerson’s name
I was just over at think progress and they make some EXCELLANY highlights to go with your’s earl
it seems powel and wilferson were FURIOUS with cheney after that interview and he needed to slam cheney back
these highlights are INCREDIBLE;
BRUTAL!
there’s more;
me LUBS me some wilkerson
People like Cheyney–and, I fear, his near apologists in the current Administration–will never get the point about torture and arbitrary deprivation of liberty until they at least face the possibility that it might apply to them. We have a rule of law and inalienable rights so that no person or persons gets to arbitrarily choose who gets mistreated and who has privileges. It’s everyone or no one in a nation of laws.
This is why I think that someone needs to point out that persons like Cheyney and Yoo–those who would make themselves King–are exactly the “enemies domestic” that most frightened the Founders and framed their conception of Treason. If we believe in them and their vision, no threat–certainly no threat conceived by goatherds in far away caves, with or without crahing planes–can come anywhere near the danger that these crypto-royals pose to the nation.
Hence my Modest Proposal: if we grant Mr. Cheyney’s logic, shouldn’t we have an Inquisition rather than a truth commission or special prosecutor? Isn’t a treasonous and tyrannical plot a more clear and present danger than ANY ticking bomb, even a nuclear one? Shouldn’t we be showing the Bushies the “instruments of full disclosure?” and then going 24 on their aging exteriors? I’m just saying, “if”.
An inquisition would be satisfying; it would subject Mr. Cheney to his own perverse sense of justice. It would not restore the rule of law or help guide us away from the Cheneys-in-waiting.
Churchill once corrected a too self-assured view about his country’s naval supremacy. He reminded the English that their anthem’s refrain, “Rule, Britannia, rule the waves” was a command, a task to perform. It was not an unchangeable description of its navy’s dominance of the sea.
So too, the “rule of law” is a command, a task to perform. Our Founding Fathers went to great lengths to structure our government to avoid being subject to the rule of men. They knew Cheneys in their day, and structured their government to avoid their dominance. They preferred the rule of law. With all its flaws, in its terms or application, it was far safer than the rule of men.
Wilkerson’s claims are consistent with Powell’s prior conduct and the public descriptions of Cheney and Rumsfeld’s. Mr. Cheney didn’t just throw away his kid gloves (which he skinned and tanned himself). He threw away the rule book, the statute book and the prayer book. He wasn’t defending America; he was reveling in power and wreaking havoc among the innocent more than the predatory. And he ran the government while Mr. Bush sat in a chair too tall to allow his feet to touch the ground.
What public servant, let alone one of the brightest stars ever to have graduated from Harvard Law, could pretend that we cannot cast our eyes on such evil, that we must only “look forward”. That’s the bleep of an apologist from Nuremberg seeking safety in obscurity, not the voice of statesmanship.
Wilkerson is on Rachel’s right now.
Brian Tamanaha, on why there must be a criminal investigation of the Bush administration:
There’s only one problem with your post, it’s in past tense. People are still being tortured as we speak. About 50 of the detainees are on a hunger strike, so they are being force fed. Twice a day they are being strapped down and having tubes shoved up their noses and down into their stomachs, without anesthetic. That’s torture. Many of them are in critical condition.
Standing for justice and accountability,
For Dan,
Heather
That would indeed be torture.
Thanks, Heather.
Force-feeding is questionable as torture; it is cruel, all the more so because it is a response to hunger strikes undertaken in order to get the administration to stop torturing or holding the innocent for no better reason than it doesn’t know what to do with them, or to face the consequence that its and its predecessor’s policies have made extremists where few existed before.
But you’re correct, the prisons have not been closed and abuse and torture and inhumane treatment continue. Some reports indicate that it has gotten worse at Gitmo, not better, since the transition to Team Obama. An incredible development.
The idea that it is responsible to take a year or two to release the innocent seems Cheneyian. It’s about as responsible as Team Obama’s approach to the bail-out, which is to continue the Bush regime’s template, but with more money. Which is also much of what seems to be taking place at the DOJ, to pick a single department.
Who says elections have consequences?
As the GrievanceProject pointed out, force-feeding in combination with other acts and over a sustained period could well be torture, not just cruel or inhumane treatment. (Though legal distinctions don’t mean a lot when you involuntarily have a tube shoved down your throat twice a day by burly special forces guys who’ve kept you in sensory isolation and beaten, intimidated and threatened you and your religion for years.)
Cheney’s prisons evolved around eliciting a sense of hopeless, abject, battered dependence, not the timely gleaning of information from informed players. (Even the latter is not sufficient to imprison someone, let alone abuse and torture them.)
Apart from continuing to hold the innocent for years, under cruel and inhumane conditions and subjecting some or all of them to torture, there’s the quaint notion that even wrongdoers have rights. After, but especially before the government proves their guilt in an open court of competent jurisdiction operating under generally accepted rules of procedure and evidence. Mr. Cheney’s word ought not be enough to imprison someone for life.
In CheneyWorld, however, the ideas on which this country was founded, and which he claims to protect, were as quaint as the horse and buggy. Mr. Cheney prided himself on imprisoning people because he could, because he was afraid of them or wanted us to be afraid of them, because of what they might do or claimed to want to do, regardless of any reasonable ability to achieve their objects. Like razing the Brooklyn Bridge with a flashlight and tire jack, or shutting down an airport with a pair of pliers, a roll of tape and a fistful of dollars. That’s not the rule of law or even rational, if authoritarian, government. It is rule by whim.
Obama has only been in office two months. But he spent nearly three months preparing to take office. On key issues, it seems reasonable to demand he act faster.
Sadly, women also were imprisoned and tortured. See ondelette’s writing about Aafia Siddiqui at HumanityAgainstCrimes.
Thanks for that correction. I don’t imagine it mattered to Cheney. He remembers reading – from the safe distance of one of his five deferments – about booby-traps killing soldiers in Vietnam. Everybody’s a potential enemy for him, no matter the facts or circumstances. The farther down that road the mind goes, and the more heinous the acts committed to “keep it safe”, the farther down it has to go. Little wonder he retired to within a tee shot of the CIA’s main gate.
It seems like the answer to your final questiom might Obama himself. The longer Obama as chief law enforcement officer engages in obstruction of justice, cover up, and otherwise opting to use his office to insulate torturers from consequences, the more he moves to the head of the list.
It’s a sad thing, that the first black AG and President combine to make proction of torture their legacy.
Obama is a relatively untried executive. His talent is far beyond Bush’s, but he’s never run an operation; he’s been an individual player. Bush has left so much garbage on the doorstep, few would know what to pick up first. And like Bush, he’s hindered by some of his advisers. Emanuel and Summers would top my list of assistants to send home.
More problematic still, I think, is that while Obama is willing to experiment and take risks (he went to Wall Street before becoming a community activist), he seems to value joining more than reforming. I don’t think he can do the reforming without joining, which blunts the will to do the reforming. Kind of the opposite of Groucho Marx’s quip that he wouldn’t join a club that would have him for a member.
Obama “No one is above the law”
Whitehouse “No one is above the law”
Holder “No one is above the law”
Leahy “No one is above the law”
Feingold “No one is above the law”
Biden “No one is above the law”
Feingold “No one is above the law”
For most of the Republicans lies under oath about a blow job “no one is above the law”
Torture, lies about WMD’s, false Niger Documents outing an undercover agent, undermining the DOJ,
ALL ABOVE THE LAW
Don’t forget that Powell was a member of the Principals Committee. Danner confirms last year’s ABC News Report (April 9) that the Principals Committee approved and supervised the techniques revealed in the ICRC Report.
ABC News:
Being part of group decision-making is the only way to know what the group is doing. That especially held true in the secrecy obsessed Cheney administration, where he gutted the normal networks and policy-making process and kept normally key office holders out of the loop. Powell’s being a member of a group, on its own, doesn’t make him responsible for its decision. But it does call into question his willingness to stay Bush’s first full term rather than resign for publicly disclosed reasons.
Cheney’s willingness to enact merciless retribution even against collateral players like Plame was legendary. The federal bureaucracy was virtually littered with the corpses of careers of those who said, “No” to his whims. His willingness to seek it against an uppity former senior player who from Cheney’s perspective left the team in a lurch – and who knew more secrets that could hurt Cheney than did Valerie Plame – I would not underestimate.
What was it that David Addington said ‘We’ll deal with that when and if it is necessary to do so,” he would say … going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop’.
Excellent diary, earlofhuntingdon. I recommended.
This issue must stay front page until Obama and Holder confront this torture and criminal policies of the Bush/Cheney/Rummy administration.
Thanks, also, to all those fine comments above.
Here is my comment over at Jim White’s diary re Holder’s sticking his head in the sand about the past crimes of BushCo. Below is an excerpt from an article by Mark Danner entitled: U.S. Torture: Voices From The Black Sites.
Emphasis mine. How can Obama and Holder refuse to investigate and prosecute those responsible for and complicit in these crimes in the face of evidence such as that revealed in this article and elsewhere?
True Americans will not shut up until justice is pursued.