Madness and Shame

Truthout, Tuesday 22 July 2008

by: Bob Herbert, The New York Times

David Addington is described by Jane Mayer as Dick Cheney without a sense of humor. (Photo: Getty Images)

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney, but without the vice president's sense of humor.

In her important new book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney's main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration's legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: "No one stood to his right." Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: "He doesn't believe in the Constitution."

Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington's existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration's Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror - regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say - was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, known as "black sites."

Ms. Mayer wrote: "The legal doctrine that Addington espoused - that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it - rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared."

When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.

Continued . . .