Liz Cheney Fails David Rivkin's Crazy Test
That former Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr admonished Liz Cheney for her stunning and shameless attack on the Obama Justice Department tells you all you need to know about her "Al Qaeda 7" and "Department of Jihad" slanders. But to truly appreciate the depth of Cheney's descent into the political gutter, consider the rebuke of David Rivkin. Rivkin, a former Reagan and Bush 41 administration official, isn't merely another of the signatories to the bipartisan letter criticizing her group, Keep America Safe. He also happens to be perhaps the most ardent supporter of detainee waterboarding and the Bush torture team which authorized it.
That Liz Cheney crossed the Rubicon (or, more accurately, jumped the shark) with her McCarthy-style questioning of the loyalty of DOJ lawyers who in the past represented terror suspects is reflected in the opening paragraph of the statement Rivkin signed on Monday:
The past several days have seen a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantánamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy. As attorneys, former officials, and policy specialists who have worked on detention issues, we consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.
And to be sure, David Rivkin has been no defender of suspected terrorists or their legal rights.
After the Supreme Court restored detainees' habeas corpus rights in its 5-4 Boumediene decision, Rivkin in June 2008 blasted the "arrogance" of the Justices. Worse still, as he told PBS News Hour, the result was the equivalent of declaring human beings property and codifying racial segregation:
"But to be honest, and not to be too dramatic, it's one of the worst decisions by the Supreme Court I've ever read, on par with Dred Scott decisions and Plessy v. Ferguson.
The reason for it is not because of its practical implications; they're quite modest. But the sheer ambition, the sheer judicial arrogance that you see here."
When the Obama administration released four controversial Bush torture memos authored by Steven Bradbury, Rivkin took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to claim "The Memos Prove We Didn't Torture." Of course, Bradbury himself not only questioned whether waterboarding and other techniques even worked ("It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program"), he specifically rebuked the Bush administration for depending on a military training program, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, (SERE) to assess the risks that a suspected terrorist might face when being waterboarded. As McClatchy reported:
"Individuals undergoing SERE training are obviously in a very different situation from detainees undergoing interrogation; SERE trainees know it is part of a training program," Bradbury wrote, borrowing from the IG report's conclusion.
Nevertheless, Rivkin argued that:
All of these interrogation methods have been adapted from the U.S. military's own Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (or SERE) training program, and have been used for years on thousands of American service members with the full knowledge of Congress. This has created a large body of information about the effect of these techniques, on which the CIA was able to draw in assessing the likely impact on the detainees and ensuring that no severe pain or long term psychological impact would result.
Rivkin's Bizarro World conclusion?
Far from "green lighting" torture -- or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees -- the memos detail the actual techniques used and the many measures taken to ensure that interrogations did not cause severe pain or degradation.
The case of Nigerian underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab drove Rivkin to new fits of foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy. On January 5, 2010, he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer:
"The safety of the American people has been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, animated by an irrational hostility towards the venerable military justice system."
A month later, Rivkin joined fellow Bush waterboarding enthusiast Marc Thiessen to protest the Obama administration's handling of Abdulmutallab's as a criminal suspect rather than an unlawful enemy combatant. Of course, Thiessen and Rivkin did not compare the Nigerian to shoe bomber Richard Reid who was arrested, tried and convicted by the Bush DOJ under almost identical circumstances. Instead, they cited the case of African embassy bomber Ahmed Ghailani, captured in 2004 outside of the United States.
(Sadly for Rivkin and Thiesen, one day after their Wall Street Journal op-ed appeared, Obama administration officials revealed that Abdulmutallab was "cooperating" and producing "actionable intelligence.")
Given his ultra-hard line on detainee torture, it would come as no surprise to learn that David Rivkin played the home version of the waterboarding game with his children while admiring a framed picture of Dick Cheney. Which is what makes his criticism of Liz Cheney all the more shocking - and noteworthy. They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but to witness David Rivkin support Eric Holder and the Obama Justice Department isn't just weird. As Stephen Colbert would say, "that's the craziest f**king thing I've ever heard."
UPDATE: Senator Lindsey Graham joined the list of conservatives blasting Liz Cheney's DOJ demagoguery. Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey also added his voice to those denouncing Cheney and her group. Unsurprisingly, as Daily Show viewers witnessed Tuesday night, Marc Thiessen parted company with David Rivkin by rushing to her defense.
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Justice Department attorneys who once helped represent terrorism detainees are at the center of a raging dispute. A conservative group is arguing the nine lawyers are influencing U.S. policy to help their former clients.
Shawn
Posted by Jim Karter on May 12, 2010 12:45 AMThe reason for it is not because of its practical implications; they're quite modest. But the sheer ambition, the sheer judicial arrogance that you see here.
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