Cheney Torture

In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the highest-ranking officials in the Bush administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- met in the White House and quietly agreed to override some of the basic provisions of the U.S. Constitution that protect individual rights.

They also decided to disregard the Geneva Conventions and to sanction the use of torture, which they renamed "enhanced interrogation techniques." All of this they did in the name of national security. To provide legal cover for these activities (and to immunize themselves against future prosecution), they enlisted a cadre of government lawyers to draft opinions that cloaked what many believe to be war crimes in an aura of respectability. Ashcroft, a man of ponderous public piety, reportedly warned the group that "history will not judge us kindly."

By going on television and giving interviews against Obama's policy, Cheney is effectively continuing to puppet master torture as a political tool instead of a legal one.

If Cheney were quiet, like Bush, there is great risk that he will be prosecuted for War Crimes.

If, however, Cheney and his gang of thugs, can keep the focus on Obama and keep Iraq and terror political hot potatoes, then any sort of prosecution of Cheney on rightful legal grounds crashes upon the shore as political revenge and not an act of restoring the ideal that we are a nation of laws and not men.

Obama seems to know Cheney's game and he's beating him back with the slow trickle of information on state sponsored terror -- and that release of the details on our private torture programs will be the public end of Cheney and company and their reign of terror against our Constitution.