Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker: At every stage in the post-9/11 debate, Cheney and his staff sought to enshrine torture as official U.S. policy, relying on a legalistic distinction between "torture" and "cruelty."
Christy at Firedoglake has two posts on the subject. In the first she calls attention to a quote from Alberto Mora, former chief counsel for the US Navy: “To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values.” In her second, she focuses attention on Cheney butt boy Timothy Flanigan, and recalls that the Bush administration had wanted him to be the replacement when James Comey resigned.
Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah notes how Cheney and Addington rejected sound advice from their staunchest ideological allies, who they then forced to defend in public the very arguments they had vigorously opposed in private.
Kevin Drum: As today's piece shows, the pushback from both the courts and Congress against Cheney's hardline stands has already been substantial — and I suspect it's only going to get stronger as time goes by. Cheney's goal was to give the president more power, but in the end his monomania blinded him to the fact that he was accomplishing just the opposite. Much like his response to the war on terror, in fact. But the whole country is paying the price for that.
Anonymous Liberal at Crooks and Liars: (1) Conspicuously absent from nearly every important scene described in these articles is the President himself.
(2) If you read between the lines in part two of the series, it seems pretty clear that Dick Cheney himself bears enormous responsibility for what happened at Abu Ghraib:
(3) Another meta-theme that emerges from the articles is how utterly self-destructive Cheney’s legal crusades have been. Time and again you see smart lawyers within the administration (often ones who agree with Cheney substantively) warning him that the courts aren’t going to accept certain arguments, and time and again you see Cheney ignoring this advice and insisting that the administration plow ahead. In every case, the courts ended up rejecting Cheney’s views, and in the exact way the administration’s own lawyers had predicted.
Max Sawicky reminds: Cheney originally selected himself to be VP. He chaired the VP Search Committee for Bush and then recommended himself.
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