[Pen-l] Cole & Brooks on Obama Cheney Smack-Down

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Juan Cole <jricole@xxxxxxxxx>

Veteran security reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren Strobel at
McClatchy [http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/68643.html]
fact-check former vice president Dick Cheney's speech defending
torture and denouncing plans to close Guantanamo Bay Landay and
Strobel catch the vice president in a whole series of falsehoods:

The long and the short of it is that other high US officials doubt the
allegation that torture was necessary to fighting al-Qaeda, or
necessarily produced good information that could not have been
obtained in any other way. McClatchy points out that Ibn al-Shaykh
Libi's confession, produced by torture, actually helped drag the US
into a fruitless war in Iraq insofar as he made false allegations that
Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda in chemical weapons. The US
military combed six million captured Baath documents and found the
allegation false.

It could also be added that torture almost certainly deepened and
lengthened the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq, which contrary to
Cheney's claims was not mainly led by al-Qaeda.

President Obama's speech on the same subject, is here
[http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/68646.html]. It is an
important speech, but problematic. It is framed as an attempt to
defend the Constitution from Cheney's abuses, and as a balancing of
transparency against national security. I'm not one of those he
accuses of being a transparency fundamentalist. But I find him making
too many concessions to the National Security State that are in my
view unconstitutional. He maintains he is cutting back the abuses. But
it isn't good enough that one president should identify where he
things the US government went too far, and voluntarily cut back.
Cutting back from three packs a day to only one could still kill you.
And what happens if a different sort of president gets in in 2012 and
ramps up the abuses again? By declining to draw a clear and
adjudicable line, Obama is unwittingly allowing the Right to lay the
groundwork for permanent move to presidential dictatorship. Obama says
he doesn't want to re-litigate the last 8 years. That is frankly
disingenuous. The last 8 years was never litigated. And crimes were
committed. If they are not addressed, they will become norms, not
crimes.
End/ (Not Continued)

In the following, David Brooks seems to make sense, for a change.
>From SLATE's news summary:
>The NYT's David Brooks points out that Obama and Cheney both talked as if "we lived through an eight year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period." But that "is a completely bogus distortion of history." After Sept. 11 there may have been a period of Bush-Cheney policy, but that lasted "maybe three years." Then a number of Bush officials became more influential and "tried to rein in the excesses" of that policy. "When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he's not really attacking the Obama administration," writes Brooks. "He's attacking the [later] Bush administration."<

-- 
Jim Devine / "It has always been the prerogative of children and
half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the
half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor."  --
Neil Gaiman
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