1 Boring Old Man

"The basic proposition here is that somebody who comes into the United States of America illegally, who conducts a terrorist operation killing thousands of innocent Americans, men, women, and children, is not a lawful combatant. They don’t deserve to be treated as a prisoner of war."

This morning, on awakening, I’m not conflicted. I still think it’s peculiar that he had the reaction he did. It would’ve been fine for him to feel those things. I felt some of them. Most of us did. Terrorist attacks evoke that kind of feelings. It would’ve been fine for him to be a vocal "hawk" in Cabinet Meetings, representing the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" position – a position I think of as "the Israeli Position." But that’s not what Cheney did. He mobilized his impressive political savvy and influence with our boy-president to push his ideas through rather than debate them in among Peers. And why leave the F.I.S.A. courts out of the wiretap plan? The judges would’ve approved anything remotely reasonable. It was their country that got attacked too.

But more than that, it’s the persistence of his ideas that bothers me. I can understand him acting in the heat of the moment. He was, after all, the only person in the Executive with any experience at all – a former White House Chief of Staff, a former Congressman, a former Minority Whip, a former Secretary of Defense. But it’s now five and a half years later. Even if we spot him over-reacting in the heat of the moment, he’s still at it. These programs – emergency war powers, military tribunals, Gitmo, wiretapping without warrants, torture, suspense of the Geneva Conventions – are certainly something that ought to be reviewed, revised, re-thought. Why is he still defending his "Bunker Mentality?"

So the hypothesis that Cheney was the wizened Action Figure in a gaggle of Ken and Barbie Dolls has some big holes. He was never a G.I. Joe. Powell was our soldier, and Cheney went over him, around him, through him. So, when I add the immediacy and method of his power grab after 9/11, his obsession with secrecy, and his persistence in holding on to an emergency set of powers, I have another obvious hypothesis. He either saw 9/11 coming or he jumped on it mighty fast. And in either case, he immediately seized it as an opportunity to further the agenda of his Project for the New American Century – a project that most of us think had as one of its motivations the Middle Eastern Oil Corrider. And part of this other hypothesis is that his continued secrecy and power-mongering is more than just his nature or his ideology, it’s a way to cover his tracks.

In this light, the thing to revisit is the meeting known as the Cheney Energy Task Force two weeks after he took office in the pre-911 days – the one that the Supreme Court said we can’t look in to – the one with the oil company executives. We have a powerful argument that access to those records are not an invasion of Cheney’s privacy. They are evidence in a criminal conspiracy investigation.

_{Note: "Earmarked for production sharing" and
the Blocks for Exploration above Saudi Arabia}

But the part that still sticks in my craw is the viciousness of it all – the torture, the depersonalization of the enemy, the renunciation of basic human decency. It hasn’t helped us in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the World, or with al Qaeda. It has nothing to do with any manifest or hidden agenda that I can see. The torture and revocation of the Geneva Conventions stand as Cheney’s personal legacy. There is no explanation for it other than a powerful sadistic trend in his personality. It’s as plain as the  nose  look on his face.