What is Dick Cheney trying to do?
Over the past few weeks, former Vice-President Dick Cheney has taken to the airwaves to denounce the Obama administration and defend George Bush’s record on torture, the War in Iraq and other national security issues. In an interview Tuesday, May 12th with Fox News Channel, Cheney reiterated his charge that President Barack Obama’s administration is “dismantling” the national security policies that kept the United States safe after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Last weekend he made the Sunday talk show tour and next week he is giving a high-profile speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on “a blueprint for keeping America safe,” addressing the effectiveness of Bush’s terrorist surveillance program in detecting the threat of Al Qaeda and its operatives in the post-9/11 period.
The former VP, who while in office preferred to operate in secret behind the scenes, has now decided to make a clean break with past precedent and speak out strongly and publicly against the current President. The question is why and why now?
Take into consideration the following developments:
1) A Spanish court has decided to look into opening an investigation against 6 former high-level Bush administration officials on torture charges. The crusading Spanish judge is well known for ordering the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was convicted. Evidence supports the case that their policy decisions were coordinated out of the Vice-President’s office. NYTimes
2) On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who served as a senior advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration and was the Director of the 9/11 commission, revealed on Foreign Policy’s “Shadow Government” blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the “White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.” Reps John Conyers and Howard Berman, who chair, respectively, the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees have written an urgent letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton requesting the memo, saying it may “may shed important light on the process by which these interrogation practices were evaluated, approved, and implemented by the former Administration.” (Read their letter)
3) Today, the US State Department announced that the United Nations General Assembly elected the United States to a three-year term on the UN Human Rights Council. The Department’s press release said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice are pleased with the outcome of the election and eager to take up the important work of the Council. The US had previously boycotted the UN Human Rights Council, since it was formed in 2005.
So what is Dick Cheney actually trying to accomplish?
