Cheney, The Loose Cannon

Vice-President Dick Cheney's preoccupation with ensuring that the U.S. Congress makes no law restricting the terror fighters' right to abuse detainees is now distracting other policymakers from carrying out their duties.

Today's Washington Post reveals that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was recently forced to interrupt a busy official visit to Canada in order to convene a secure teleconference with Cheney to ensure that he didn't unilaterally decide U.S. policy on the treatment of detainees.

As I discussed last week in my groundbreaking A Kook By Any Other Name, Cheney and his longtime counsel David Addington have been working for the last three and a half years to allow the U.S. to ignore the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of enemy prisoners of war.

This kind of crap has got to stop. The reputation of the United States in the community of nations has been earned at far too much cost of American blood to allow these chickenhawks to project their fearful world-view into policy any more. The Iraq war is bad enough, but trying to weasel out of the Geneva Conventions is beneath contempt.