Cheney is still on the dark side

photo credit: Mr. Gunn

“We have to work the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows.”

So declared Dick Cheney five days after the 9/11 attacks. And the vice-president was as good as his word. Within months, Guantanamo was full of hooded prisoners, secret jails were popping up in former Soviet Bloc countries and President Bush was authorising secret interrogation methods for key detainees.

But if you think that’s all over, think again; despite the efforts of human rights groups and the courts, Cheney is still getting his way. Look at the executive order interpreting the Geneva Convention on secret CIA detention facilities.

Ostensibly, it bans torture, but the vague language leaves the door wide open for abuse. The order also defines the category of people who can be secretly held in a way that’s broad enough to include a fat chunk of the global population, allowing Bush to detain anyone thought to be a supporter of a group associated in some unspecified way with the Taliban or al-Qa’eda, if they might possess information that could assist us.

That definition could include a ten-year-old girl whose brother once trained with al-Qa’eda.

It’s dark out there, all right.

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