The Big Dick - Part 2

As we saw in the first installment of the Post's series on The Big Dick, Alberto "Fredo" Gonzales was Cheney's water boy. (Think about that nickname that Dubya gave Gonzales. Fredo, as the weak and dim-witted son in The Godfather.) Opinions carrying Gonzales' name were sometimes (most of the time?) written by someone in Cheney's office. It turns out that the right to torture also came from Cheney's office via his own counsel, David Addington.

The best defense against [a future charge of violating the Geneva Conventions], Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential direction for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

  WaPo Part 2

Humane treatment with exceptions on the authority of the president. (So now are we getting closer to who is responsible for the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?)

In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We don't torture." What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to leave room for cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." He added: "Torture is an extreme version of cruelty."

And here we had been giving Fredo credit for narrowly defining torture. The infamous memo defining it to mean major organ failure or death came under the signature of the assistant attorney general, but its model came from Cheney's office. (Where they really made their mistake was in letting the military interrogators at Abu Ghraib have the same torture rights as the CIA has always had. The amateurs didn't have the sense to keep it secret.)

On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.

Rice "very angrily said there would be no more secret opinions on international and national security law," the official said, adding that she threatened to take the matter to the president if Gonzales kept them out of the loop again. Powell remarked admiringly, as they emerged, that Rice dressed down the president's lawyer "in full Nurse Ratched mode," a reference to the ward chief of a mental hospital in the 1975 film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Neither of them took their objections to Cheney, the official said, a much more dangerous course.

Since the orders came from his office, I doubt they ever even considered going to him. I wonder if The Big Dick told "dressed down" Fredo not to worry about the President's Bitch. But, what I want to know is why she wouldn't have taken the matter to the president anyway. Is the implication here that even after two years, when the National Security Adviser and the Secretary of State found out about an illegal order, the president himself was not informed? He really is a waste of space, isn't he?

During an argument on the issue in Fredo's office amongst the various attorneys, when it was pointed out that the courts might not look favorably on giving the president full torture rights, Fredo did what you by now are expecting the little water boy would do.

Gonzales listened quietly as the Justice Department and his own staff lined up against Addington. Then he decided in favor of Cheney's lawyer.

Indeed, the courts did not look kindly upon the order, and when District Judge Michael B. Mukasey ruled that Jose Padilla had the right to a lawyer, Cheney sent his goons round to tell him he should retract his decision. Mukasey boldly declined.

Bush acknowledged publicly on Sept. 6 that the CIA maintained secret prisons overseas for senior al-Qaeda detainees, a subject on which he had held his silence since The Post disclosed them late in 2005. The president announced a plan to empty the "black sites" and bring their prisoners to Guantanamo Bay to be tried.

[...]

After a private meeting with Cheney, [...] Bush decided not to promise that there would be no more black sites -- and seven months later, the White House acknowledged that secret detention had resumed.

Of course we know that The Little Prince can't make his own decisions.

On Oct. 5, 2005, the Senate voted 90 to 9 in favor of [John] McCain's Detainee Treatment Act, which included the Geneva language. It was, by any measure, a rebuke to Cheney. Bush signed the bill into law.

[...]

Yet Cheney and Addington found a roundabout path to the exceptions they sought for the CIA, as allies in Congress made little-noticed adjustments to the bill.

The final measure confined only the Defense Department to the list of interrogation techniques [...] No techniques were specified for CIA officers, who were forbidden only in general terms to employ "cruel" or "inhuman" methods.

[...]

The Supreme Court has defined cruelty as an act that "shocks the conscience" under the circumstances. Addington suggested, according to another government lawyer, that harsh methods would be far less shocking under circumstances involving a mass-casualty terrorist threat. Cheney may have alluded to that advice in an interview with ABC's "Nightline" on Dec. 18, 2005, saying that "what shocks the conscience" is to some extent "in the eye of the beholder."

Consummate evil.

Without repealing the War Crimes Act, which imposes criminal penalties for grave breaches of Geneva's humane-treatment standards, Congress said the president, not the Supreme Court, has final authority to decide what the standards mean -- and whether they even apply.

Consummate scum suckers.