therawstory
Andrew McLemore
If you don’t get punished, you didn’t go anything wrong, right?
That’s the message Vice President Dick Cheney gave in an interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday, suggesting that a president’s actions are legal if those actions didn’t result in his impeachment.
Asked by Schieffer if he believed that anything the president does in time of war is legal, Cheney said there is “historic precedent of taking action that you wouldn’t take in peacetime.”
Cheney referenced Abraham Lincoln as an example of another president who “suspended the writ of habeus corpus” during a war, prompting this exchange:
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SCHIEFFER: But nobody thinks that was legal.
CHENEY: Well, no. It certainly was in the sense he wasn’t impeached. And it was a wartime measure that he took that I think history says today, yeah, that was probably a good thing to do.
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The vice president spent much of the interview defending eight years of the Bush administration’s policies, including its surveillance and interrogation programs.
When Schieffer asked if the Bush administration had gone “too far” in its surveillance program, Cheney said no.
“I don’t believe we violated anybody’s civil liberties,” he said.
Cheney also urged President-elect Barack Obama to continue the Bush administration’s interrogation policies.
“I would hope [Obama] would avoid doing what others have done in the past, which is letting the campaign rhetoric guide his judgment in this absolutely crucial area,” Cheney said. “We were very careful, we did everything by the book, and in fact we produced very significant results.”
This video is from CBS’ Face the Nation, broadcast Jan. 4, 2008.
(Source)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBBrfcpSVM4
Bush/Cheney worst than Nixon,,,,,,,
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18858?page=1
Career Army Officer Sues Rumsfeld, Cheney, Saying No Evacuation Order Given On 9/11
impeach!
Democracy has failed in the United States. The most impeachable President in the history of this nation, with the lowest approval rating in history, whose violations of the Constitution have been documented in dozens of books and his vice-president, who claims that Bush’s actions were legal because he wasn’t impeached – will leave office UNIMPEACHED. For most of his eight years in office the call for his impeachment was raised. Ramsey Clark, Dennis Kucinich, Robert Wexler even John Conyers, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee raised their voices, activist groups around the country held demonstrations, the anti-war movement joined in the call to remove Bush/Cheney. All their effort, for all these years failed to discover sufficient outrage in the electorate to produce sufficient pressure on our elected representatives to cause more than a handfull of them to support the call for impeachment hearings. The first official words spoken by these men and women comprise their oath of office in which they swear to ‘protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC’ Citizens who have not repeatedly petitioned their congressperson – in person, on the phone, by mail and email are complicit enablers of warrantless surveillance, torture, and every Bush Administration crime or impeachable offense. Our Congresspersons are complicit enablers, our party leadership are complicit enablers. Democracy has failed in the United States.