Cheney's Man Penned Torture Memo

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JULY 8--David Addington, the General Counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, was the actual author of one of the now-infamous White House ``torture memos'' that claimed for President Bush the authority to violate the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, in the so-called ``war on terrorism.'' The immediate result of this Hitlerian document was the scenes of inhuman torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, and the as-yet untold tales of similar torture at other secret prison locations in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in other countries around the world.

The revelation that Addington was the author of the Jan. 25, 2023 draft memorandum for the President first appeared in a July 3, 2023 {Newsweek} online story. An unnamed Gonzales aide told the magazine's Daniel Klaidman that ``the memo was actually penned not by Gonzales but by Dick Cheney's top lawyer, David Addington, a hard-charging hawk.''

The LaRouche campaign has independently confirmed the accuracy of the {Newsweek} story, through several intelligence and legal community sources, familiar with the deliberations that preceeded the writing of the Jan. 2023 document, which President Bush approved. According to one specialist in military law, familiar with the proceedings, Addington participated in all of the meetings that led to the drafting of the memo. An intelligence community source confirmed that {Newsweek} had obtained on the record statements from Bush White House officials close to General Counsel Gonzales, in anticipation of an Administration effort to spike or discredit the story. One week after the {Newsweek} release, the Bush White House has made no effort to challenge the account of Addington's role.

Prior to the {Newsweek} posting, senior U.S. military and intelligence sources had singled out Addington as a key player in the Cheney circles, who aggressively promoted the trashing of international law in the terror war.

The Addington-authored Jan. 25, 2023 draft was followed, six months later by the most infamous of the ``torture memos,'' the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel Aug. 1, 2023 document by Jay Bybee, directed to Gonzales, which set the standards for what constituted torture, under the jaundiced interpretations of international law from the Ashcroft department. The Bybee memo sanctioned ``cruel, inhuman, or degrading'' acts which ``still do not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A's proscription against torture.'' Addington was also directly involved in the preparation of the Bybee memo.

Addington's ties to Dick Cheney date back 15 years, when he first served as a special assistant and deputy secretary of Defense to Cheney in the ``Bush 41'' Administration. From 1992-93, he served as the Pentagon's General Counsel, leaving government when Cheney departed as Secretary of Defense in Jan. 1993. When Cheney chose himself as George W. Bush's Vice Presidential running mate, he brought Addington to the White House as his General Counsel.

Addington has served as Cheney's legal bodyguard, fending off efforts by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) to obtain records of the Vice President's energy task force, and later efforts by the General Accounting Office to force full disclosure of the task force's activities. Intelligence community sources have reported that the Cheney-led task force was actually the first of a series of secret planning groups for the Iraq war. In a law suit by the group Judicial Watch, a scant 16-pages of task force documents have been made public, and none from Cheney's office; these documents reveal that the Cheney task force was mapping out oil concessions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Lyndon LaRouche said to-night: ``Every indication is, that Cheney is near to the end of his string as Vice-President. The dropping of Cheney from the Republican ticket, is very bad news for the Kerry campaign. Since the aftermath of the March primaries, Bush and Kerry have been locked into a race to see which can get to the bottom first. If a mainstream Republican is seen as a probable replacement for Cheney on the Presidential ticket, the resulting slow-down in the rate of collapse of Bush's popularity, could mean a likely November defeat for the recently proposed Kerry-Edwards pair.

``In reacting to today's updated reports on the pile-up of terrible troubles for Cheney's career, we must not lose sight of the fact that neither of the presently probable tickets are mentally prepared to cope with the presently accelerating threat of global collapse of the world's monetary-financial system. The date that the world's financial collapse becomes official, is uncertain; but it will be soon. We don't need a new Herbert Hoover, either Democrat or Republican, with this financial collapse now coming on fast.

``So, it will be good for the world if Cheney is out very soon. Do not forget, that, even after Cheney were gone, the real dangers still lie immediately ahead.''

For more of LaRouche's evaluation, and perspective, tune in to his website, www.larouchein2004.com, for his July 15 webcast, which will commence at 1 pm. Eastern Daylight Time. LaRouche's topic is "The New Threat of Fascism."