Salon.com > Torture Investigation

Cheney says U.S. “has never lost its moral bearings”

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:40:00 +0000

Former Vice President Dick Cheney got an award Wednesday night, the Center for Security Policy's "Keeper of the Flame Award." As you might expect of Cheney, he didn't use the occasion to bask -- instead, he went on the warpath, attacking his liberal critics generally and the Obama administration specifically.

It was, to say the least, an interesting venue for that kind of speech. Admittedly, the award has been given to plenty of other prominent figures, from former President Ronald Reagan to James Jones, who's now President Obama's national security advisor, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. and Donald Rumsfeld. (Of that last man, Cheney said Wednesday, "truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.")

But the Center for Security Policy was founded by Frank Gaffney, who remains the organization's president. And in recent months, Gaffney has been an even harsher critic of Obama's than Cheney himself -- and a much more extreme one.

Just this past June, Gaffney wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times that was headlined, "America's First Muslim president?" He didn't really seem to mean it as a question, either, saying:

The Cheney administration in exile

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:40:00 +0000

After an administration ends and the other party takes over, key members often find an institutional home from which to continue their arguments. In 2003, for example, veterans of the Clinton administration founded the Center for American Progress, to provide research and talking-points for center-left policies.

Following this basic model, Liz Cheney -- daughter of the former vice president and a former State Department official herself -- has gathered a group of conservatives of a particular ilk into a group she’s calling “Keep America Safe.” However, it’s not exactly a Bush administration in exile. Considering some of the people involved -- Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, blogger Michael Goldfarb and Cheney herself -- it might be more appropriate to call it a Cheney administration in exile.

Various matters

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:05:00 +0000

(updated below - Update II)

(1) A newly released Gallup poll finds the American public almost evenly divided on whether they approve or disapprove (47-49%) of Eric Holder's decision to appoint a prosecutor to investigate torture crimes. As Greg Sargent notes, the wording of the poll suggests that he's undertaking a much broader investigation than he is -- i.e., it obscures that he's launched a rather limited investigation into whether CIA interrogators exceeded the torture permission slips they were given. Had it been clear that Holder was undertaking a limited probe -- and, more to the point, had the media consensus not been almost entirely against those investigations (as usual) and the American public thus not subjected to an almost entirely one-sided debate -- support for Holder's investigations would almost certainly be even higher.