Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled chutzpah has led him to take public and well as private credit for being the intellectual author of US policy on torture, has become such a glaring liability that his tenure may be short-lived. There is a growing possibility that the vice president will resign at the turn of the year "for reasons of health," and that his partner-in-crime -- in what Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Department, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has labeled the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" -- will choose to retire to his home in Taos early next year.
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It is no secret that Cheney bears primary responsibility for making our country a pariah among nations by punching a gaping hole in the (until now) absolute ban on torture under international and US law. Under international treaties, including treaties ratified by the US Senate and thus the supreme law of the land, civilized societies have long since prohibited practices widely recognized as torture. No matter. At the instigation of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, the inherent human right to physical integrity and personal dignity has become an early casualty of the US "war on terror."
We did not need Col. Wilkerson to tell us that. What he has revealed in tracing responsibility for the US rogue policy on torture to the office of the vice president and Rumsfeld merely confirmed much of what is already known, but reported meagerly -- if at all -- in US media.
Just five days after 9/11, the vice president told Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press:
"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side ... a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies ... it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."http://www.alternet.org/story/29479/
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