Cheney isms
Attorney General Eric Holder has made a decision to continue investigations into detainee abuses and other legal elements of our nine year long War on Terror
Key Members of Both Parties Criticize Holder Decision to Look Into Alleged CIA Abuse of Detainees. There has been a fair amount of conservative push back on this. Not least from the most centrally implicated of all in this, the former vice president
Cheney Criticizes Widening Investigation of CIA Counterterrorism Program. . A plain rational for investigations is simply that Richard Cheney must be reproved or he will continue his campaign relentlessly until he is declared right, absolved, vindicated
Cheney: Interrogations Probe Is a 'Political Act'. He will insist on being placed in spirit, if not in literal being, back on the throne. If I use a word like throne understand I've chosen my words deliberately. Among the various slights of hand occurring is to get the American people to accept a supposed effectiveness in tortured interrogation as equaling the ethical high ground. Do men who trade so starkly in talk of strength and weakness, perceived and real, truly believe also in right and wrong, in good and evil? I don't think so. A genuine teleological sense is inconsistent of a world view of power and materialism. Empty talk of God and morality; though, is perfectly consistent with this, because so much here depends on what you can get people to believe.
At this point in the debate the Washington Post prints a strange article that purports to show "enhanced" interrogation delivers the goods
Terrorist Recast as CIA Asset.. Even reviewing their story at face value it doesn't really. A main break came from classical methods: he, KSM, talked thinking (being allowed to believe) interrogators already had certain information from another source. He was subjected to repeated cross examinations on various details and information and a meta dossier built up slowly from this. Even if an individual does not talk much various responses to stimuli (certain images, names evidences) will tell a story. Supermax prison systems are crushing and isolating enough in their manner of being that with the added full court press of Army prisoner interrogation standards you have what psychological pressure you need for the job. There seemed little useful in Khalid Mohammed's later infomercial ramblings that might not have been obtained through conventional professionally applied means. The unending rounds of waterboarding and campaign to break the wills of detainees was done for the personal satisfaction involved. You interrogate to gain "information". You torture to fill a hunger, an emptiness in yourself.
The CIA in particular is discontented even angry at being investigated. CIA must judge whether they made a mistake in deciding to let the Dick Cheney / John Yoo notion of ethics and national security be their cover. They had a larger national mandate to be guided by broader and more balanced approaches. Consistent with views of both political parties. Had they done this with due diligence they would not now be facing repercussions, over the potential illegality of their previous actions. This is no doubt a crisis of company morale occurring; however, this problem is a problem of their own making. The other part of this twisted web of reaction is our army of the detained interred throughout the world in named and unnamed camps and the legal tabla gris they live off of. These are the prisoners of this war, the dangerous, the unwanted, the inconvenient. I have said these things before, but as long a Mr. Cheney maintains his position, it bears repeating. The fundamental error is the a priori the assumption of guilt. Which flows back and forth between the interrogation and detainment issues infecting both. POWs under international law can be detained and questioned because because they are from an state entity (if in uniform), declaring responsibility for them and can be foreseeably repatriated to that state entity upon cessation of hostilities. Irregulars and nonstate combatants, need their detainment to rest on some notion of criminality, unless some state-aspiring hierarchy can be assigned responsibility for them (this hierarchy either becomes a state or is reconciled to an existing state). Some version of evidentiary rules obtains at this point and no notion of guilt or evil intent on which loss of liberty and secondary forms of information extraction depend can go forward without it. Attempting to deal with this by stuffing it into cracks of the law where you claim to be held to no rule, is questionable judgement, temperamentally questionable and unsupportable policy for legitimate government.
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