Saturday, November 05, 2005
(12:02 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Dick Cheney: War Criminal
Via Bitch PhD, an article in the International Herald Tribune:Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.From Bob Harris at This Modern World, I learn that Dick Cheney's most recent approval rating is 19%. More Americans, reportedly, approve of cheating on one's wife than approve of Dick Cheney's performance in office.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.
"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."
He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.
"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.
The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
[...]
Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."
On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.
Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council.
He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages.
If I were a Republican right now, I would seriously consider cutting my losses and impeaching Cheney and Rumsfeld. The Meiers nomination seems to me to have shown some willingness on the part of the Republicans to declare independence from Bush, even if on a factual level it probably led to a worse and more dangerous nominee on many fronts. I am of the opinion, however, that stopping torture is the most urgent issue -- if the choice is theoretically between a nominee like Meiers, who appeared to be a plant solely to make sure the administration would be absolved on the torture issue in the last resort, or another Scalia, then I say let's have another Scalia.
Some form of the rule of law is better than a perpetual state of exception in which arbitrary sovereign power inheres in the person of the president -- at least there's something to work with, something to reason with, when you are dealing with a Scalia. When you are dealing with a Cheney or a Rumsfeld, however, it's just sheer nihilism -- just sheer exercise of power, exercise of humiliation and degradation for its own sake, even beyond what is necessary or helpful for such (bad) purposes as depriving the Iraqis of their national patrimony of oil, etc. There is a difference between the religious right and Hitler. I'm not so sure that same difference exists between Cheney/Rumsfeld and Hitler -- that is, in the case of Cheney/Rumsfeld, it's a quantitative, not a qualitative difference.
