Obama and his Administration now has its hammer.
With Ex-President Cheney unwilling to step out of the limelight for ideological or ass-saving purposes, he is now the highest ranking Republican going up against Barack Obama...but his party can't exactly follow him. We're well past kabuki now, or the emperor revealed without clothes. Every politician in D.C. knows that he was the architect of our nation's notorious torture policy and it's application as physical program, the Grand Vizier, the Grand Inquisitor, the Emperor. The most wrong man in politics.
Why on earth would any of the other scurrying elected Republican officials get too close to Cheney? For so many years now he's had the lowest approval rating of any of them by a longshot, and they were finally rid of him! And if he gets indicted, or simply goes down in history as the politician who brought the most shame to our nation since slavery, then do you really want to be the last guy people remember standing next to him?
If they line up right behind Cheney this time around, they're even more scared, because it would mean that amongst all the Republican "talent" in this country, he's still the strongest man around, the one they believe to be the most feared by his enemies -- and his elective career is finished. Kaput. So...better to swarm to the other Party Leader, Mr. Limbaugh, a non-elected radio pundit. After all, he's just an entertainer. Or whatever the apology is this week.
Here's what I think happened over this past week. Cheney still has moles embedded throughout the "permanent" government -- the Pentagon, possibly the State Department, other administrative areas where they have been watching Obama and delivering early warning to their master. Cheney must have gotten word that the memos would be released, directly implicating, indicting him as being the boss of the torture syndicate. Proving it, now by a timeline. So, like Rove (whom he must have tipped off as well), he immediately moved to "get out in front of it" by going on the Sean Hannity show.
In doing so, he's triggered this massive cognitive dissonance, as GOP figures attempt to thread some non-existent needle where we didn't torture, but it works -- because of some story the Dick Cheney apparatus told me (i.e. from the torturers themselves!) -- just accept it does, and it wasn't that bad what we did anyway (assorted nonsensical justifications), so maybe it is torture so if it is so what? Which leads to, so what are you going to do about it?:
That's right, that's former President Cheney's daughter out there fabricating right from the starting gun, attacking, playing the family arguments, claiming it's not torture, it's Navy Seal training tactics, lies about the information we "gained" from waterboarding, all passive tenses for Dick Cheney's involvement like he was just offering an opinion...you know, spinning like a dervish to try and keep her father off the stand and out of jail.
Since these revelations, on the very face of them, call for investigation and possibly indictments, it's clearly in Obama's interest to be the guy standing between the pitchforks and prosecuting the remnants of the GOP. This is the time for him to be soliciting bent-kneed favors godfather-style, especially on his potentially transformational national healthcare plan. The kind that really changes the trajectory of this nation.
Instead of prosecuting them, ostracize them with more transparency, more U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan prison photos on the way, force the decision to be made by society rather than government. Let some investigations go through, "against your wishes," and extract more legislative favors along the way. That's a longer game, and so far Obama's the master of that.
I mean, he's written two really good bestsellers, won a Senate seat, and won a Presidential primary and campaign.
3 comments:
http://tinyurl.com/ce68oj
Good read for you Netter. Her position seems to change by the hour.
http://tinyurl.com/ce68oj:
"On one occasion, in the fall of 2002, I (Pelosi) was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future. The Administration advised that legal counsel for the both the CIA and the Department of Justice had concluded that the techniques were legal."It's a terrible thing when the President uses the full weight of the highest legal apparatus of the Executive branch to deceive members of Congress.
What about the next section of that story you're quoting?
"A Pelosi spokesman passes along her response to the article when it first appeared, claiming that Pelosi's successor on the intel committee -- Yep, Jane Harman -- lodged a protest with the CIA when she learned waterboarding was in use.
"On one occasion, in the fall of 2002, I was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future. The Administration advised that legal counsel for the both the CIA and the Department of Justice had concluded that the techniques were legal.
I had no further briefings on the techniques. Several months later, my successor as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, was briefed more extensively and advised the techniques had in fact been employed. It was my understanding at that time that Congresswoman Harman filed a letter in early 2003 to the CIA to protest the use of such techniques, a protest with which I concurred."
Lower down in the article, the authors and their sources acknowledge Pelosi & Co. were severely constrained in what they could do with the information — and had no way of knowing how the techniques would ultimately used or abused in a pre-Abu Gharaib era."
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