October 7, 2007

Why make the stupid choice

Today's New York Times editorial points out the obvious, as many voices have, that practicing what amounts to torture and operating secret prisons greatly diminishes US moral authority, concluding that whether or not the US should condone and practice torture is an easy choice.

The next logical question would seem to be why make the stupid choice by condoning torture and operating secret prisons?  Sadly the mainstream media never seems to have time to ponder such a question.  Apparently there are many more important issues vying for limited time, such as "Hillary's cackle." [I finally turned off CNN in disgust after they used "Hillary's Cackle" as a banner line to promote their fair and balanced coverage of Clinton laughing at laughably loaded and highly hypocritical questions.]

So why did Cheney choose for his Bush administration to promote torture and secret prisons knowing, as he certainly must have, that torture produces bad intelligence even if it's called an "enhanced interrogation technique," knowing that condoning torture and operating secret prisons would greatly diminish US moral authority?

The obvious answer would seem to be that Cheney has other priorities and is not particularly interested in good intelligence or what the world thinks of the US.  Recall that Cheney's OSP (Office of Special Plans) had to work overtime to bury reliable intelligence under bullshit in the run up to the Iraq war crimes. 

Cheney wants bogus intelligence, the scarier the better.  While enhanced interrogation techniques aren't very useful if one's goal is to discover truth, they are uniquely well suited if your goal is to produce actionable (Cheneyspeak for hype-able) intelligence that can be used to herd congress into granting the executive and Cheney branches of government more secret power.

Especially useful to Cheney is the power to secretly spy on anyone without oversight while declaring all aspects of the Cheney branch of government double-plus classified under his personal seal.  Does anyone really think Cheney will spy on Americans more responsibly than J Edgar Hoover?

Cheney-Bush's dictatorial abuse of power in claiming the authority (or extorting from congress authority not really theirs to grant) to detain (or kidnap) anyone (here or anywhere in the world) and then disappear them into secret prisons and legal black holes like Guantanamo is part of the classic formula for a corporate/fascist takeover of government, a major factor in the systematic suppression of dissent and opposition that always accompanies the descent into fascism.

Stray Thoughts from Don Alejandro
who often wonders if the files in Cheney's man sized safe have anything to do with chronic spinelessness in the house and senate...