vpResident Evil

Anything that comes out about Dick Cheney these days may set a new low for Constitutional Shock and Awe in the beltway but it never surprises me.  Anyone trained in the the Nixon White House has to be well versed in enemies lists that basically include any one that disagrees with your agenda and adept at paranoid manipulation of government agencies.

From the NY Times to the Washington Post to the nattering nabobs of cultural Obanality at CNN, everything is coming up probes.  While the White House wants to avoid looking back, the Justice Department appears to be sending out signals that it will look back, hard and deep (per Newsweek). To Eric Holder, servant of the people, I say, full steam ahead!  Do we finally have Richard B. Cheney in the targeting sights of ladies liberty and justice or are we being teased again?  The economy, universal health care, and just about every other agenda we could possibly support means nothing if our rule of law means nothing.   President Obama, of all people, should know and appreciate this.

Holder’s decision could come within weeks, around the same time the Justice Department releases an ethics report about Bush lawyers who drafted memos supporting harsh interrogation practices, the sources said. The legal documents spell out in sometimes painstaking detail how interrogators were allowed to subject detainees to simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, wall slamming and confinement in small, dark spaces.

Any criminal inquiry could face challenges, including potent legal defenses by CIA employees who could argue that attorneys in the Bush Justice Department authorized a wide range of harsh conduct. But the sources said an inquiry would apply only to activities by interrogators, working in bad faith, that fell outside the “four corners” of the legal memos. Some incidents that might go beyond interrogation techniques that were permitted involve detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are described in the secret 2004 CIA inspector general report, set for release Aug. 31.

Among the unauthorized techniques allegedly used, as described in the report and Red Cross accounts, were shackling, punching and beating of suspects, as well as the waterboarding of at least two detainees using more liquid and for longer periods than the Justice Department had approved. That conduct could violate ordinary criminal laws, as well as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed more than a decade ago.

We have to rely on the independence and spine of Holder and the balls of congress who have allowed themselves to be nothing but talking heads when it comes to their duties of oversight.  Can we rely on them to be truly pissed off enough at Cheney’s ordering the CIA to keep them out of the loop on secret programs for them to actually find some brass ones and do their job?

House Democrats said yesterday that they expect to launch a formal investigation into a secret CIA program that was not disclosed to Congress for almost eight years, a probe that could entangle senior Bush administration officials who oversaw intelligence issues.

Democrats on the House intelligence committee said the inquiry would examine both the nature of the still-secret program and the decisions to keep congressional oversight committees in the dark about its existence.

“This wasn’t an oversight. There was an order given to not inform Congress,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), chairman of the panel’s oversight and investigations subcommittee.

Lawmakers learned of the program from CIA Director Leon Panetta at closed-door briefings June 24 for the House and Senate intelligence committees. The day before, CIA officials informed Panetta of the program and told him Congress had not been briefed. He then canceled it.

The New York Times, on its Web site, reported yesterday that Panetta has told the committees that Vice President Richard B. Cheney gave the order to keep the information from Congress. The newspaper cited unnamed sources.

In an interview last night with The Washington Post, an intelligence official said it was “generally known” from the beginning that Cheney had requested that the program be kept from Congress. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear whether the agency was obligated to brief Congress.

During the second half of the Bush administration, CIA officials did not consult with the administration about the program or take orders from Cheney to keep it secret, according to former agency officials who held senior posts at the time.

The Constitution is quite specific about the duties given to Congress, the President and the Vice President, and others.  I do not recall ever reading that the Vice President could order any agency to withhold briefings to its appropriate Congressional Oversight Committee.  Call me plain old fashioned, but we need to ensure that we never have a President that  delegates the destruction of the Constitution to a Vice  President ever again.  I won’t even start in on the idea of a President that delegates violating the terms of the Geneva Convention and other treaties we’ve negotiated and signed to a Vice President.   If we do have a Constitutional “scholar’ in the White House now, he needs to step aside and let the Justice Department do its job or be held equally accountable for the weakening of the supreme law of the people.  We, the citizens, need to drop every thing else until rule of law is firmly reestablished in this country.

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