1 Boring Old Man

Whitehouse and the Corpus Delicti Leading to Cheney
By: emptywheel
September 2, 2009 6:00 pm

^{A number of you have pointed to this article, where Sheldon Whitehouse speaks of the corpus delicti that justifies an investigation.}

^{The prosecutor is often first presented with a case as a "corpus delicti" — a bullet-riddled body in the street, for instance. That ordinarily is enough to justify investigation. Through investigation, the evidence may prove that there was not in fact a crime [it was a suicide or an accident] or that the fatal acts were privileged or enjoy a legal defense [self-defense or justifiable shooting by an officer of the law]. But one begins by investigation.}

^{Here he is on KO tying the dead bodies of torture right to Dick Cheney. As he says,} 

If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t often spend a great deal of time trying to hide it.

^{Senator Sheldon Whitehouse being sworn in by a Sith Lord}

Dick Cheney’s Version
New York Times Editorial
September 2, 2009

^{After the C.I.A. inspector general’s report on prisoner interrogation was released last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney settled into his usual seat on Fox News to express his outrage — not at the illegal and immoral behavior laid out in the report, of course, but at the idea that anyone would object to torturing prisoners. He was especially vexed that the Obama administration was beginning an investigation.}

^{In Mr. Cheney’s view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush’s Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.}

• ^{It’s easy to understand Mr. Cheney’s aversion to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it stopping with the interrogators. He’s right.The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured. Mr. Cheney was at the center of each of these insults to this country’s Constitution, its judicial system and its bedrock democratic values. To defend himself, he offers a twisted version of history.}
• ^{He says Mr. Bush’s Justice Department determined that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” ordered by the president were legal under American law and international treaties like the Geneva Conventions. In reality, those opinions were based on a corrupt and widely discredited legal analysis cooked up after the White House had already decided to use long-banned practices like waterboarding…}
• ^{He insists the inspector general’s findings were “completely reviewed” by the Justice Department and that any follow-up investigation would be improper and unnecessary. In reality, Mr. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, did not appoint an independent investigator after receiving the inspector general’s report, which was completed in 2004. The Justice Department decided there was only one narrow case worth pursuing, involving a civilian contractor — hardly a surprise from a thoroughly politicized department whose top officials set the very rules they were supposed to be judging….}
• ^{Mr. Cheney claims that waterboarding and other practices widely considered to be torture or abuse “were absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Cheney is right when he says detainees who were subject to torture and abuse gave up valuable information. But the men who did the questioning flatly dispute that it was duress that moved them to do so…}

^{Deuce Martinez, the C.I.A. officer who interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, engineer of the 9/11 mass murders, said he used traditional interrogation methods, and not the infliction of pain and panic. And, in an article on the Times Op-Ed page, Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who oversaw the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, another high-ranking terrorist, denounced “the false claims” about harsh interrogations. Mr. Soufan said Mr. Zubaydah talked before he was subjected to waterboarding and other abuse…}

^{Every week, it seems, new disclosures about this sordid history dribble out. This week, Physicians for Human Rights analyzed what the inspector general’s report said about the involvement of C.I.A. physicians and psychiatrists in the abuse of prisoners. It said they not only monitored torture, like waterboarding, but also kept data on the prisoners’ reaction in ways that “may amount to human experimentation.”}

^{Getting at the truth is not going to be easy. The C.I.A. destroyed evidence — videotapes of interrogations — and is now refusing to release its records of the questioning of its prisoners. It also is asking the courts to keep secret the orders Mr. Bush gave authorizing the interrogations, and the original Justice Department memos concluding that they were legal. Americans need much more than glimpses of the truth. They should not have to decide whether to believe former interrogators, whom they do not know, or Mr. Cheney, who did not hesitate while in office to mislead them when it suited his political aims.}

Back in November, I was planning to stop my incessant blogging. There wouldn’t be anything to blog about, I thought. Bush would evaporate into the Texas brush and Cheney would ride off into the Wyoming sunset. Well, I was half right. Now, I find myself tracking Cheney like he was a terrorist [okay, is a terrorist]. These posts are why he failed to ride off into the sunset. He’s in big trouble. Now he’s good with managing big trouble, but what he’s doing right now isn’t how you do that [managing big trouble]. So Why is he talking all the time? It reminds me of the outing of Valerie Plame in response to Joe Wilson’s op-ed back in 2003, some three months into the Iraq Invasion. Had the Bush Administration done what they usually do, sit it out with a few terse denials, it probably would’ve passed. Cheney’s provocations now may be stirring his base, but they’re stirring us too.

So, why? It is a regular feature of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorders, which he has in spades. They seem impervious to criticism. They say they are impervious to criticism. But, in truth, they are exquisitely sensitive to personal slights, criticism, being disdained. In the case of Wilson, his op-ed said that his trip to Niger was in response to a request from Cheney’s office [true]. With Torture, every article has his name in it – we could call it Cheney’s Torture Program accurately. And an unscrupulous psychiatrist might say the way to flush out a Narcissist would be to keep the insults coming.