Another thing Colin Powell has kept quiet about when, for the good of

[babylonsister]

this country, he should have shared imo.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/24/all-the-vice-presidents-men/

All the vice president’s men.

The Washington Post has posted the second in its four-part series on Dick Cheney. (Read part one here.) The most recent article develops in more detail the role of Alberto Gonzales as one of Cheney’s key enablers:

On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.

Rice “very angrily said there would be no more secret opinions on international and national security law,” the official said, adding that she threatened to take the matter to the president if Gonzales kept them out of the loop again. Powell remarked admiringly, as they emerged, that Rice dressed down the president’s lawyer “in full Nurse Ratched mode,” a reference to the ward chief of a mental hospital in the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Neither of them took their objections to Cheney, the official said, a much more dangerous course.

In another instance, the article recounts a meeting over the administration’s denial of due process to detainees. At the meeting, “Gonzales listened quietly as the Justice Department and his own staff lined up against Addington. Then he decided in favor of Cheney’s lawyer.”

[frogcycle]

1. "a former White House official with firsthand knowledge"

Who the hell is singing? And where have they been?

These stories surfacing of disagreement within the administration don't vindicate anyone. Daniel Ellsberg did something about his dissent. Deep Throat did something. Powell, Rice, Ashcroft, anyone who says now "gee, I thought it was bad" is equally as culpable as the ones doing the deeds. By not going public they were complicit. And they are even more despicable human beings, because they KNEW it was wrong, and the ones doing it may at least in some cases have been acting on (warped, incorrect, spurious) principles they believed in.