Dick Death

How sick an individual is Former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney?

Death squad sick, per Seymour Hersh:

"After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

How El Salvador 1980's. The man who would have been right at home as Grand Inquisitor in the Spanish Inquisition is a stain on American history. I have no doubt that this man, the most successful bureaucrat in the modern history of our nation, gets off on torture. As Andrew Sullivan connects per this portion of a CNN transcript:

UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: To -- not to get information. Just the pleasure of doing it. They make it pleasurable, pleasurable (INAUDIBLE) doing it.

COOPER: So, it doesn't -- it doesn't yield useful information; it's just doing it because they enjoy it?

UNIDENTIFIED DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: Yes. Information, they have information from the government, so they have all the information they can get. Most of the -- most of the -- most of the torture is for pleasure.

That's always the bottom line -- participatory porn for the most violently repressed. And the Grand Inquisitor's role is to recruit and license the most brutal in society to indulge their violent perversions, or to bend otherwise decent types to do the same.

The only solution: Indict.