Tag Archives: Dick Cheney

Assange and Cheney

What do these men have in common?

Interpol has issued red notices and has alerted authorities to monitor their movements. They soon may have arrest warrants issued in their names.

photo credit: World Economic Forum

Nigeria recently filed bribery charges against former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and officials from five foreign companies, including Halliburton Co. The alleged $180 million of bribes were connected to $6 billion in contracts with Nigeria LNG Ltd., whose largest shareholder is the state-owned petroleum company, to build liquefied natural gas facilities on Bonny Island, off the country’s southern coast.

In the U.S., KBR and Halliburton agreed to pay $579 million to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2009 for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that bans bribery of foreign officials to obtain or retain business, in Nigeria from 1994 to 2004.

photo credit: adamfeuer

Julian Assange’s lawyer stated that Sweden hasn’t issued a valid European warrant for their client’s arrest for the sex crimes the WikiLeaks founder has been accused of. The lawyer said the arrest warrant was sent back by Scotland Yard because it did not comply with the law and was defective. British authorities are currently holding Assange without bail, fearing he will flee the country.

Assange was originally accused of sexual crimes following allegations made by two Swedish women. The case was opened, dropped, and then reopened by the prosecutors, but formal charges against the WikiLeaks founder haven’t been made in Sweden.

The U.S. government is working with Interpol and British and Swedish authorities to detain and, ultimately, to extradite Assange to the States to face charges for leaking government documents. Yet, the Justice Department sees no irony or hypocrisy in shielding Dick Cheney from Interpol and Nigerian authorities.

Tortured Logic

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When the United States ratified the Convention Against Torture in 1994, it agreed to criminalize torture and to provide civil remedies for torture victims. Torture was defined as the infliction of “severe” pain and suffering with the intention of doing harm for a specific purpose, such as obtaining information during interrogations, carried out by “a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

In August 2002, Jay Bybee, head of the Justice’s Office Of Legal Counsel, and now a federal judge appointed for life to the U.S. 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote a 50-page memo that essentially said the president could authorize torture even though our laws and treaties prohibited it. The memo asserted that the president could act however he saw fit during war, even if U.S. law and international treaties prohibited such conduct. “The president enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his commander in chief authority,” the memo stated, and “Congress may no more regulate the president’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

Bybee’s tortured logic completely contradicts the fact that The Convention Against Torture provides that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.” And Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions provides that the rights and duties concerning fundamental humane treatment apply whether a person detained is a prisoner of war, unprivileged belligerent, terrorist or ordinary civilian.

Now we learn from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report that as national security adviser to Bush, Condoleezza Rice verbally approved the CIA’s request to subject Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, before Bybee’s memo was even written. Last fall, Rice told the Senate Armed Services Committee only that she had attended meetings where the CIA interrogation request was discussed and asked for the attorney general to conduct a legal review. Rice used the infamous Alberto Gonzales “I don’t recall” defense in her testimony, and conveniently omitted her direct role in approving the program in her written statement to the committee. It’s clear that Rice essentially lied to the committee, which given her track record, should come as no great surprise.

Rice approved the use of torture despite the fact that Philip Zelikow, a former top lawyer in the State Department, wrote a memo strenuously objecting to the legal opinions laid out in the torture memo. The White House responded by attempting to destroy all copies of the memo Zelikow authored.

Conservatives like former Vice President Dick Cheney claim that by releasing the memos, we are no different than a Banana Republic. The memos clearly show that Bush administration officials authorized the use of torture and committed war crimes. If Rice, Cheney and others in the administration are not prosecuted for their crimes, then Cheney’s characterization of the U.S. will be accurate.

Metaphysics and the Vice President

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Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality. One of its most famous philosophical riddles poses the question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” After listening to Vice President Dick Cheney’s responses during an ABC interview about our governments use of torture, I’d like to pose another metaphysical question. “If no one prosecutes you for committing a crime, did you actually commit one?”

On December 11, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report into the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody based on a detailed analysis of how Chinese torture techniques, which are used in US military schools to train personnel to resist interrogation if captured, were reverse engineered and applied to prisoners captured during the Iraq war. The techniques, taught as part of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program or SERE, include sleep deprivation, the prolonged use of stress positions, forced nudity, hooding, exposure to extreme temperatures, subjecting prisoners to loud music and flashing lights, and waterboarding.

The authors of the reported concluded that the abuse of detainees in US custody could not simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. Rather, senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and then authorized their use against detainees.

While Cheney’s name was not mentioned specifically in the Senate report, (unlike President Bush for stripping prisoners of the protections of the Geneva Conventions in February 2002, and other administration officials, including the Vice President’s former legal counsel and current chief of staff David Addington) Cheney’s responses during the ABC interview clearly indicate he knew and approved of torture, particularly his admission that he was involved in approving the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Cheney stated, “I felt very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do.”

The law is not in question. Legal precedence has been established. After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. During the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, leading members of Japan’s military and government elite were charged with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. U.S. military tribunals and U.S. judges have examined certain types of water-based interrogation and found that they constituted torture. The Geneva Convention is clear. Waterboarding is torture and is illegal.

Richard Nixon once famously stated, “If the President does it, it’s not a crime.” That is as illogical and indefensible as Cheney’s reasoning regarding torture, particularly as reports surface that it provides little useful information and many false leads. For the country to allow this administration’s crimes to go unpunished is as immoral as torture itself. Let’s stop the nuanced debate and revisionist history. Let’s create our own reality.