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Barack Obama’s protecting his biggest detractor, Dick Cheney. This could be the ultimate irony. Could it be that the only thing standing between Dick Cheney and him being prosecuted for war crimes is President Barack Obama?
One of the more intriguing aspects of this torture matter is the issue of Cheney demanding that the torture memos be released to show that torture yielded actionable intelligence. The OCL (Office of Legal Council), who were asked/ordered to come up with the legal opinion that would authorize torture, wrote opinions limiting the purpose of the “enhanced measures” to the ticking time bomb scenario. In other words the interrogation enhancement techniques (torture) they authorized was specifically for the purpose of saving lives, to discover an impending danger. They did not include provisions to use “enhanced measures” to get confessions to justify the war. Even in the tailor-made authorization crafted by those in-house-attorneys, torture was not authorized to cover Cheney’s justification for war agenda.
There have been at least three different investigative type reports, which Salon and other news agencies have compiled that charge Cheney with pushing torture to get that make believe, save-his-ass, war-justifying, Al Qaida Iraq connection.
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, reports in the Washington Note blog, that the vice-president’s office ordered further torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan, by his hosts at an Egyptian prison because he had not yet implicated Saddam with al-Qaida.
Salon reports: NBC News producer Robert Windrem, In April 2003, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi official named Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who had served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Two unnamed officials said that upon learning of Dulaymi's capture, the vice-president's office proposed that CIA agents in Baghdad commence water-boarding him, in order to elicit information about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam.
Salon reports: The same kind of demands were directed towards interrogators in Guantánamo, according to the testimony of former Army psychiatrist Charles Burney, who testified that he and his colleagues interrogating prisoners at the detention camp felt "pressure" to produce proof of the mythical link.
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney and his daughter have been on a barnstorming campaign against President Barack Obama’s approach to national security. Ironically, as New York Times columnist David Brooks points out in his column, the no-torture policy currently in operation was instituted by the Bush administration. The so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that Cheney is insisting should be in place were discontinued during the Bush administration. Thus the argument that Cheney lost as Vice-President he is now pushing all over again now that he’s out of office.
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A glaring flaw in Cheney’s argument that those in the media
fail to point out is that those torture measures that he contends were so
useful in saving America from another
attack haven’t been used in over six years. The obvious rejoinder being, to what
do you attribute those six years of safety that no longer used torture? Nevertheless, the newsmedia is letting this
father and daughter tag-team roam the cable news shows not daring to challenge
them on these conspicuous holes in their argument? Cheney is currently enjoying the same lack of
scrutiny by those in the news media that he experienced when he was
Vice-President. This is the same kind of newsmedia accommodation that allowed Bush
and Cheney to march us into war.
With the consistent lack of accountability being imposed by the newsmedia it’s little wonder that Cheney is stepping forward with the brazenness of a home invasion robber to challenge the President to release the memos that he says will show that torture led to hundreds of lives being saved. There’s a big fat joker in that deck. Releasing any memos regarding Cheney’s ordering torture would require releasing all the memo’s that involve Cheney giving torture instructions including those that reveal Cheney ordered torture to get confessions on an Iraq Al Qaida connection, which would expose his criminal liability.
If memos are released that prove irrefutably that the Vice President ordered torture to gain false confessions hooking up Sadam with Al Qaida to justify his war agenda, that would leave little room for the President to avoid allowing the attorney general to enforce the law. Prosecution would have to go forward regarding Cheney’s violating the law in ordering torture. This would even be in direct violation of what the OCL’s legal opinion allowed.
The meeting the President had with representatives of several human rights and civil liberties groups in the White House, last week made it abundantly clear regarding the President’s position toward prosecutions. As reported by Michael Isikoff, investigative reporter; “ at least one issue, though, Obama seems to have made up his mind. Isikoff reports that Obama announced his opposition to torture prosecutions--an unsurprising admission, perhaps, but one that must have disappointed many in attendance. Previously he had said that the question of investigation and prosecuting Bush administration officials was one for Holder to answer.”
Unfortunately, this amounts to the President politicizing the Justice Department just as Bush did. However, noble or expedient his justification —we don’t want a distraction from our big agenda of health care and global warming—it remains a violation that a constitutional lawyer should readily recognize and not violate.
In any case that’s how Cheney has managed to dodge the prosecution for war crimes and violation of American law bullet, so far. However, with his unabashed admissions that he ordered torture and the fact that war crimes can be filed by any country, he’s not yet out of the proverbial woods. There are currently two countries already in the mix in pursuing war crimes charges against American officials.
On November 14, 2006, a criminal complaint was filed in a German court against senior U.S. officials, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, high ranking military officers, and several former government lawyers alleging torture and war crimes at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp.
Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast.
In Cheney’s recent speech billed as the “dueling speeches” he insisted that the torture measure he ordered were “legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.” This comes from a man who has consistently been at odds with the truth.
Obama is strenuously attempting to stay away from investigating and prosecuting past acts of the Bush administration. How long Cheney is going to be able to get away with playing Russian roulette by demanding that the torture memos be released is a drama we can only wait and watch unfold. Advice to both Cheneys, be careful what you keep bitching about.
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