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Like father, like daughter. Once a political hack, always a political hack. Guess who is back? The Torture Queen herself!
Over the weekend, Liz Cheney went to some political gathering called Smart Girls Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. She brought with her all the political baggage she’s been lugging around with her since her father was forced out of his undisclosed location because of term limits. There were a couple of other rightwinger geniuses there like Michelle Malkin and Representative Marsha Blackburn to go along with the superior genius of Liz Cheney but, outside of some off the wall bloggers and a stray NYT reporter, this little shindig got no press coverage whatsoever. Perhaps it was because no one there said anything worth repeating. Perhaps it was because we’ve heard all this rightwing claptrap before. Whatever the reason, this was nothing more than a backslapping, everybody agree with everybody else gathering of people who are still stuck in the mindset of the last administration.
What was still the same old same old was the message from Liz Cheney: torture works. She may have talked about something else but this was the message that came thru loud and clear to me. Ignoring the fact that torture is illegal here in America no matter what John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington may have said at one time, Liz Cheney still thinks that the best way to defeat the bad guys is to act just like them. The old eye for an eye stuff. Right.
Liz seems to think that waterboarding is legal despite the fact that this government prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs during WW II for doing that very action. The legal precedent is clear to everyone except the NeoCons like Liz who think the law does not apply to them or if they change the wording of a legal opinion that it changes the law as if by magic. Sorry. It doesn’t quite work that way. In fact, it’s never worked that way. Calling torture by another name doesn’t change a thing. You’ve just put another name on amounts to torture. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques is still torture no matter what euphemism you want to use. It’s the same stuff that Saddam used on his own people and we invaded him over less. Our law says you cannot torture people. There are no justifiable excuses.
But here she is, in public, bashing President Obama for not allowing torture to be used anymore and here is Liz Cheney still thinking that “24” is a reflection of real life and that the bad guys have set up a doomsday device and we have less than a day to find it and disarm it so we need to use torture to find out the truth from recently captured and fully informed terrorists. Remind me to never let Liz watch Dukes Of Hazzard because she’ll start believing that cars can fly and all southern sheriffs are stupid. God help us if she ever watches the A Team and begins to think that bad guys can be disabled and disarmed by shooting heads of cabbage at them. Some things are too stupid to be believed but not according to Dick’s daughter. Torture works in CheneyWorld even though there is no evidence to back that up.
The destruction of America’s world standing because of this ignorant, uncivilized belief in torturing prisoners is long lasting and these unrepentant ignoramuses want Liz to run for office someday soon? Oh, God, would that wish come true so the public can give her the beatdown that her daddy never gave her for being so fucking stupid. Seems like stupidity is in the Cheney genes. Like I said, like father, like daughter.
Recently a video has surfaced of the speech Bush made before we went into Iraq. What made this pretty interesting to behold was that Bush was warning Saddam and the Iraqis about committing war crimes and the excuse of “just following orders” would not be recognized. It’s pretty apparent that Bush is aware of what a war crime is by watching this video otherwise he would not have warned the Iraqis about it. The irony comes when you realize that he was aware enough to have authorized the very same war crimes in the pursuit of intelligence from detainees. The difference here is he gave the orders instead of just following orders.
With the release of the memos authorizing the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” aka torture, we now see the mindset that the Bush Administration was operating under. It wasn’t pretty. In essence, the memos said that almost anything goes short of death. Given that there were detainees who died while in custody, they couldn’t even stick to that limitation. This all ignores the prevailing law of the United States under US Code 2340, Title 18 and the Convention On Torture of which the US was a willing signatory. Even the “quaint” Geneva Convention has rules about torturing people that we apparently tossed by the wayside along with our morality.
What became even more interesting is the conduct of Condi Rice over the last few days. She was captured on camera admitting to passing along the word to the CIA about the new rules.
I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.
According to Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor at George Washington University, Condi Rice just implicated herself in the conspiracy to torture detainees by that admission. She didn’t stop there, however. She then proceeded to try and justify Bush’s actions with Nixonian logic.
I just said, 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.
Well, Condi dear, that load of crap did not work when Richard Nixon tried to justify his role in the Watergate burglaries 37 years ago and it isn’t working now. The president isn’t above the law but rather subject to the law. He has the obligation to support the Constitution and he didn’t. In fact, he’s the guiltiest party in this whole mess and you helped out.
The legal gibberish that Bybee and Yoo (as well as David Addington) signed off on was a tortured attempt to justify torture and circumvent the law. A first year law student can make Swiss Cheese out of their insane logic and if this ever goes to trial. rest assured, someone with a whole lot more experience will do the honors. Trouble is, I do not think, in this day and age, that there are any prosecutors alive that have the passion or the balls to pursue these crimes where ever the evidence leads. Politics, and President Obama’s desire to bury this festering pus bag of wrongdoing without exposing all that was done, will make certain of that.
A trip to the Hague for George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington and the rest of the scum that debased our Constitution and our world image seems to be out of the question. That’s a real shame. It means they got away with it.
Links:http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/30/condi-president-makes-it-legal
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/28/bush-torture-flashback/
Black & White and Cardinal Red All Over 