Word: cheneys
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...speeches by Obama and Cheney are not seen as essential viewing...
...Dick Cheney's displeasure and Nancy Pelosi's discomfiture may have revived the idea of setting up a "truth commission" to look into the Bush-era counterterrorism policies, but President Barack Obama still wants no part of it. According to David Axelrod, the President's senior adviser, Obama remains convinced that looking forward rather than back "is best for the country...
Plans for a truth commission, originally proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy, had seemed doomed by Obama's initial thumb's-down. But they gained some traction in recent weeks, thanks to fresh controversies over the CIA's detention and interrogation policies under Bush. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has repeated claims that the harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects helped save thousands of American lives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had to deny that she was informed about the CIA's use of waterboarding and has accused the agency of misleading Congress. (See pictures of the aftershocks of the Abu Ghraib...
Axelrod, however, argues the opposite. "I would say the last three weeks have demonstrated the perils of such a thing," he told TIME this week, "because what you have seen is Cheney and the authors of the old policy trying desperately to justify what they did, and then you have seen people who are enraged by Cheney and the old policies who want to relitigate the whole matter. And all of a sudden you are in the old time machine headed backwards. And that's not useful." (Read a story about how the waterboarding controversy is drowning Pelosi...
...being made, in this case, by unappealing extremists. The lawyers, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), believe that the detainees should be treated, more or less, under the civil-justice system as described by Article III of the Constitution. The soldiers, misled by former Vice President Dick Cheney, believe that in a time of war, the President has unlimited ability to set the rules necessary to protect the nation. "They're both wrong," says Senator Lindsey Graham, a lawyer-soldier who still serves as a JAG in the Air Force Reserve. "You need a hybrid system, which...