STEVE SHEPPARD
Cheney Is Wrong: There Is Precedent for the Torture Investigation
FindLaw guest columnist and University of Arkansas law professor Steve Sheppard offers a rebuttal to former Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that Attorney General Eric Holder's investigation and possible prosecution of Bush Administration agents for their interrogation practices will set a "terrible precedent." Sheppard cites several prior instances -- including Teapot Dome and Iran-Contra, which Cheney himself investigated -- in which administrations have previously investigated their predecessors. He also contends that one reason that such investigations are rare is that often, administrations have already investigated their own alleged misdeeds, obviating the need for their successors to do so. Wednesday, September 2, 2009

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20...2_sheppard.html

Cheney's investigation of Iran-Contra was essentially a cover-up, if not a self-driven tutelage on how to replicate it, given what we know about Dick Cheney, his views on the Vice-Presidency and the unlimitable powers of the Presidency, and Seymour Hersh's disclosure of the still-not-well-known meeting, an informal “lessons learned” discussion, as this excerpt from Ed Echo's Op-Ed News article "9/11: Cover for a Coup D'Etat?":


"Power has been consolidated in Cheney's shop since the beginning, Seymour Hersh in his great piece for the New Yorker entitled The Redirection wrote the following:

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

And of course the Iran-Contra network survived to rise through the bureaucracy, the key players either pardoned by 'Poppy' Bush or let off the hook by the Clinton administration they were only hiding in the background like cockroaches couched in fetid dankness and awaiting their opportunity to feed."


Here's more from inside "the Lynx Lair", a "data dump of material linking Iran-Contra to the current bailout/theft":

"How did David Addington get to know Vice-President Cheney, and how long have they worked together?

"They met on Capitol Hill in the mid-eighties, when Cheney was a Republican congressman from Wyoming and Addington was a young staff lawyer working for the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. So they have worked together for about two decades. Their partnership was cemented when they worked together on the Minority Report on the Iran-Contra affair. Both Addington and Cheney took the idiosyncratic position that it was Congress, not President Reagan, that was in the wrong. This view reflected the opinion, held by both men, that the executive branch should run foreign policy, to a great extent unimpeded by Congress."

Cheney’s Cheney
by Blake Eskin
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/0...on_onlineonly01
in http://stationcharon.blogspot.com/2009/01/...ernment_28.html


"Addington also is connected to spook master and former CIA head William 'Bill' Casey (a man whose history and past associations is a veritable almanac of American fascism dating from WWII through the Reagan years and who played a key role in the theft of the PROMIS software) …. The Cheney minority report was the doctrinal basis for the Bush presidency: the unitary executive, the commander in chief ruling in wartime by fiat and, ultimately, torture being defined as whatever the president, not the Geneva Conventions, said it was. Addington's authorship of the Cheney Iran-Contra report was largely overlooked until fairly recently, but his deeper connection to that scandal and its resonance have received little attention. In the 1980s, Addington, then in his 20s, served as deputy counsel to CIA director William Casey, the moving force behind the Iran-Contra affair and the most powerful figure in the Reagan administration after the president."

Sidney Blumenthal's article for Salon entitled The Sad Decline of Michael Mukasey
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/20...asey/print.html

Is Addington still in the government and how much does President Obama know about the Addington-
Cheney-Kissinger connection?