Vice President Corleone

Apropros of my earlier post about how the right and left view the CIA, I see (via Jeanne D’Arc) that the Senate is going to water down the anti-torture legislation to exempt the CIA.

Marty Lederer at Balkinization:

It’s increasingly clear that the strategy of McCain’s opponents — the Vice President and his congressional supporters — will be to amend the McCain Amendment in the Conference Committee so as to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. The Senate delegation to the Conference Committee presumably will include three of the nine Republicans who voted against the McCain Amendment — Ted Stevens, Thad Cochran and Kit Bond. A recent Congressional Quarterly article, reprinted here, reports Stevens — who would “lead the Senate’s conferees” — as saying that “he can support McCain’s language if it’s augmented with guidance that enables certain classified interrogations to proceed under different terms.” “‘I’m talking about people who aren’t in uniform, may or may not be citizens of the United States, but are working for us in very difficult circumstances,’ Stevens said. ‘And sometimes interrogation and intimidation is part of the system.'”

What this barely veiled statement means is that Senator Stevens will support inclusion of the McCain Amendment in the final bill only once it has been “augmented” to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. (Stevens’s reference to persons who “may not be citizens of the United States, but are working for us” suggests that he also intends to include a carve-out for foreign nationals acting as agents of the CIA, such as the team of the CIA-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary squads code-named Scorpions.) If Stevens (read: Cheney) is successful in this endeavor, and if the Congress enacts the Amendment as so limited, it will be a major step backwards from where the law currently stands. This can’t be overemphasized: If Stevens is successful at adding his seemingly innocuous “augment[ation],” it would make the law worse than it currently is.

This is Cheney’s baby all the way. Does anyone harbor even the tiniest doubt that Cheney would put out a political hit on a CIA operative to punish her husband? He’s a thug through and through.

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