The Donald and Dead-eye Dick of course. Rumsfeld and Cheney are the old chickenhawks that still want to usurp more and more power for the Oval Office and deny due process to the individuals that are being held for years without even so much as a hearing at this point.
Please, correct me if I am wrong..but only that batshit-crazy sumbitch known as Zacharias Moussaoui has been tried for the terrorist attacks on the twin towers on 9/11. Any arguements on this point? Ok, lets move on..
In June 2005 these two gentlemen, England and Zelikow, generated a 9 page memo that outlined how the current administration needed to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies and procedures. The Rumster and Cheney have fought them the whole way and on every point. Take this small snippet of the article:
"When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded. It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president,” said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. “It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy.”--How does that appeal to you, dear reader? Its like trying to gather up every newspaper in town when you find out your mug is on the front page in a very unfavorable light, wouldn't you say? I would...
Now, lets see what Tricky Dick had to say: "On one side of the fight were officials, often led by Vice President Dick Cheney who said the terrorism threat required that the president have wide power to decide who could be held and how they should be treated. On the other side were officials, primarily in the State Department and the Pentagon, who portrayed their disagreement as pragmatic. They said the administration had claimed more authority than it needed, drawing widespread criticism and challenges in the courts."--There is logic in the other sides argument..Cheney's..not so much.One guy is a war-mongering, torture-happy sob, the other is a power-hungry sumbitch. Jesus Christ in a thong..wtf do we have leading us, America's version of Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler ?? I mean seriously..they can't not even friggin listen to opposing POV's? Where is the fucking harm in listening to your own people with a different perspective? These two fuckwits were PISSED that people had the audacity to offer alternatives that might fucking work, because frankly, Rummy and Cheney's bullshit..just isn't cutting it.
Now the gentlemen's credentials:
Mr. Zelikow, who served as staff director for the national commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, joined the State Department in early 2005 with strong views on the detention issue, other officials said. Early on, he began to push the idea that high-level C.I.A. captives held in connection with the 9/11 attacks should be brought to justice, these officials said.
Mr. England took over as Mr. Rumsfeld’s acting deputy in April 2005 while continuing to serve as secretary of the Navy. (He was confirmed as deputy secretary in April 2006.) He, too, had experience with the detainee issue, having spent months working to overhaul what many military officers saw as a flawed screening process for prisoners at Guantánamo.
Two other officials who had worked extensively on detention issues during Mr. Bush’s first term also participated in the drafting of the memorandum, officials said. One of them, Matthew C. Waxman, was Mr. Rumsfeld’s chief aide for detainee issues. The other, John B. Bellinger III, was the State Department’s legal counsel.
The proposals in the paper were not entirely new. But what was different, one administration official said, was an effort at “a big-bang solution,” to persuade senior officials or the president himself to adopt a comprehensive new approach to the detention problems of the policy. Failing that, officials said, the authors hoped to foster new debate about how to shape a strategy that would be more sustainable diplomatically, politically and in the federal courts.
They hoped to "foster debate" why is that so scary to Cheney and Rumsfeld? WTF is wrong with those two? Something more sustainable. God forbid, we do something that we can actually develop a decent policy around which doesn't piss off the world, get shot down by the judicial system or our citizens here.
Its a good article, its long but worth it my dear reader. If only to see how the normal process of dialogue regarding important strategies and laws has been shutdown by two men that are dinosaurs and should be put out to pasture...or put out of their misery. I don't care which anymore.
