|
Hunting For Cheney’s Head?
When Josh Marshall portrait Cheney in early 2003 he found him to be proven wrong on most the issues he touched. Marshall traced this back to a particular mentality:
Cheney is conservative, of course, but beneath his conservatism is something more important: a mindset rooted in his peculiar corporate-Washington-insider class. It is a world of men–very few women–who have been at the apex of both business and government, and who feel that they are unique in their mastery of both. Consequently, they have an extreme assurance in their own judgment about what is best for the country and how to achieve it. They see themselves as men of action.
…
[A]nyone who doesn’t agree gets ignored or, if need be, crushed. Muscle it through and when the results are in, people will realize we were right is the underlying attitude.
The current Washington Post series on Cheney (Part I, Part II, more to follow), has lots of interesting and sometimes breath taking anecdotes of Cheney’s and his consigliere Addington’s actions. They fit the analysis Marshall wrote four years ago.
Cheney sees himself not as the usual vice-president but as the president behind the president:
"He
had the understanding with President Bush that he would be — I’m just
going to use the word ‘surrogate chief of staff,’ " said Quayle, whose
membership on the Defense Policy Board gave him regular occasion to see
Cheney privately over the following four years.
…
Cheney
preferred, and Bush approved, a mandate that gave him access to "every
table and every meeting," making his voice heard in "whatever area the
vice president feels he wants to be active in," [White House Chief of
Staff] Bolten said.
Cheney and Addington are running circles around the law and around other players in the White House, especially Rice, Powell and Ashcroft. They are ruled down by the Supreme Court and get proven to be wrong again and again on policy issues. Still they push on.
Some parts of the WaPo reports seem to have been edited down to isolate Bush from the damage. Indeed the whole series could be subtitled "Blame Cheney not Bush."
People on and off the record, like torture advocate John Yoo, use their accounts to deflect some blame from themselves and onto the Cheney/Addington team.
The vice president’s lawyer advocated what was considered the memo’s most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because 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."
That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA — including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.
Yoo said for the first time in an interview that he verbally warned lawyers for the president, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that it would be dangerous as a matter of policy to permit military interrogators to use the harshest techniques, because the armed services, vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the tools or exceed the limits.
Still in total the series is a narrative of episodes that, taken together, are a good basis for a trial at the Hague.
One wonders to what planed effect such a broad assault, supported by many insider quotes, gets launched right now. Who is hunting for Cheney’s head here?
Though I accept the fact that “depth psychology” is not very much in favor these days (if indeed it ever was), I will argue that it has, on occasion, the undeniable virtue of going to the heart of the matter, and the heart of the matter, where Cheney is concerned, is Bush rather more than Cheney.
Let’s remember who’s President–and let’s not forget that Cheney tried, rather tentatively, to start up his own campaign for the Presidency in 1995. The Republicans–the owners, at least–have never held the man in much esteem, and his “campaign” (if in fact it ever became one) never turned anyone on, so he settled for what he now has.
Is it a matter of affect? Bush comes forth with some kind of blind fervor, and moves the folks to say “yes!” This is just fine with Cheney. And why? Because Cheney knows how to handle the Prince.
To put it in brutal terms: Bush is a creature of bloodlust and a torture-freak, and Cheney is a power-freak who knows how to please the Prince (I’ve never seen any sign that Cheney gets high on torture; it’s almost an abstraction for him, mostly a “means to an end”). Gonzales, of course, provided Bush with the very same service in Texas (with those 150 lost souls on death row). No wonder that Cheney and Gonzales prosper in the face of every revelation! They feed the habit of the junky, and the junky, who lives for his fix, knows this only too well. I think of them, in this context, as his indispensable “sex workers,” and nothing more.
I remember a drunk who once told me: “you can take everything I have, but you’ll never, never separate me from this” (he was holding a bottle of gin). And while Bush may, or may not, have put the cork in his own bottle of gin, the rest of us will never, ever, separate him from his other habit– from the craving, and the gratification, of his lust for blood. To make matters worse, we cannot claim that we didn’t see this process at work in his days as the Governor of Texas (Carla Faye Tucker is there for all to see).
But the day will come when we read the graphic, the appalling, testimony of those who, with their very own eyes and ears, have witnessed Bush as he ventilates and gratifies that bloodlust (talking directly to torturers on the telephone, for example). Yes, one day this day will come, but it will not come anytime soon, because witnesses are also voyeurs–a perversion not be proud of.
And what will we learn from this testimony?
Well, we traded a brilliant creature of lust (Bill Clinton) for a depraved creature of bloodlust (George Bush, whose record was there for all of us to see). It’s something to think about for a while, if only because these drives, which belong in some way to us all, are there to be recognized and dealt with–either to be affirmed, or else to be deferred, postponed, and kept in check.
Unacceptable, to the spirit of clarity at least, is any effort to deny or to minimize this situation–a very hard thing to do, given Bush’s skill at masking his deepest urges (even, as a concept, from himself–at refusing to accept them as his own).
This is so sick that it becomes downright interesting: even the most florid (and thickest) of Bush’s associates seem to be getting the idea that this man is poisoning their minds.
Except, perhaps, for Cheney: he’s so addicted to power that he’s happy to accept his own eventual ruin. As is also, apparently, Gonzales.
But when Bush is left to clear the brush on his “ranch,” and Cheney and Gonzales feel the unremitting lashes of a vengeful and undiscriminating public, Justice will not be served, because we are among those to whom this responsibility also belongs: by scapegoating Cheney and Gonzales (who have made their scapegoating impossible to avoid), we will not only let Bush off the hook, we will also absolve ourselves.
Posted by: alabama | Jun 25 2007 17:19 utc | 5
b real- I’m speaking for myself at this time. no one else. however, I do think that acts of violence against the state are to the benefit of the state, not the person’s cause who does something, no matter how just the cause. — except when the state physically attacks you. then it’s self-defense.
maybe things will be different in some future. I hope not.
in the past I reacted with my lizard brain when I was mugged and I fought back. Pure adrenaline and self-defense. When my kids were born I had a new feeling…a feeling that I would definitely hurt anyone who tried to hurt my child… this was after childbirth and it was a “feral” sort of response, if that makes sense.. or more lizard brain response.
I understand the anguish of the Palestinians from the perspective of their view of the suffering of those they love. However, as a people or group, I think they would have shamed Israel in the face of the entire world into a settlement by now if they had disavowed suicide bombings. But those actions (as in what I said about the state, above) give others a reason to justify continued inhumanity. That situation is probably way too complex to talk about so simply because religion and colonialism and fear are raw in that situation (for whacko American fundie christians, too, who support the destruction of the mosque sitting above the wailing wall… a sick, sick, sick way of looking at the world.)
Ghandi and MLK accomplished their goals by nonviolence. And of course they both lost their lives for their work, so violence was put upon them, even if they did not practice it themselves. However, without King, I don’t think the civil rights movement would have been successful. If African-Americans had fought back, they would have given the racists a justification for further oppression. Instead, the eyes of the world saw Bull Connor attacking non-violent people. People were arrested at lunch counters and others took their places and the world saw that these people in their nice clothes were doing nothing other than expecting to sit at a counter and order food.
That’s where my ideas about “do not and will not” come from.
If you alienate the middle class in the U.S, you cannot win. fact. — or you win only by oppression, so, to me, you lose.
If you had foreknowledge of Hitler, and could go back in time then, yes, it would be easy to say, of course it’s moral to kill him. But if you lived in that time, or if I did, rather, with no foreknowledge, I wouldn’t have thought such an action was moral until a major tipping point… and by that time the state apparatus of control (and civilian sector help) would have made such actions difficult if not impossible.
if I had been living in the Warsaw ghetto….then, yes, violence was entirely justified because death was a near-certainty anyway, so you might as well take out as many of them as you can and maybe even escape.
but there are all sorts of difficult situations I cannot answer… like, if I were a CIA agent, etc., would it be moral to take out (via “natural” death) someone who condones torture and who doesn’t give a crap about the constitution while holding such power? — I don’t know. — or what about soldiers who are charged to protect and defend the constitution? — I don’t know. If there are legal grounds, then I would wholeheartedly support Cheney’s arrest and trial.
But at the level of individual citizen, I think it would be wrong to try to harm him or any other person who is a part of the govt. (or anyone else, for that matter.) our entire system is built upon the idea of rule of law. If you become judge and executioner, you are outside the law and violate the idea you claim to uphold. The exception for me is self-defense from a direct physical attack.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jun 26 2007 21:54 utc | 31
|
