{"id":2711,"date":"2008-12-16T21:24:45","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T02:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=2711"},"modified":"2008-12-17T03:11:21","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T08:11:21","slug":"each-of-us-has-to-ask-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/12\/16\/each-of-us-has-to-ask-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"each of us has to ask ourselves&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"75\" width=\"327\" vspace=\"5\" border=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/froomkin.jpg\" \/><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/blog\/2008\/12\/16\/BL2008121601443.html?hpid=opinionsbox1\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Cheney Beckons Obama to the Dark Side<\/strong><\/a><br \/>                    By Dan Froomkin<br \/>                    Washington Post<br \/>                    December 16, 2008                    <\/div>\n<p>                  <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>Question<\/strong>:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">&quot;But you&#8217;ve heard leaders, the incoming Congress saying that this policy has basically been torture and illegal wiretapping, and that they want to undo basically the central tenets of your anti-terrorist policy.&quot;<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong>Cheney<\/strong>: <\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">&quot;<font color=\"#300030\"><strong>They&#8217;re wrong<\/strong><\/font>. On the question of terrorist surveillance, this was always a policy to intercept communications between terrorists, or known terrorists, or so-called &#8216;dirty numbers,&#8217; and folks inside the United States, to capture those international communications. It&#8217;s worked. It&#8217;s been successful. It&#8217;s now embodied in the FISA statute that we passed last year, and that Barack Obama voted for, which I think was a good decision on his part. It&#8217;s a very, very important capability. It is legal. It was legal from the very beginning. It is constitutional, and to claim that it isn&#8217;t <font color=\"#300030\"><strong>I think is just wrong<\/strong><\/font>. <\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\"> &quot;On the question of so-called &#8216;torture,&#8217; we don&#8217;t do torture, we never have. It&#8217;s not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously; we checked, we had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross. The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful, wouldn&#8217;t do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal. And <font color=\"#300030\"><strong>any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong<\/strong><\/font>.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"> &quot;Did it produce the desired results? I think it did. I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9\/11, provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or fours years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"> &quot;So it&#8217;s been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves. And I think those who allege that we&#8217;ve been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the Terrorist Surveillance Program, simply <font color=\"#300030\"><strong>don&#8217;t know what they&#8217;re talking about<\/strong><\/font>.&quot;<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"292\" width=\"520\" vspace=\"7\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/cheneyabc.jpg\" \/><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\">Oh look. Vice President Dick Cheney called in to talk to Rush Limbaugh yesterday. and got interviewed on ABC. I originally embedded an audio, but then thought better of it. Rush plus Cheney is too much to ask anyone to listen to. So I found Froomkin who had posted some of the Limbaugh transcript. It goes without saying that his comment, &quot;<strong><font color=\"#400040\">we don&#8217;t do torture<\/font><\/strong>&quot; is absurd, but the way he says it adds insult to injury, &quot;<strong><font color=\"#400040\">we had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross.<\/font><\/strong>&quot; Notice, he didn&#8217;t say &quot;we asked the Justice Department to clarify our policies on interrogation.&quot; He said, &quot;<strong><font color=\"#400040\">we <u>had<\/u> the Justice Department <u>issue the requisite opinions<\/u>&#8230;<\/font><\/strong>&quot; I&#8217;ve got to add that his term, &quot;<font color=\"#400040\"><strong>bright lines<\/strong><\/font>&quot; is certainly evocative. It appears to me that those &quot;<font color=\"#400040\"><strong>bright lines<\/strong><\/font>&quot; might be summarized as &quot;<font color=\"#400040\"><strong>still alive<\/strong><\/font>.&quot; Recall this interview on <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/09\/18\/extrordinary-rendition\/\"><strong>Meet the Press<\/strong><\/a> on September 16th, 2001:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#400040\"><strong>TIM RUSSERT:<\/strong><\/font> There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions? <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"> <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY:<\/strong><\/font> Oh, I think so. I think the&#8211;one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we&#8217;ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There&#8217;s&#8211;if you&#8217;re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you&#8217;re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you&#8217;re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I&#8217;m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><strong>The Hard Part:<\/strong><\/font><\/u> I don&#8217;t recall hearing him say that or reading it in 2001. But I remember how I felt then, and it wasn&#8217;t pretty. I am a psychoanalyst, and have been taught both formally and in the school of hard knocks to attend to my own fantasies &#8211; particularly my aggressive fantasies [I&#8217;ve also learned in the&nbsp; same way to keep them to myself]. In 2002, when they began to beat the drums for warfare in Iraq, I was involved in and email discussion about invading Iraq with my recently rediscovered high school classmates from 1960 [long ago and very far away]. During that discussion, I thought back on my own internal responses the year before. I recalled the violence of my own reaction to 9\/11. I decided that I had felt exactly what the vengeful Osama Bin Laden wanted me to feel &#8211; filled with hate. In 2002, I had more perspective. And as I listened to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld talk about invading Iraq, I thought two things:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\"> Why the hell are they talking about Iraq? Iraq didn&#8217;t bomb us. And Saddam Hussein&#8217;s just a blowhard. Iraq?<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div align=\"justify\">They [Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld] are still feeling what Osama Bin Laden wanted them to feel &#8211; filled with hatred and talk of evil. And they&#8217;re going to act on those feelings! Where are the adults?       <\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">Needless to say, I came out of that discussion with my old classmates opposing the Invasion of Iraq. I also lost the possibility of renewing those old friendships with high school classmates because I dared to be so &quot;unpatriotic&quot; [things change a lot in 40+ years]. But I think each of us has to ask ourselves the question:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#200020\"><strong>Had I been in Cheney&#8217;s shoes, would I have pushed Domestic Surveillance, or Torture, or Invading Iraq &#8211; in those craziest of days? <\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">I&#8217;m safe on Iraq. I know that because I can still quote some of the nasty vitriol that came my way from former classmates. But, had I heard Cheney on September 16th, 2001, I think I would&#8217;ve been comforted by what he was saying. But I hope that were I in his shoes, by one year later, if I thought that Torture or Domestic Surveillance were necessary, I would say it out loud and let America and Congress have their collective say in things. I doubt I would have tried to &quot;sneak it through&quot; as a big secret.<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><font color=\"#200020\"><strong>But I can see thinking Cheney thoughts in the week after 9\/11, and can <\/strong><strong>still <\/strong><strong>get there if I visualize that day in 2001.<\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">Actually, I think we all can, and maybe that&#8217;s why our outrage about Gitmo and Torture was so slow in coming. We have almost declared video footage of September 11th, 2001 forbidden. We just don&#8217;t like thinking of that day. And I think we say &quot;911&quot; as a way of distancing ourselves &#8211; instead of saying &quot;the day I personally watched the Twin Trade Towers in New York crumble, with people hurling themselves out of the windows.&quot; At least that&#8217;s why I say &quot;911.&quot;    <\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><strong>The Easy Part:<\/strong><\/font><\/u> No matter how you come out on the &quot;what would I have done?&quot; test, if you reread the Cheney interview at the top of the page, he&#8217;s a major moral loser. He pronounces his critics to be <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>wrong<\/strong><\/font>. He doesn&#8217;t say, &quot;they have a different perspective&quot; or &quot;their hierarchy of values are different from mine.&quot; He says they are just <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>wrong<\/strong><\/font>. He espouses a political philosophy common in the Bush Administration but nowhere sanctioned by the American Constitution or any version of American values that I know of, <font color=\"#400040\"><strong>the ends justify the means<\/strong><\/font> [&quot;So it&#8217;s been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.&quot;]. He repeatedly says that the laws [they retroactively passed] back him up. And because he got somebody to justify what he wanted [David Addington and John Yoo], that makes everything fine [&quot;<strong><font color=\"#400040\">we had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross<\/font><\/strong>&quot;]. Conclusion: Dick Cheney is a self-important, sadistic, paranoid man who had no business being in the White House.   <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><strong>The Worst Part<\/strong><\/font><\/u>: 34 more days!<\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\"><u><font color=\"#400040\"><strong>The Best Part<\/strong><\/font><\/u>: Only 34 more days&#8230;   <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cheney Beckons Obama to the Dark Side By Dan Froomkin Washington Post December 16, 2008 Question: &quot;But you&#8217;ve heard leaders, the incoming Congress saying that this policy has basically been torture and illegal wiretapping, and that they want to undo basically the central tenets of your anti-terrorist policy.&quot; Cheney: &quot;They&#8217;re wrong. On the question of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}