"Cheney's Law" ............................ Conspiracy to Corrupt?

[KoKo]

Cheney's Law

David Bromwich/Huffington Post

Americans were brought up to think about a person mistreated by authority (however lawful the authority): "You can't do that to him!--a man's got his rights." The goal, in morals and manners, of the Cheney mutation is to replace that libertarian presumption by a timid, resigned, and docile acceptance: "Too bad; he must have done something wrong if they're doing this to him." The reform of manners is not yet complete, but, every day, bad laws assist the process of coarsening and brutalization.

Conspiracy is a word that Americans on the clever side of thirty tend to reject. We acknowledge, because history tells us, that there were conspiracies in the distant past, among the assassins of Julius Caesar for example, or the privy councilors of Charles II, who owed their nickname, "the Cabal," to the surnames Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. And there was the Night of the Long Knives. But there has not been an important conspiracy close to our time; certainly not in America: that is the doctrine.

We need another word, then, to describe a series of actions concerted by men of power, executed with elaborate concealment for a determined end, in violation of all the ordinary procedures of government and in deliberate defiance of the law.

Such was the path of the change devised in 2001-02 for the prisoners captured in the field in Afghanistan. The vice president and his lawyer, David Addington, held that captives were to be transported without notice to a prison sealed off from the jurisdiction of American laws, or any other system of laws. There they would be sorted and processed into Special Tribunals.

All discussions of the meditated change excluded the responsible officials in the department of state. Pierre-Richard Prosper, interviewed in Cheney's Law, reports that he studied the question for Colin Powell and reached a conclusion at variance with Cheney and Addington. He should have seen their proposal, but he never did. Rather, the executive order was routed through the corridors of the White House with the stealth of a burglar on a well-cased street. By the time it passed under the president's pen, it had changed hands four times; and these were not the usual hands. John Bellinger, the lawyer for the national security staff, never set eyes on the new understanding. Colin Powell first heard of it on the television news.

Warrantless wiretaps were meant to pass quietly into law by a similar circuit of evasion; but Cheney and Addington were tripped up by one of those accidents that haunt the most cunning of stratagems. A sick man in a hospital bed, who happened to be the attorney general, remembered he had sworn an oath to uphold the laws; and when he took that oath, he had not made a private reservation that the laws he upheld might just as well be laws contrived in secret. Cheney and Addington did not predict the cussedness or the integrity of John Ashcroft. Still, in the assault on FISA, it took the threat of more than thirty resignations from the justice department to convince the president to back down and compromise.

more at...............

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/cheneys-law_b_69239.html

[Richard Steele]

1. K&R

[Demeter]

2. Anybody Who Thinks There Aren't Any Conspiracies NOW

isn't really thinking. Or paying attention, either.