Cheney

While everyone’s railing about the incredibly nasty speech by former Vice President Dick Cheney this morning — who takes credit for preventing terrorist attacks against the United States by using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” even as he neglects to mention that he and President Bush could have but did nothing to stop the attacks on September [...]

Greg Sargent mines a Washington Post piece to discover that the Obama administration is looking to declassify a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that laid out grave doubts about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program. Background on the value of that report — referred to numerous times in the May 2005 torture memos from the Justice [...]

This probably won’t come as a huge surprise to most readers, but since it still might to former Vice President Dick Cheney or former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, both of who’ve been going around asserting that the Bush administration’s torture and abuse tactics as have saved America from another terrorist [...]

While we’re all duly praising Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) for calling a hearing next Wednesday on the torture memos, I’m still puzzled by one thing: why isn’t the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts calling the authors of the memos to explain how and why they reached their legal conclusions despite clearly [...]

The latest batch of torture memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, which Spencer and I wrote about yesterday, divulged in even more gruesome detail than we’d seen before just how far the previous administration was willing to go to justify the torture and abuse of detainees in its “war [...]

Reading The New York Times’ lead editorial today feels a bit like reading a summary of much of what I’ve been writing for the past two months: that President Obama, despite his impressive pronouncements on closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and ending torture and unnecessary government secrecy, hasn’t changed the federal government’s positions [...]

That’s the claim made by the Wall Street Journal editorial board over the weekend, hammering Obama for his aggressive assertion of executive power to hide evidence of warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration.

For those of you who missed it, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show last night featured a terrific and news-breaking interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.),  in which Pelosi talked about, among other things, holding Bush administration officials criminally accountable.

Noting that George Bush Sr. pardoned the Iran-Contra clan on Christmas eve of 1992, Democrats.com is warning that his son could do something very similar Wednesday: pardon Dick Cheney and the rest of the administration officials who authorized and encouraged the torture and humiliation of “war on terror” detainees.

This is from a U.S. District court filing from Dick Cheney’s office:
”The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law…”