1 Boring Old Man

Senator Luger calls for a new strategy in Iraq

Longtime Bush administration supporter Sen. Richard Luger (R-IN) gave a speech on the Senate floor yesterday in which he called for the Bush administration to change their Iraq strategy so that it meets up with U.S. interests. Luger warned his colleagues, “Unless we recalibrate our strategy in Iraq to fit our domestic political conditions and the broader needs of U.S. national security, we risk foreign policy failures that could greatly diminish our influence in the region and the world. The current debate on Iraq in Washington has not been conducive to a thoughtful revision of our Iraq policy.”

He continued,”Our debate is being driven by partisan political calculations and understandable fatigue with bad news — including deaths and injuries to Americans… I would observe that none of this debate addresses our vital interests any more than they are addressed by an unquestioned devotion to an ill-defined strategy of “staying the course” in Iraq.” Luger went on to call the current administration policy unsustainable. He said, “In my judgment, the costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved. Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.”

He also suggested that, “We should attempt to preserve initiatives that have shown promise, such as engaging Sunni groups that are disaffected with the extreme tactics and agenda of Al Qaeda in Iraq. But three factors – the political fragmentation in Iraq, the growing stress on our military, and the constraints of our own domestic political process — are converging to make it almost impossible for the United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame.”

In Luger’s view, most Iraqis don’t want to be Iraqis. “Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis. We may bemoan this, but it is not a surprising phenomenon. The behavior of most Iraqis is governed by calculations related to their history, their personal safety, their basic economic existence, and their tribal or sectarian loyalties. These are primal forces that have constrained the vision of most ordinary Iraqis to the limits of their neighborhoods and villages.”

The Washington Post Series makes clear how Cheney operates and explains how a quality of his that has been elusive works – persistence. He and Karl Rove share a quality. Just when you think you’ve got them stopped, or cornered, they both slide out the other side. They keep turning up and before you know it, they’ve come out on top. The Post has example after example with Cheney. We know about it with Rove – the 2000 election, the Fitzgerald Investigation. They’re both like wildfires, just when you think you’ve gotten one under control, they reignite somewhere else – some place you think you’ve already controlled.

The term used in wildfire management is "containment." First anticipate the path of the fire. Then draw a perimeter and extend fire control around the entire fire. Hold the perimeter until the fire within dies. We know about the extension of the rule of containment with the U.S.S.R. We contained them until they "burned out." That seems to be what the Democrats are trying to do with the Bush Administration. Of course we’d like otherwise. We’ve lived with this malstrom for so long – we want the damn fire put out! But, I have to admit that given the level of entrenchment they’ve achieved, fighting the battle of containment is better than the alternative. Hammering at the accessible edges, making sure they don’t break out in the already controlled part of things [DoJ], shrinking the perimeter. It’s the best we can do right now. It’s sure a lot better than this time last year.

A Strong Push From Back Stage

… Cheney has changed history more than once, earning his reputation as the nation’s most powerful vice president. His impact has been on public display in the arenas of foreign policy and homeland security, and in a long-running battle to broaden presidential authority. But he has also been the unseen hand behind some of the president’s major domestic initiatives.

Scores of interviews with advisers to the president and vice president, as well as with other senior officials throughout the government, offer a backstage view of how the Bush White House operates. The president is "the decider," as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices.

Cheney led a group that winnowed the president’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Cheney resolved a crisis in the space program after the Columbia shuttle disaster. Cheney fashioned a controversial truce between the legislative and executive branches — and averted resignations at the top of the Justice Department and the FBI — over the right of law enforcement authorities to investigate political corruption in Congress.

And it was Cheney who served as the guardian of conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters. He shaped and pushed through Bush’s tax cuts, blunting the influence of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a longtime friend, and of Cabinet rivals he had played a principal role in selecting. He managed to overcome the president’s "compassionate conservative" resistance to multiple breaks for the wealthy. He even orchestrated a decision to let a GOP senator switch parties — giving control of the chamber to Democrats — rather than meet the senator’s demand for billions of dollars in new spending.

Chapter 3 in the Washington Post series paints a slightly different picture of Cheney than the former installments. Some things are the same – working behind the scenes leaving few fingerprints, tireless devotion to whatever task presents itself, a broad range of political and interpersonal skills, a firm grasp on the technical issues and details of a given issue, and extreme effectiveness. What’s different is the content. In this installment, we’re told about Cheney’s skillful handling and manipulation of a variety of matters. While I don’t particularly agree with his choices, I have to admire his skill. He is known as the most powerful Vice President in history. It would be equally true to say he’s the most effective Chief of Staff in history [or maybe the most politically savvy "President" in history]. In the issues described here, he’s on top of his game. From a Psychiatric point of view, he’s what is known as a "Successful Narcissist" – his self-confidence and felt sense of rightness hold him in good stead. People are drawn to the kind of confidence such people have. For example:

When Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, broached the idea of limiting the popular mortgage tax deduction, he said he quickly dropped it after Cheney told him it would never fly with Congress. "He’s a big timesaver for us in that he takes off the table a lot of things he knows aren’t going to go anywhere," Lazear said.

Lazear, who is otherwise known as a fierce advocate for his views, said that he may argue a point with Cheney "for 10 minutes or so" but that in the end he is always convinced. "I can’t think of a time when I have thought I was right and the vice president was wrong."

As far as Greenspan knew, the vice president agreed with him on the danger of the tax package Bush was contemplating. The Federal Reserve chairman worried that the sheer size of the cuts would drown the federal budget in red ink.

…

So Greenspan sent Cheney a study by one of the central bank’s senior economists showing that big deficits lead to higher long-term interest rates, according to a person with firsthand knowledge. Higher rates, Greenspan believed, would wipe out any short-term benefit from a tax cut.

In subsequent meetings with the Fed chief, Cheney never took issue with the study. What Greenspan did not know was that, behind the scenes, the vice president took steps to undermine an argument that could threaten the big tax cut he favored. Conda, the vice president’s aide, said Cheney asked him to critique the study. Conda attached his own memo arguing that the Fed’s analytical model was flawed. He said "it wasn’t my job to know" what Cheney did with the paperwork, but noted that Greenspan’s study did not gain traction inside the White House.

O’Neill continued to oppose the tax cut on grounds that the government was moving toward "fiscal crisis," irritating Cheney. "The vice president really got a sense of where O’Neill was coming from and surmised it was a problem," Conda said. The following month, Cheney would demand O’Neill’s resignation.

I’m reminded of a powerful article in Rolling Stone before the 2004 election, The Curse of Dick Cheney. It’s worth a read today, if you haven’t seen it. And I think of Aristotle’s Poetics frequently as I read this series. It’s a theory of Dramatic Tragedy that holds that the fall of the character comes about from a "tragic character flaw" that is apparent throughout the story, and ultimately brings about the character’s downfall. Dick Cheney is a flawed man, and blind to his own flaws. In spite of his incredible effectiveness as a politician, he has an exaggerated sense of his own rightness, and presses forward with campaigns that would be better let go of. He also hasn’t got much of a moral compass. He doesn’t seem to make a distinction between effective political strategies and sleaze – and dips into the latter with some regularity. But mainly, it is his hypertrophied sense of his own rightness that often leads him [and us] into very murky waters. It is this trait that is his "tragic character flaw." In the end, Dick Cheney has artfully lead us down the most destructive path in our history, in my way of thinking. He has amassed power and applied it to ends that are destructive to our form of government, to our place in the world, and to our future – he is a human weapon of mass destruction.

I’ve never bought the theory of the Bush-Cheney relationship as Pinocchio-Geppetto — it lets Bush off too easily to imagine that Cheney pulls all the strings. But it’s clear that Cheney is the toughest, smartest infighter in the administration and that his toughness and smarts have been employed partly in service of an independent agenda. Cheney came into office believing that the presidency — and, by extension, the vice presidency — had been deflated, and he set out to puff them back up again.

Students of public administration should have to take a course called "Cheney." How he has amassed and employed his power offers a case study in how government really works — and how a skillful operator can make a bureaucracy dance. Take Cheney’s penchant for secrecy, which seems to border on the maniacal. His office stamps "SECRET" on routine documents, including talking points for officials to use with reporters. He keeps papers pertaining to everyday business in huge Mosler safes. Is this loopy? No, he’s just putting into practice the dictum that information is power. Sunshine is for losers.

The vice president, whose Secret Service code name is "Angler," really does know all the angles. And above all, he knows how to survive. His onetime mentor Donald Rumsfeld is gone, his onetime top aide Scooter Libby is on his way to jail, yet Cheney — defiantly, disastrously, unbelievably — remains. It will take years to uncover and undo all the damage he has wrought.

Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power

"The CIA guys said, ‘We’re going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees’" if interrogators confined themselves to humane techniques allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

Dick Cheney and his band of whatever·neoconservatives·are had a belief – a belief many of us see as false. They believed that America won the ‘Cold War.’ Actually, they thought something more than that. They believed that Ronald Reagan [and something called Reaganism] won the ‘Cold War’ by standing tough against the Russians – outspending them on the Military. It’s part of Wolfowitz’s old Defense Guidance [1992], revived as the Bush Doctrine [2002] – Strength Beyond Challenge. Most of the rest of us thought the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, World Communism, the Soviet Bloc all fell down because the U.S.S.R. was, at the core, a corrupt dictatorship – and falling down is what they do. We don’t question that The Arms Race and The Policy of Containment had something to do with what happened – but so did Rock and Roll and Conspicuous Consumerism. They envied what we had, and finally got around to getting it for themselves – it’s what people do.

Extending Democracy, Liberty, and Security to All Regions

• A policy of actively promoting American versions of democracy and freedom in all regions of the world. Bush declared at West Point, "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves — safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life."

Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power

"The only person in Washington who cares less about his public image than David Addington is Dick Cheney," said a former White House ally. "What both of them miss is that ….. in times of war, a prerequisite for success is people having confidence in their leadership. This is the great failure of the administration — a complete and total indifference to public opinion."

Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power

"Once he’s taken a position, I think that’s it," said James A. Baker III, who has shared a hunting tent with Cheney more than once and worked with him under three presidents.

Principle	Success	Failure
Preemption
Unilateralism
Strength beyond challenge
A policy of actively promoting American versions of democracy and freedom in all regions of the world.

This story we’re reading in the Washigton Post is a story about a Narcissistic [and very talented] man who has the political skill to parlay his own opinions into public policy – and he’s done that for six long years. Narcissistic people don’t believe in Democracy, they manipulate it. They believe in power. It takes power to get the masses moving down the right paths.

How do you turn a Narcissistic person into a Paranoid person? It’s a piece of cake. Osama Bin Laden did it in a morning. You confront him with the wrongness of his thoughts.  In 2001, Dick Cheney was on top of his game. He wasn’t President, but he’d made it to the top. He could control the world from the background. Everyone knew Bush was a figurehead – everyone, even the people who voted for Bush that had good sense. Cheney had his Energy Conference – the big guys were in his corner. All that he needed was a reason to unseat Saddam Hussein, and he’d bring America the oil we needed to maintain our lifestyle and fill the coffers of the oil companies. He knew Iraq was his for the taking. He’d already done that once before. But 9/11 put a damper on all of that. So much for pre-emption. So much for unilaterality. So much for strength beyond challenge.

I expect Cheney really believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. In his mind, Hussein was the enemy. Bin Laden had to be being controlled and supported by Hussein. As Baker said, "Once he’s taken a position, I think that’s it." So, for five years, Cheney has spouted this delusion at any opportunity. He believed it. Paranoia’s like that – fixed false beliefs. The people he got to agree with him were in the Defense Department – Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith – the "likewise afflicted."

I would bet that what Cheney really wanted to get by torturing the prisoners is the same thing he wanted from the C.I.A. – confirmation the Iraq was behind everything. Hussein had pulled one on him, and he wasn’t going to let him get away with it. Cheney just knew he was right about that. Just like he just knew that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So he tortured the prisoners [just like he tortured the C.I.A.] to get confirmation of what he knew was true – of what he still believes…

Am I right about this? Who the hell knows. It’s just what I think… 

Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power

Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby. The meeting marked "the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up" among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. "The CIA guys said, ‘We’re going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees’" if interrogators confined themselves to humane techniques allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive’s will to resist. The vice president’s office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials.

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

A backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of abuse leaked out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to be sharp reversals in courts and Congress — for both Cheney’s claims of executive supremacy and his unyielding defense of what he called "robust interrogation."

But a more careful look at the results suggests that Cheney won far more than he lost. Many of the harsh measures he championed, and some of the broadest principles undergirding them, have survived intact but out of public view.

… the "torture memo," as it became widely known, was not Yoo’s work alone. In an interview, Yoo said that Addington, as well as Gonzales and deputy White House counsel Timothy E. Flanigan, contributed to the analysis.

The vice president’s lawyer advocated what was considered the memo’s most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA — including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

Yoo said for the first time in an interview that he verbally warned lawyers for the president, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that it would be dangerous as a matter of policy to permit military interrogators to use the harshest techniques, because the armed services, vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the tools or exceed the limits. "I always thought that only the CIA should do this, but people at the White House and at DOD felt differently," Yoo said. The migration of those techniques from the CIA to the military, and from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib, aroused worldwide condemnation when abuse by U.S. troops was exposed.

A Different Understanding With the President

… Cheney made no sound. "I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed," said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.

Three people who were present, not all of them admirers, said they saw no sign then or later of the profound psychological transformation that has often been imputed to Cheney. What they saw, they said, was extraordinary self-containment and a rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power. While others assessed casualties and the work of "first responders," Cheney began planning for a conflict that would call upon lawyers as often as soldiers and spies.

More than any one man in the months to come, Cheney freed Bush to fight the "war on terror" as he saw fit, animated by their shared belief that al-Qaeda’s destruction would require what the vice president called "robust interrogation" to extract intelligence from captured suspects. With a small coterie of allies, Cheney supplied the rationale and political muscle to drive far-reaching legal changes through the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon.

The way he did it — adhering steadfastly to principle, freezing out dissent and discounting the risks of blow-back — turned tactical victory into strategic defeat. By late last year, the Supreme Court had dealt three consecutive rebuffs to his claim of nearly unchecked authority for the commander in chief, setting precedents that will bind Bush’s successors.

Yet even as Bush was forced into public retreats, an examination of subsequent events suggests that Cheney has quietly held his ground. Most of his operational agenda, in practice if not in principle, remains in place.

First off, we know from Richard Clarke, Paul O’neill, and now many others that Bush and Cheney were headed for Iraq from the very first days. Remember that they came from the world of Laurie Mylroie, Michael Ledeen, the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century – the neocon world. They saw al-Qaeda as the peanut gallery. They had badgered Clinton and the C.I.A. unmercifully for being on a wild goose chase after al-Qaeda. Iraq and Iran – they were the real enemies. Putting aside our speculation that they were after the Iraq Oil Corrider from the very start, we know that they were after Iraq. They said it. This formulation that Cheney was pushing these policies because of a "shared belief" that he and Bush had seems off the mark to me. They didn’t really care about the Taliban, or al-Qaeda. I question that "al-Qaeda’s destruction" was ever their real goal. They believed the problem was the Middle Eastern States – primarilay Iraq and Iran.

But the contention in that paragraph that Cheney and Bush were in concert is incompatible with the rest of the article. "What they saw, they said, was extraordinary self-containment and a rapid shift of focus to the machinery of power. While others assessed casualties and the work of "first responders," Cheney began planning for a conflict that would call upon lawyers as often as soldiers and spies." He went into action almost immediately. Cheney was working behind the scenes, but was keeping people away from Bush. He was intercepting their communications to Bush. Cheney was mustering the legal [?] rationalizations outside of Bush’s awareness. He essentially conned Bush into quickly signing it without consulting other Cabinet members. He squeezed Bush by leaking the plan in his speeches before Bush had made any decisions. How could he be working on their "shared belief" if he was using subtrafuge with the President himself. It looks to me like he was working on his belief, Cheney’s belief. He was getting Bush to go along with him.

And why would he have such a strong belief? And why has he stuck to it for five plus years? Of all the things that needed doing after 9/11, why was this such a big deal? Why would he want to keep prisoners of war out of the legal system? Why would he want to torture them? Why does he still want to torture them? What did he want to find out from them? There’s little question that whatever it was [or is], it was plenty important to him. He pulled out every skill from his bag of tricks to make it happen.

I don’t know the answer to my own question. I just don’t buy the one given in this article – an explanation that’s not critically parsed – simply stated as if it were factual. I have some thoughts about it, but they’re embryonal at this point. I think I’ll let them percolate until I read the rest of the installments in this absolutely fine series [Pulitzer Prize?].

Main Stream Media – you rock today! 

A New Cheney-Gonzales Mystery

A new battle has erupted over Vice President Dick Cheney’s refusal to submit to an executive order requiring a government review of his handling of classified documents. But the dispute could also raise questions for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. For the past four years, Cheney’s office has failed to comply with an executive order requiring all federal offices—including those in the White House—to annually report to the National Archives on how they safeguard classified documents. Cheney’s hard-line chief of staff, David Addington, has made the novel argument that the veep doesn’t have to comply on the ground that, because the vice president also serves as president of the Senate, his office is not really part of the executive branch.

Cheney’s position so frustrated J. William Leonard, the chief of the Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, which enforces the order, that he complained in January to Gonzales. In a letter, Leonard wrote that Cheney’s position was inconsistent with the "plain text reading" of the executive order and asked the attorney general for an official ruling. But Gonzales never responded, thereby permitting Cheney to continue blocking Leonard from conducting even a routine inspection of how the veep’s office was handling classified documents, according to correspondence released by House Government Reform Committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman.

Why didn’t Gonzales act on Leonard’s request? His aides assured reporters that Leonard’s letter has been "under review" for the past five months—by Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). But on June 4, an OLC lawyer denied a Freedom of Information Act request about the Cheney dispute asserting that OLC had "no documents" on the matter, according to a copy of the letter obtained by NEWSWEEK. Steve Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists researcher who filed the request, said he found the denial letter "puzzling and inexplicable"—especially since Leonard had copied OLC chief Steve Bradbury on his original letter to Gonzales. The FOIA response has piqued the interest of congressional investigators, who note Bradbury is the same official in charge of vetting all document requests from Congress about the U.S. attorneys flap. Asked about the apparent discrepancy, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the OLC response "was and remains accurate" because Leonard’s letter had generated no "substantive work product."

It’s almost impossible to respond to this particular bit of foolishness. "No substantive work product" is about all one can say about the DoJ. The Vice President may claim he’s not part of the Executive Branch, but whatever he is part of – it’s the same Branch as the Department of Justice – because their job these days seems to be acting as Cheney’s personal counsel [and covering their own very exposed asses].

"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.