Posted by
Rude One
Let us now praise infamous men. The desiccated husk of a demi-human that
is named Dick Cheney, former Vice President of these here United
States, dragged his decaying body and scent of rot into his home away
from home, Fox "news" studios, to discuss the Senate's report on the
CIA's program of torturing suspected terrorists.
He was speaking with
Bret Baier, who obviously must worship mad Lovecraftian gods in order to
be in the presence of such a barren soul with such black eyes and a
mouth torn to shreds by the speaking of endless lies without vomiting
endlessly. How many sacrifices have to be made at an altar covered in
the blood of Iraqi children to keep Cheney alive? How many virgins,
fresh for fucking and devouring, did Baier have to provide Cheney in
order to secure the interview?
However, oddly, Cheney ought to be thanked for what he told Baier. When
asked about President George W. Bush's awareness of the CIA's
interrogation methods, which the report says he was kept in the dark
about, Cheney responded, "He was in fact an integral part of the
program. He had to approve it before we went forward with it...I think
he knew everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the
program. There's no question... I think he knew certainly the techniques
that we did discuss the techniques. There's nothing - there was no
effort on our part to keep him from that. He was just as with the
terrorist surveillance program. On the terrorist surveillance program,
he had to personally sign off on that every 30 to 45 days. So the notion
that the committee's trying to peddle it, somehow the agency was
operating on a rogue basis, and we weren't being told or the President
wasn't being told is just a flat-out lie."
Cheney totally and without
hesitation said that Bush committed war crimes.
Now, one way to look at Cheney's remarks is to say, as several people
have, that the former VP threw Bush under the bus, a kind of "Fuck you,
I'm not taking the fall." But it's more than that. It's the beginning of
a legal defense. Cheney may be an entity of concentrated malice, but
he's not stupid. With United Nations officials saying that there need to
be prosecutions for the crimes described in the report, with the
potential for other nations to want torturers and torture architects
arrested, even if the likelihood of anything happening along those lines
is slim to "America is awesome," Cheney knows that he might need a
legal defense. And the only defense for a vice president is to point the
finger at the president and say, "That's where the buck stops."
While some on the right, like Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and,
really,
The American Conservative magazine (
seriously),
have honorably stood up and said that the torture program was an
unmitigated wrong, most conservatives have gone nutzoid in defense of
the CIA. For instance:
MSNBC's host with the inbred eyes, Joe Scarborough,
tweeted, "Senate Intel Report investigators refused to interview the accused. Sounds like
Rolling Stone's journalistic approach on their UVA story." And that'd be totally true if
Rolling Stone
had had access to a treasure trove of documents from the students
accused of rape at the University of Virginia. But the magazine didn't
review six million pages of emails, memos, and internal reports from the
alleged rapists, things that in a court of law are often seen as more
legitimate than the recollections of someone years after the fact.
There's 6000 pages more we haven't seen of the torture report, with,
it's reported, tens of thousands of footnotes. You can bet that many of
them are not just interviews with the victims - they include internal
interviews with the people involved, including by the CIA's inspector
general.
The whole charge is bogus because, as Dianne Feinstein
noted,
while the report was being put together, the CIA was being investigated
by the Justice Department for destroying evidence of torture. The
agency couldn't compel anyone to testify to the committee because "CIA
employees and contractors who would otherwise have been interviewed by
the Committee staff were under potential legal jeopardy." And Joe
Scarborough can go fuck himself with that Starbucks travel mug.
The rest of the conservative arguments against the report are equally
bullshit filled. There's the "Who the fuck cares?" camp, who say things
like,
"Without a nation we have no values. And without torture, regardless of
the latest politically correct views, we have no nation." (That's from
Daily Caller tough guy David Lawrence.) There's the "It worked"
argument, best exemplified by the desperate ass-covering of things like
the
website CIA Saved Lives, the
Wall Street Journal editorial by former CIA directors, and torture-approver John Yoo.
Yoo is an especially skeevy cock knob about the report, which he calls
"the Feinstein Report" (which will no doubt become the talking point).
He wants to know what else would have worked to get information he
claims stopped terrorist plots: "The Feinstein Report claims that the
CIA would have captured all of these operatives anyway...Feinstein
provides no reason to conclude, counter-factually, that the U.S. would
have killed or captured these al Qaeda leaders without the high-quality
intelligence from interrogations. The United States and its allies
certainly had not done so before the interrogations started—it did not
even know about many of them before 9/11. But we do know that armed with
the intelligence from interrogations, the U.S. succeeded."
So his argument boils down to saying that burning down the house was the
only way to get rid of the mice because we don't know if traps would
have worked. In fact (and by "fact," the Rude Pundit means, "What
happened"), we got all the intelligence we needed out of people like Abu
Zubaydah
before they were tortured, which proves the traps work, put the fucking gas can down.
There's two more arguments that the Rude Pundit will deal with tomorrow.
