Robert Scheer: Cheney’s Legacy of Deception

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



Cheney’s Legacy of Deception
Posted on Dec 23, 2008

By Robert Scheer


In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although firmly ensconced, even in the popular imagination, as an example of evil incarnate—nearly a quarter of those polled in this week’s CNN poll rated him the worst vice president in U.S. history, and 41 percent as “poor”—Cheney exudes the confidence of one fully convinced that he will get away with it all.

And why not? Nothing, not his suspect role in the Enron debacle, which foretold the economic meltdown, or his office’s fabrication of the false reasons for invading Iraq, has ever been seriously investigated, because of White House stonewalling. Nor will the new president, committed as he is to nonpartisanship, be likely to open up Cheney’s can of worms.

Cheney has even had a pass on torture, the “enhanced interrogation” policy that he initiated in his first months in office. “Was it torture? I don’t believe it was torture,” he told The Washington Times on Monday, a week after the release of a unanimous Senate report concluding that the policies Cheney initiated indeed were responsible for torture. In fact, the Senate committee concluded that the model for the Cheney-Bush interrogation policy was the torture practices of the Chinese communists during the Korean War. But it’s not torture when the U.S. president does it, according to the legal judgments that Cheney’s chief counsel, David Addington, pushed through the administration.

Fortunately, Cheney’s view of the unquestioned unitary power of the presidency was scorned by Vice President-elect Joe Biden: “His notion of a unitary executive” Biden said, “meaning that, in time of war, essentially all power, you know, goes to the executive I think is dead wrong.”

With Biden occupying Cheney’s old office and presumably his secret bunkers as well, maybe we will, at last, learn a bit more of the nefarious truth about the man. One place to start is with the statement of retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff and who stated unequivocally that Cheney was the primary author of the torture policy: “There’s no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated—in the vice president of the United States’ office.” .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081223_cheneys_legacy_of_deception/

[Double T]

1. Cheney is a criminal; never trust a guy that tortures and shoots his friend in the face.......

without giving it a second thought. This bastard has no conscience.