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The Balance Begins to Tip Against Cheney
After years of pulling punches, Democrats in the Senate are throwing them at Cheney, following the revelation that the man who operated as something akin to a co-president during George Bush's first term ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress.
There "absolutely" needs to be a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of Cheney's assault on the system of checks and balances outlined in the essential sections of the US Constitution, argued Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois).
"The executive branch of government cannot create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark. There is a requirement for disclosure," the chamber's number two Democrat said on ABC's This Week program. "(Any investigation) has to be done in an appropriate way so it doesn't jeopardize our national security, but to have a massive program that is concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate; it could be illegal."
We have heard calls for investigations before.
But the former vice president's disregard for the vagaries of constitutional governance seems to have returned to haunt him.
So serious are the charges against Cheney that Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who for too long worked too closely with the Bush-Cheney administration on so many issues, appears finally to be accepting that an inquiry is going to be required.
"This is a big problem, because the law is very clear," Feinstein said as the details of Cheney's wrongdoing began to come to light. "If the Intelligence Committees had been briefed, they could have asked for regular reports on the program, they could have made judgments about the program as it went along. That was not the case, because we were kept in the dark. That's something that should never, ever happen again."
The intelligence committee chair--whose power is usually matched only by her caution--bluntly suggested that Cheney had acted illegally.
"I think you weaken your case when you go outside the law," Feinstein said. "We should have been briefed before the commencement of this kind of sensitive program."
Of course, there will be push back from the defenders of the indefensible. "It is not out of the ordinary for the vice president to be involved in an issue like this," said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, (R-Arizona). Kyl point is well taken; the Arizonan has worked with several vice presidents who have been "involved in an issue like this." George Herbert Walker Bush was all wrapped up in the Iran-Contra scandal and Cheney's regard for the rule of law is so dismissive as to make him a prime suspect whenever a shredded copy of the Constitution is uncovered.
But the fact that the Congress failed to hold the elder Bush to account for his high crimes and misdemeanors does not absolve Cheney of responsibility for what he has done. Not, it should be noted, does it absolve Congress.
Durbin is precisely right when he says:
(We) know that Vice President Cheney played an unusual role with President Bush in the early days of the administration. That seemed to change over time.
But it is inappropriate for the vice president or the president to be ordering that a program be kept secret and not disclosed at the highest levels of congressional leadership.
We have to have a check and balance in our system. To give to the president unbridled power and authority goes way beyond what our Constitution has in mind.
That system of checks and balances has been battered to the breaking point over the past four years.
The process of restoring it will only be completed if those who were responsible for the battery are held to account. And the list of these wrongdoers begins with the name "Dick Cheney."
- Posted in
79 Comments so far
Show AllProbably just another "LEANTOO" so as to cover the crimes.
If justice does commence it will payback for calling Pelosi a liar, concerning CIA briefings.
Don't bet on it folks. Too many dems carried Cheney's shit for too long and their hands are still dirty. The republicans (including Specter and Lieberman) will filibuster any serious attempt to investigate Cheney further.
Dick Durbin is hardly representative of the entire Senate. Let's hope that he doesn't take any trips in small planes any time soon.
q
I'll believe it ONLY WHEN 5-deferment Dickhead Cheney and his puppet chimpy are dangling from the end of a rope.
NUREMBERG II 2009
Dick Cheney's accountability moment may finally be arriving.
------------------------
John, John, John...are you still that naive?
Cheney's was (is?) the 'Don' of the D.C. corporate/political criminal empire.
Nobody touches the 'Don'!
Feinstein's words are theatrics meant to temper the masses.
Congress is already working on the cheney-cia-executive-death-squad-screw-transparent-government-retroactive-immunity legislation as we speak!
John Nichols is not naive. His job at The Nation is to safely channel opposition to the corrupt duopoly into the Democratic Party where it will die. His purpose is to prevent the formation of opposition outside the Democratic Party where the PTB couldn't control it.
In this particular case his job is to spin the illusion that the Republicans really did it this time, the Democrats are fed up and some heads are going to roll. Yeah right Nichols, what else is new?
Me too
Cheny ain't enough of course. How to charge the vice - pres and not the pres?
Can't get around it : Bush has to go before the court sooner or later.
And I want to know what the program was! Now.
odoco
The 'cover' story already produced by the Wall Street Journal states that the program was one to 'eliminate' Al Qaeda members. By pre-emptively framing it this way the 'Right' will be able to argue that the program fit within Constitutional guidelines because we were 'at war' with Al Qaeda and as such the members of the Executive branch should not be held accountable.
"Bush has to go before the court sooner or later."
Don't bet on it. Obama has already done all that he can to shield Dubya and his gang from almost any prosecution and with Obama expanding on Dubya's policies, the genie's way out of the bottle here. If Dubya goes to court, he and his gang will be sure to drag in his enablers.
eh glenn pelosi IS a liar and she will get caught up in it as well.
Nothing is going to happen to Cheney. The congress is a joke-about the only thing they are good for is giving themselves pay raises.
That's been fixed for a while now also. The system is set up so that they get automatic raises and actually need to bring a motion to the floor to forego it, which they did for 2010!
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/pelosi_pay_increases/2009/03/12/191447.html?utm_medium=RSS
Pelosi Won't End Automatic Congressional Pay Raises
Thursday, March 12, 2009 7:55 PM
WASHINGTON - Congress' automatic pay raises are in little immediate danger of being scrapped for good, even with the economy slumping and millions of Americans unemployed....
I'll never trust or believe in the American government again - no matter who may be appointed to power - until the last of these treasonous war criminals are brought to justice, real justice, from the Hague or the ICC.
I feel exactly as you do. '08 was my last election vote. I'm with George Carlin now. Fuck it all! And Cheesedick Cheney will never see the inside of a prison.
Unfortunately, that's how I feel now, too. I received a jury summons and said I have no faith in the criminal justice system, that no matter what the crime or evidence I can't ever vote to convict anyone of anything- until the Bush Administration is held accountable for what they have done.
Still waiting to see if I'm "excused" from serving.
Now that the cow is gone, we need to investigate barn door security.
Um, Cheney is long out of office. But that aside, the balance was always against that creep. It's just that the Republicans and most Democrats made sure he was protected from being held accountable for his crimes and it's still going to happen. Expecting Cheney to be held accountable is like expecting Lucy not to pull the football away from Charlie Brown every time his foot is about to hit the football. The pols are the Lucys and we the electorate are the Charlies. :(
And even if Cheney is about to get it, Obama will grant him a big fat presidential pardon !
Well said RichM. John Dean may have gotten away from Nixon's party but he still has a habit of clinging to the Democrat Party and still expecting anything from the Democrats in Washington. To put it in layman's terms, most of the electorate is the Charlie Browns while the pols in Congress are the Lucys playing us for the sucker.
Wow, looking at the comments, this cheap article has no one fooled, must have been a slow news day for Nichols.
Mr. Nichols: spare us the empty blather and wake us when Cheney et al. are being shipped off to the Hague or Federal prison.
Now why don't you write an article outlining the rampant institutional corruption plaguing our democratic process? And suggest ways to fix it.
Cheney has no right to breathe any of the available air left on planet Earth.
The American government has a long history of its inhabitants doing the 'unconstitutional' and/or the criminal and getting away with it, so I don't really expect Mister Cheney to be brought to 'justice' - whatever that is in his particular case.
Since at least Truman and WWII we've been living in what amounts to a national security state far more sophisticated and entrenched than that fool Reagan's 'evil empire' ever was. A basic difference in reality between most Americans and the Soviet 'peoples' is that the people living under the Soviet Union knew they lived in a tyrannical national security state and most Americans don't know they do.
good point tirebiter,
One living example of a war criminal who was never held accountable is Henry Kissinger. Not only was he never prosecuted, he still sits on the CFR and is treated like a god by the MSM and politicians, including many Ds.
Hey, it's all right to dis German nazi's, but Kissinger is OUR nazi.
One has to admit that this alleged tyranny must be very different in its characteristics since it is therefore so aptly concealed from so many. One thing that all repressive governments have in common, however, are asinine commentators functioning as politicians. It's a time-honored tradition.
"...but to have a massive program that is concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate; it could be illegal." -Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois)
This type of speculative observation reads more like a Samuel Beckett novel than steely political rhetoric of a tyrannical propaganda machine. Consider the way it lazily proposes the obvious. Clearly, our political process is soaked in the luxury of seemingly immutable "considerations". Such as what the difference might be between what is inappropriate and what is illegal. If anything we should realize from such statements that this is not merely a vast hierarchy at work, but the formalized "deciding" of active participants. Results are not preordained, they are not deterministic; they are only intended to be so by previous active participants, intended to appear as foregone policy. This has been born out by struggle and experience.
The calls for investigation rather than heartfelt exhortations of course are due to a myriad factors such as the imperative that it is better to stand on ceremony than appear impassioned about justice at inconvenient moments. Let us deliberate and wax gravitas:
Hence "[t]his is a big problem, because the law is very clear," Feinstein said as the details of Cheney's wrongdoing began to come to light.
In my mind, the problem is not so large if the law is so clear, and the previous musings are almost immediately all-but-irrelevant, leading me to sense the reasoned rhetoric behind the process of selling a fact as though it were a reasoned conclusion, while seemingly carefully omitting the logical conclusions that fact may refer to.
It is helpful to know that "[t]hat's something that should never, ever happen again." Yes, I can say this of a great many things. Ironically, I cannot say this of a number of presently illegal things, which dissuades me from labeling this zinger as generic.
It is odd that we should live in a country where it seems apropos to advance which illegal things should or should not be done again.
No one will be held accountable. They never are.
Forgetaboutit.
moonpie: well said
remember the iran contra shit pile
the us was selling arms to iran to raise money to fund fascist guerrillas in nicaraugua
oh yeah - it came to light in the congressional hearings that ollie north was also bringing in hundreds of tons of cocaine in military hercules aircraft to american bases then it was dumped into black neighborhods on the cheap
two birds with one stone, as they say
lee hamilton, later of 9/11 commission fame oversaw the investigation and found in the end, like 9/11, no illegalities worth pursuing
you gotta love it
that must be a perfect example of accountability you can believe in
As Kevin Phillips has pointed out, if you want nothing done about an issue then have Lee Hamilton investigate it.
q
The Senators are pursuing a power-ego agenda having nothing to do with the interests/will of the people. The people wanted Darth Viper in the slammer three years ago. Today, I'd throw the Senators in the Potomac along with Darth Viper and all the rest of the elite establishment and make them tread water together for several days under the muzzle of a gun. Then take them all to court for war crimes trials and sentencing. Then the people will have to be held to account for their grave mistake of riding the gravy train - for decades. You want justice?
"That system of checks and balances has been battered to the breaking point over the past four years."
Leave it to Nichols to understate the problem by an order of magnitude. The system of checks/balances, the rule of law, and what little independence between the two elite parties existed before 9/11 are all gone now. It's a fascist oligarchy with a few minor feuds among the elites, but they are all blood brothers now and will stick together. They have to if they want to survive.
Feinstein sez: "If the Intelligence Committees had been briefed, they could have asked for regular reports on the program, they could have made judgments about the program as it went along."
***
Yes, and those 'judgements' would have been "Full steam ahead and damn the torpedos, with our full blessing, massuh!"
Listening to Democrats now attempting to impersonate vertebrates is sickening.
If the the secret program was about taking out al Queda, Panetta would not have stopped it because that program was already known to Congress and approved if I recall.
The USA kills "Terrorists" every day and it is no secret program.
This could be bigger than you all think.
A friend of mine who had connections to the CIA's Remote viewing program told me years before Sy Herch's article came out about Cheney's hit squad, that he talked to a man who said he was a hit man for Bush but couldn't get any media to report anything about it.
If by any remote chance that a special prosecutor is appointed, I would not be surprised if Cheney dies suddenly.
We'll See.
"This could be bigger than you all think."
It is a crime of abominable proportions.
Read below and you will get a picture, which will be extremely hard to swallow, and very painful to digest: “Collateral Damage” by E. P Heidner, part I and II.
>>> www.scribd.com/people/documents/2169400-ep-heidner <<<
The two documents have just recently been published and are very well researched and referenced (over 400 footnotes). The articles are lengthy, some parts not easy to follow and to digest and they need to be read with an open mind. But they are well worth the effort. They provide the most distressing information (some reads like a thriller).
The implications will challenge how we look at politics, economy, history, finance, war and terrorism. Many persons in the documents are well known; many are right now in pivotal positions of politics and finance. These people do shape OUR life and that of our children right now. The details are stunning. The consequences are BEYOND BELIEF.
The buck doesn't stop with Cheney.
Cheney will die before uttering a single word of truth ever again.
End of story.
When has Cheney EVER uttered a word of truth?
q
There will be no accountability.
""As the attorney general has made clear, it would be unfair to prosecute any official who acted in good faith based on legal guidance from the Justice Department."
- Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller
Maybe the Justice Dept was kept in the dark on this one too.
Bush even had problems with Ashcroft.
Actually, I think that is deliberately referencing members of the Office of Legal Counsel. In other words, if Cheney felt it was the right thing to do, and some psycho like John Yoo agreed, then they're off the hook.
The Dems bottom line for this whole afair is in Durbin's statement.
"But it is inappropriate for the vice president or the president to be ordering that a program be kept secret and not disclosed at the highest levels of congressional leadership."
It was "inappropriate". Let the historical record speak for the ages. I'm afraid that's about the best we'll get from our right-wing, imperial, rogue government.
Nothing more to see here, folks. Say, isn't the new season of "Survivor" starting?
"So serious are the charges against Cheney that Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who for too long worked too closely with the Bush-Cheney administration on so many issues, appears finally to be accepting that an inquiry is going to be required."
-Oh boy, those are so serious! I guess outing CIA agents, leading us into a war on false pretenses (lying to Congress) and illegally spying on citizens were not very serious in comparison. The Republicans really did it this time! Good point John Nichols.
Would somebody please call Hollywood to ask what is next in this terrible B movie of poli-fi ? Just let me know when " The End " flashes on.
It is interesting to study motivations.
1) Obviously not telling the Democrats is not a more serious offense than murder, torture, fraud against the populace and the various 4th Amendment violations that amounted to policy decisions for Cheney.
2) Obviously Congress knows Cheney does not tell them the truth. They're adults, and, let's face it: would you trust Dick Cheney?
So they can now complain about not being told. Why would they? Not being told sure makes them look innocent, doesn't it? Here they have voted over and over again to fund murder, mayhem, fraud and torture. They have told wildly improbable lies to their constituency over and over.
Well, now, because Cheney criminally withheld from them some part of their guilt, they can clamor at him.
Heads of state and rich wonks generally never get prosecuted for their crimes. But when it happens, it involves just such a wrinkle.
Thanks to Nichols for putting this in front of us again. Let's push to try Cheney.
the only checks and balances congress members are concerned about are those in their banks.
HAHAHA -- very clever of you!
: -D ........... I Love It. HAHAHA!
So, that's what that phrase "checks and balances" means.
Too funny.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
what an OLD JOKE!
you've been telling it for 40 years or more and finally somebody laffs.
Jeez, another "only in America" moment. Checks and balances?! Let's see if I've got this straight.
You can lie to the entire nation and take it to war on the basis of those lies with no consequences whatever. You can lie about torture and domestic spying with impunity. But ordering the CIA to withhold some operational information from congress critters is going to "tip the balance" against you.
Yeah, right. Any day now!
Congress does move in mysterious ways, doesn't it.
"Congress does move in mysterious ways..."
so do my bowels.
with the same result.
I'm glad the Dems are finally mad enough to pursue an investigation of Bush era wrongdoing. You have to wonder, though, if the righteous indignation has more to do with their egos being bruised by the revelations that they'd been lied to, than it has to do with the actual wrongdoing. Whichever, if it takes the humiliation of having been "had" to get an investigation into serious gear, I'm happy for it.
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. This is the meaning of Feingold's feigned outrage. She's shocked that gambling went on here. We need a metaphor equal to crocodile tears to express her crocodile outrage. War criminals one and all in all branches of government. This is merely a publicity trick to turn attention away from the Democrats and their war crimes collusion.