The following is a post written by carmengrayson:
Peter Baker’s recent disingenuous article in Sunday’s New York Times, “The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage,” masquerades as investigative reporting. In fact, it’s little more than strung-together quotations from participants involved to varying degrees in the decade’s destructive foreign policies.
The result is a reductionist essay placed in calamitous times but focused on the personal frettings of Bush and Cheney about a relatively minor and symbolic issue. In 2008 Cheney began pressing Bush to grant a pardon to the vice-president’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby. Bush had already commuted Libby’s 30-month prison sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice but he resisted an end-of-term pardon. On this disagreement Baker rests his conclusion that the men’s relationship “differs substantially” from “the commonly accepted narrative” of Cheney as puppeteer to a receptive Bush.
Far more space-worthy in the the New York Times’s article is the catastrophic breakdown of accountability in our political system. Although Baker alludes to the subject in one sentence, it provides damning evidence. Cheney tried to keep his mouth shut after leaving office, his daughter relates, but “what set him off” as a “fiery critic” was the decision to reopen an investigation into C.I.A. interrogations of terror suspects. “Threatening to prosecute C.I.A. officials was indefensible,” in Cheney’s opinion. Here is the root fear of those who executed foreign policy in those years: “responsibility for their actions”.
Torture is immoral, counter-productive and flies in the face of American/Western values. I would go so far as to say that no supporter of water-boarding etc can, by definition, be an Epicurean. The astonishing over-reaction to Al Queda and related gangs of thugs has been costly in Western lives and money and reputation, and the constant ramping up of the so-called-War on Terror is not just unwise, it is stupid. No remorse cometh forward from the short-sighted perpetrators.
New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/the-final-insult-in-the-bush-cheney-marriage.html?_r=0#commentsContainer