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My sense is that Cheney is feeling abandoned; that he senses a real danger of being brought to justice; and that he is waging a series of pre-emptive strikes to head that off.
Put yourself in Cheney's shoes, as uncomfortable as they might be. Daughter Liz has disclosed more than once what has her father so agitated - press reports that Attorney General Eric Holder is close to appointing a special prosecutor to investigate White House-authorized crimes, including torture - not policy differences, mind you, but capital crimes under U.S. as well as international law.
Cheney's war crimes and other felonies? Not enough room to list them all here. But suffice it to say that Cheney's fingerprints - and those of his legal counsel David Addington - are all over the torture policies. Inspector General reports from the Department of Justice and from the CIA are scheduled to be released soon and are sure to reveal more Cheney fingerprints.
Attorney General Holder reportedly found the CIA IG report nauseating with what are bound to be stomach-churning accounts of torture.
Revealing Photography
Still more photos, videos and documents are likely to surface in the months ahead revealing more evidence of torture, kidnapping and perhaps hit-team activities - even if President Barack Obama succeeds in keeping most of the photos under wraps.
Reading recently about the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal, I was reminded that it was the movies of Nazi concentration camps that wiped the arrogant smirks off the faces of senior Nazi officials, defendants like Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess.
Bulldozers pushing corpses into open pits, bodies stacked like cordwood -- the movies taken by U.S. soldiers of such atrocities had devastating effect. According to one witness, "Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel sat there, bent over and broken, mopping his lined face with a soggy ball of handkerchief." The smirks never came back.
Cheney and his associates have got to be prepared for something similar, even though they were not vanquished in war. They probably consider the chances slight that they would be brought to an international court, even though Chief U.S. prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, pointedly warned at Nuremberg:
"...the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to the law. And " while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment."
As for violations of U.S. law, the list is long. Interestingly, two of the three Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon approved by the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 29 and 30, 1974, were based, in part, on misusing the CIA. Such misuse was brought to a whole new level, as Cheney visited CIA Headquarters promoting "intelligence" on non-existent threats and took a leading role in misusing the agency to torture detainees.
There's also the possibility that some of Cheney's co-conspirators will renounce their abuses, either out of genuine remorse for the hubris they showed at the height of their powers or in a bid to rehabilitate their careers. From his new job at Texas Tech in Lubbock, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales earlier this week conceded that he erred in using the word "quaint" and "the Geneva Convention" in the same sentence in a memo he signed on its way to President Bush when Gonzales was White House counsel.
Now that Gonzales has a job with health benefits, we can expect further steps to disassociate himself from the smoking-gun executive memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, which ordered that the protections of the Geneva Conventions would not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees.
It is also an open secret that Cheney's chief lawyer, David Addington, drafted that memorandum, although Gonzales forwarded it on so Bush could sign it. Late last year the Senate Armed Services Committee reported that this Feb. 7, 2002 memorandum "opened the door" to a wide range of abusive interrogations.
Though Addington mid-wifed a whole generation of Bush-era illegalities, he has pretty much disappeared from public view.
It seems a sure thing that the next time Addington comes to testify on the Hill, the smirks he displayed when he and John Yoo appeared before the House Judiciary will have disappeared. Addington's view of the law is so bizarre that he might be disbarred. He is more liability than asset to Cheney at this point.
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