| | |  Americas & Beyond | August 2009 
Cheney Calls CIA Probe Political
 Doug Thompson - Capitol Hill Blue
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August 31, 2009
| | Former Vice President Dick Cheney: The attack dog is rabid again (Reuters) | |
The self-anointed attack dog for the failed administration of former President George W. Bush, which turned the Justice Department into a political hack agency, Sunday accused the Obama administration of playing politics with the investigation of prisoner torture.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney turned to Fox News, the mouthpiece for Republicans, to launch his latest attacks.
"I just think it's an outrageous precedent to set, to have this kind of, I think, intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration," Cheney said in an interview broadcast Sunday.
Cheney's broadsides are the latest in an orchestrated series of attacks from the former Vice President.
"I'm very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully," Cheney said of Bush administration tactics that civil libertarians said violated many traditional American freedoms.
Cheney was especially critical of what appears to be a flip-flop by the Obama administration on investigating abuses in prisoner interrogations.
"Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they're reversing course on that," Cheney said.
But a legal ethics professor at Georgetown Law School says the decision to investigate the CIA abuses may prove the Obama Justice Department is more independent than Bush's.
Reports The Associated Press:
Paul F. Rothstein, a legal ethics professor at Georgetown Law School, said the investigation highlights Holder's independence from the White House since Obama said he did not want one. Having said that, Rothstein added, investigating the actions of a past presidential administration sets an uneasy legal precedent.
"There is a significant segment of the population that believes that something illegal may have happened, and I think Eric Holder is sort of duty-bound to look into it," Rothstein said. "A solid person will be reasonably independent of the Obama administration — although not entirely. When you get this far in your career, you do know who the bosses are."
How others are reporting the story:
Cheney says cooperation with CIA probe "will depend" - (Reuters) - Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he might refuse to speak with a prosecutor investigating suspected CIA prisoner abuses, a probe he branded as political and bad for national security.
Cheney: Politics driving CIA terror probe - Former Vice President Dick Cheney says politics are driving the Justice Department's decision to investigate whether CIA interrogators abused terror suspects detained after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. (MSNBC Political News) |
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