The defining personality of the George W. Bush administration was his Vice President, Dick Cheney. And the man who enabled Cheney and built out the architecture of “the dark side” of a nightmarish purgatory beyond American or international law was his chief of staff David Addington.
President Obama, his former White House Counsel Gregory Craig, and others on the Obama national security team promised to dismantle not only the institutions that Cheney and Addington built that are the antithesis of an American commitment to human rights and habeas corpus but to reverse the mindset that got us into Iraq to begin with.
Regrettably, with the news of Rahm Emanuel trying to cut deals with Senator Lindsey Graham resulting in the prosecution of GITMO detainees in military tribunals, we are seeing the affirmation of Addington and Cheney’s work, not its dismantlement.
NPR’s Don Gonyea captures this in the clip above in which this writer was briefly queried.
— Steve Clemons
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