http://www.progressive.org/mag_nielsen0807Cheney's Fingerprints
By Matthew Rothschild
August 2007 Issue
You don’t have to dust for long before finding Dick Cheney’s grimy fingerprints all over the Bush crime scene. It’s becoming clearer by the day that behind every one of Bush’s illegal actions lurks the shadow of the Vice President. Never in our history have we had a Vice President who grabbed so much power. And never have we had a President so lazy that he was willing to divest so much power to such a man.
Cheney has said that it is his mission to aggrandize the Executive Branch. And then he notoriously argued that he was not part of the Executive Branch, placing himself on a new twig all by his lonesome. This is a man who has no respect for our system of checks and balances. It is high time he was impeached.
Bush, too, should be impeached, for they are partners in crime. But there is a certain logic in impeaching Cheney first. After all, who would want to impeach Bush and be left with Cheney? And secondly, the path of criminality, time after time, leads back to Cheney.
It was Cheney, in the days after 9/11, who insisted that the United States would have to work the “dark side” in the war on terror. It was Cheney who devised many of the flimsy legal justifications for the torture that U.S. personnel committed. “The Vice President’s office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody,” Barton Gellman and Jo Becker wrote in The Washington Post on June 25. They showed that the Vice President’s lawyer, David Addington (now his chief of staff), was instrumental in drafting the President’s February 7, 2002, directive, which said that U.S. personnel would abide by the Geneva Conventions “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.” Addington also worked on the Justice Department’s infamous “torture memo,” which said that almost any infliction of cruelty that didn’t cause organ failure or death was justifiable. Addington pressed the point that the President was exempt from treaties and laws governing torture, the Post said. Those “do not apply” to the commander in chief, according to the torture memo. It was Cheney who said he approved of the torture tactic of waterboarding, calling it “a no-brainer.”
It was Cheney, the Post said, who prevailed upon the Administration to declare U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi enemy combatants and to deny them access to U.S. courts.
It was Cheney who insisted that detainees had no due process rights, here or abroad, and who bypassed normal channels—including the State Department and the National Security Council—to get Bush to sign off on this executive order, the Post reported. It was Cheney who vigorously opposed any moves by Congress to outlaw torture, and got Congress to exempt the CIA from the ban.
It was Cheney who insisted that the Military Commissions Act, which Congress passed, include a section that lets the President decide whether something is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
It was Cheney who initially advocated for detentions in secret CIA prisons around the globe, the Post reported, and who prevailed upon Bush to resume them.
Beyond championing the torture and detention policy, it was Cheney who first hyped the case for the Iraq War, beginning in the spring of 2002. It was Cheney who leaned all over the CIA in the lead-up to the Iraq War in an unprecedented interference with the intelligence agency’s process of sifting through data. As Seymour Hersh has reported for The New Yorker, Cheney cherry-picked and stove-piped any information that served to buttress his case. And it was Cheney who, just days before Bush launched the war, went on Meet the Press and uttered the most flagrant lie, saying that Saddam Hussein had actually reconstituted nuclear weapons.
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