“…torture is criminal, if it’s not justified by the OLC opinion…”
By John Batchelor on May 15, 2009 at 7:10 PM in Dick Cheney, Torture
Sheldon Whitehouse, Democratic junior senator from Rhode Island, wades thigh deep into the mighty partisan swamp of torture with back to back performances on cable, CNN followed by MSNBC, commenting on a peculiar and melodramatic revelation from Charles Duelfer, the Iraq WMD searcher. The story is told in the Daily Beast by Robert Windrem, following Duelfer’s new book, that the Office of Vice-President, that is, Darth Cheney, directed an enhanced interrogation, or waterboarding, of an Iraqi intelligence officer who may have known of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Criminal
Robert Windrem’s observation on Charles Duelfer (who can certainly speak for himself when he gets to Charlie Rose for his book promotion) was yesterday’s news, and is backed up this news cycle by Scott Horton’s observations in the Beast about 9/11 investigator Robert Zelikow, and Zelikow’s questions about how the White House may have ordered the suppression of his protesting memoranda about waterboarding. TV is just getting to it the Duelfer story and is not close to the Zelikow. What TV has contributed is putting Sheldon Whitehouse on camera to use the word “criminal” with regard the allegations that Cheney got involved in a partisan pursuit of information on WMD that, if successful, would have strengthened the White House. I note the meaty word “criminal,” with regard conduct of Vice-President Cheney’s office and the CIA. It matches Nancy Pelosi’s use of the meaty word “misleading,” with regard the CIA and the briefings on waterboarding.
Whitehouse was not reluctant to wander into areas that throw the Obama administration, the current Congress and the media deeper into the swamp in search of criminal conduct by the previous administration.
Swamp Fever
Criminalizing the Bush team is what this comes to, and it is a perilous course because of precedence. More, this means both the House apparatus and the the Senate Democratic apparatus are fighting an insurgency against the Obama administration’s recent aim to bury all this in old business. Declaring a witch hunt on both the CIA and the GOP appears ambitious. The TPL/War Crimes Tribunal Posse are more passionate and pell-mell about this so far than the right-wing, but it is early. My first glance tells me that Darth Cheney is the clear winner, because he will never get off TV and will sell books forever — a combination of Churchill, Nixon, Darth Vader and Beelzebub in “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Here we go, deep into the swamp mud with a fever.
”…there is some further evidence of that… “ said Sheldon Whitehouse re an enhanced interrogation of non-Al Qaeda prisoners.
“…. there is not a great deal of evidence that came out on our hearing about that… if that is true then it takes the application of these techniques out of the scope of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion…
“…and that raises the prospect of there being a criminal prosecution that could justifiably emerge…
“.. torture is criminal, if it’s not justified by the OLC opinion, if there aren’t the defenses because you have gone outside of it…”
“…not only does it disturb me, it takes the waterboarding outside of whatever protection the Office of Legal counsel provide… if the motivation for doing this was to get political information connecting Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein that wasn’t related to a direct attack on the US, then it falls directly under the cases that show that waterboarding is a crime in America and is stripped of all protection from the OLC memoranda…”
“…this thing is just getting deep and deeper…”
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