We now know, because DCIA Panetta has told Congress, that the CIA had a secret program running for almost 8 years, and that they did not inform Congress of this, as required by law, on the orders of Dick Cheney.
It’s even gotten Dianne Feinstein,* who is generally remarkably hospitable to secrecy and executive authority saying that this was a clear violation of the law.
At this point all indications are that Cheney was setting up a death squad that would answer only to him.
Theoretically, it would only be used against al Qaeda, but remember that Bush and His Evil Minions™ defined “returning to terrorism”† as publishing an OP/ED in the New York Times.
I have no clue as to why it did not go forward, but we can be thankful about that, because they would have gotten it horribly wrong, because that is what the Bush administration did time and time again.‡
The thing is though, this is precisely the sort of thing that Cheney wanted to do, because it made him feel powerful, whether it worked or not.
They tortured because it gave Cheney and Rumsfeld a stiffy.§
It’s torture all over again: Now that the reports are coming out, it turns out that sugarless cookies worked better than torture, and Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Tennant knew this, but they were objectively pro-torture.
They wanted to do this, because it made them feel powerful, and ordering murders would have done the same thing.
The real question here is what stopped them, and the only answer that I have is that someone told them they could be in the cross hairs if they tried this, and that they, and theirs, were softer targets Osama.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.
†Except, of course, the “Tipton 3” were never terrorists in the first place.
‡Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:
But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.
Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.
§Sorry for that mental image.