Ex-VP Nabbed in Flagrant Truthfulness

Image credit to UrantianSojourn.com via TPK at Kos.

Out of his own mouth:

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.” (New York Times)

Yes, I think at the very least Cheney himself and his office, and the Office of Legal Council, and various people in the Department of Justice, must have known exactly what kind of violence the CIA was perpetrating in our name, right from the Memorandum of Understanding of September 17 2001, as Emptywheel was explaining a couple of years ago:

Operational flexibility: This is a highly classified area. All I want to say is that there was “before” 9/11 and “after” 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.

-Cofer Black, 9/11 Congressional Inquiry, September 26, 2002

When Cofer Black, the main author of the plan laid out in the September 17, 2001 Memorandum of Notification that appears to be at issue in the FOIA dispute between the CIA and White House and the ACLU (post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5), testified before the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry, he described the expanded operational flexibility CIA’s counterterrorism efforts gained after 9/11 by saying “the gloves come off.”

George W. Bush may not have been fully informed, but I don't suppose he was really that curious about the details. Morally, though, in his state of arrested development, I don't think he'd have objected to any of it.

Poor old Big Time wanted to know all about it, though. I'll bet he was drooling over the interrogation videos. Senator Feinstein did her best to set him up for exoneration, but he was too vain to allow her to suggest he didn't know every single thing that was going on. Thanks for confessing, Big Time!

Update:

Mr. Pierce agrees:

To me, the most singular thing about the Senate report is how thoroughly it takes the rest of the executive branch off the hook, which is the same dynamic that Weiner noted about the report of the Church committee. Whenever a scandal like this hits, it seems, the people who give the actual orders, the people who create the climate for the crimes, and, in this case, the people who tortured the Constitution to find a legal justification for torturing human beings, are always invisible....

Perhaps the only truly funny moment in Senator Dianne Feinstein's presentation on Tuesday afternoon was her description about how those crafty CIA spooks so badly misled poor, naive David Addington about what was going on in all those black cells in Poland and Thailand. 

Also see the Vixen.