Cheney dares US to indict him
Published: May 19, 2009
Vice President Cheney is daring the Obama administration to indict him for authorizing torture, according to a former White House lawyer, and it’s time to call him out on his bluff.
“I have written many times in this space that I oppose any criminal prosecution of prior-administration officials on torture or other issues relating to the Iraq War and the war on terrorism, especially those CIA interrogators who relied in good faith on the instructions of policymakers and the legal opinions issued by Justice Department senior officials,” former Special Counsel to the President for Bill Clinton Lanny Davis writes in a column published by the Washington Times Monday. “I have agreed with President Obama on the need to look forward, not backward.”
Davis continues, “But … I have changed my mind about the need to indict former Vice President Dick Cheney for complicity in illegal torture.”
His insistence on putting himself on multiple TV programs and conservative radio talk shows, not only defending torture but offering the defense that it worked, has changed my mind. Not only that – he went on to attack Mr. Obama as weakening the United States in the war on terrorism because Mr. Obama immediately announced that torture would no longer be allowed.
Dem’s fighting words. They are also, in my view, reckless and irresponsible. They seem to be laying down a marker that in case, God forbid, there is a terrorist attack, Mr. Cheney can be the first to blame it on Mr. Obama’s policies and say, “I told you so.”
Even more, they seem to be an in-your-face dare by Mr. Cheney to the U.S. criminal justice system: “I am Dick Cheney, I approved violations of the law in the name of the war on terror, and what are you going to do about it?”
It reminds me of Gary Hart’s reaction in the early days of his 1988 presidential campaign to the rumors of his womanizing. Mr. Hart denied the charge – and then dared the media to catch him. Well, they took him up on his dare (specifically, the Miami Herald did). And they caught him – at least in a compromising situation that led to his withdrawal from the campaign.
So as to Mr. Cheney: I think it is time to take him up on his implicit dare and indict him for violating the 1994 federal law against torture.
The longtime Democrat, who holds the title of Treasurer for Independent Senator Joe Lieberman’s Reuniting Our Country PAC, then lays out how an indictment of Cheney might look.
Davis also served as a member of President George W. Bush’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, before resigning in May of 2007 due to his “respectful disagreement with administration officials and most members of the Board over (1) the scope of the Board’s oversight responsibilities; and (2) the interpretation of an ambiguous statute and the degree of independence of the Board intended by congress under that statute.”
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