How Evil Are They?

The Washington Post reports that Dick Cheney, along with several other members of President Bush's cabinet, including Condoleeza Rice and an apparently reluctant John Ashcroft, were involved in "micro-managing", from The White House, torture sessions of captured and suspected Al Queda operatives. It's more than a little creepy, macabre might be a better word, and one has to wonder why the need for that sort of engagement in the process. Isn't that sort of interrogation best left to the professionals? And if there are certain tactics that are on or off the table isn't that a simple matter of someone below the level of Vice President saying yes or no, in code, to, say, waterboarding, and then hanging up the phone.

Then again, if one has more than a soupcon of sadism running through their oh so patriotic veins, then perhaps not. To the armchair interrogator with a lust for inflicting pain, getting right in there on the play by play would be just the thing. Apparently, Hitler spent many a happy hour watching films of his would be assassins being executed. I know it's not exactly the same thing, but the comparison is instructive. Perhaps a comparison to Nixon-Cheney worked in the Nixon administration- would be more apt, since Nixon was famously interested in the sordid details of escapades as varied as bombing runs over Cambodia to the felonious hijinks of certain "plumbers."

My contention, for the last six years or so, is that The Bush Cheney cabal would ultimately be seen as the most corrupt and depraved U.S. executive in U.S. history. But truly, how evil are they? One increasingly gets the sense, even as the ghastly saga has yet to run its course, that the record of wretchedness has depths that will never be adequately explored. There's a lot of work, probably a lifetime's work, for some intrepid soul or souls to do in getting even close to the murky bottom of the crimes of The Bush Administration. Here's hoping they get started on it, pronto.