Annals of Psychology: Research on Group Differences in the Crime Narratives of Psychopathic Murderers

Posted: October 23, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, psychology | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Gary and Judith Ridgeway

Thanks to Delphyne for sending me a link to this article about a study of the crime narratives of psychopaths. Unfortunately, since the journal article was just published in September, I haven’t been able to read the whole thing yet. It’s a study of speech patterns and word usage in the crime narratives of 14 psychopathic killers, compared to 38 murderers who were not categorized as psychopaths, carried out by Jeffrey T. Hancock of Cornell University and Michael T. Woodworth and Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia.

Please forgive a brief personal digression here. I have been interested in narrative analysis since I took an introductory course in research methods about 16 years ago. My professor in that course was one of the leaders in the study of children’s narratives and narrative development. I was amazed that someone could be a psychologist and study stories, and my imagination was immediately captured by the idea. As an undergraduate, under supervision from this professor, I analyzed the writings of novelist Jack Kerouac, and found a fascinating pattern in his work. In every book he wrote, Kerouac recreated a traumatic scene from his childhood in many different guises.

Kerouac’s 9-year-old brother Gerard, whom he adored, had died when Jack was only four. Shortly before Gerard died, Jack had knocked over a structure that Gerard was building with his erector set, and Gerard had gotten very angry and yelled at Jack to go away. That was the last interaction that Jack remembered with Gerard before he died. From a child’s point of view it seemed that these two events–knocking over the structure and getting yelled at and Gerard’s death were linked. Young Jack felt that his bad behavior had caused Gerard’s death. This was extremely traumatic for a young child, and the scene became a part of Kerouac’s vision of the world and his interpretation of interpersonal experiences. Such traumatic repetition is not unusual in creative works. It happens with writers, painters, and musicians. Freud called it sublimation.

In graduate school, I interviewed children for a study of narrative and personality. I later wrote my dissertation on children’s use of a specific aspect of narrative structure called “evaluation.” Evaluation refers to any parts of the narrative that are not necessary to straightforwardly convey “what happened.” When someone adds emotion or description to a story or uses words like “very,” “really,” or “a lot” to add emphasis, that is evaluation–the narrator adds personal reactions to the events in the story.

The narrative form is inherent to the way humans think. Narrative is the basis for autobiographical memories, and it very likely reflects aspects of personality. In my opinion, personality is likely to be correlated with individual differences in the use evaluation in stories.

The study by Hancock and colleagues that I mentioned above was based on computerized textual analysis of personal crime narratives–basically personal stories like the ones I have studied in both children and adults. Here is a summary of the results (emphasis added):

The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, of Cornell University, and colleagues Michael Woodworth and Stephen Porter at the University of British Columbia….

Hancock and his colleagues analyzed stories told by the murderers and compared them with 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail. Their stories were taped, transcribed and subjected to computer analysis.

Psychopaths used more conjunctions like because, since or so that, implying that the crime had to be done to obtain a particular goal. They used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food, sex or money, while non-psychopaths used more words about social needs, including family, religion and spirituality.

Unveiling their predatory nature in their own description, the psychopaths often included details of what they had to eat on the day of their crime.

Psychopaths were more likely to use the past tense, suggesting a detachment from their crimes, say the researchers. They tended to be less fluent in their speech, using more ums and uhs. The exact reason for this is not clear, but the researchers speculate that the psychopath is trying harder to make a positive impression, needing to use more mental effort to frame the story.

The primary purpose of this study was to demonstrate that the language patters could be identified using automated software rather than human coders. According to Hancock, his findings provide support for previous studies of the language of psychopaths. I can’t wait to get my hands on the full article so I can look at his sources. I hope the paper includes an explanation of the coding system and examples of narratives.

Based on the brief descriptions of the study that I’ve seen so far, the differences that were found between the narratives of psychopathic and non-psychopathic murderers could mostly be classified as differences in the use of narrative evaluation, which I described above. Evaluation includes causal words and emotion words. I assume that the researchers programmed the software to count causal and emotional words and phrases as well as words and phrases that referred to social needs–also examples of evaluation.

The differences in fluency could also be classified as differences in narrative structure. Differences in narrative structure, including evaluation,  have been found in comparisons of children from different cultures and comparisons of children with developmental disorders such as ADHD, autism, and Williams syndrome.

Of course there are many limitations to this study. The authors suggest that their findings could be used to identify psychopaths, but I’d think it could only be used to distinguish between groups–not to diagnose individuals.

Whenever a story on research results is published in the media, people start to generalize the results in all sorts of inappropriate ways. For example, just because someone uses a lot of “uhs,” and “ums” in their speech, doesn’t make him or her a psychopath. I’d be really concerned if police departments tried to use the automated language analysis software to evaluate criminals.

I found some quotes from Gary Ridgeway’s confessions on-line. Ridgeway (pictured at the top of this post) is also known as the Green River killer. He has so far confessed to murdering nearly 50 women.  I believe his confessions are even posted on You Tube. Here are some examples of his descriptions of his crimes. Keep in mind that a narrative is defined as two statements about the past that are temporally related.

Question: “How did you kill her?”
Ridgway: “I choked her, with my arm. One or two I choked with a towel.”

He doesn’t express any emotion toward the victims other than his own hatred and rage.

“All the women I killed them ’cause I wanted and it was hate, hated them,” he said….”They were just pieces of trash to me. They were garbage,” he said.

When he talked about his own motivations, he included information about his emotions.

“I had control when I killed the women. I got my rage out for the time,” he said. “I did cry, yes I did, and that was the good part of me. I cried, but I still killed them and didn’t care anything about them.”

So Ridgeway’s “emotional flatness” was expressed in relation to his victims, but he describes himself as experiencing strong emotions. His problem is not understanding that other people also experience the same kinds of emotions. His lack of empathy allowed him to treat his victims as objects rather than feeling human beings.

If I were doing a follow-up to Hancock’s study, I would try to find a larger sample of psychopaths, including both males and females. I would specifically at expressions of emotion and note whether the words referred to the narrator or to other people. Since psychopaths are deficient in empathy, I would expect to find that they express more emotion in their narratives when talking about their own feelings than in references to the feelings of other people.

Tuesday Reads: FBI’s Failed Amerithrax Investigation

Posted: October 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 26 Comments

Anthrax spores surrounding a red blood cell

Good Morning!!

For today’s morning reads, I’m going to focus on an important story that has long fascinated me: the anthrax attacks of 2001 and the FBI’s investigation of the case, which they dubbed “Amerithrax.” Did the FBI fail to really follow through on the investigation because of incompetence? Or is the government hiding something?

I’m sure you recall that just a week after the September 11 attacks, envelopes containing anthrax spores were mailed to several media offices and to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Five people died from anthrax poisoning and seventeen others were infected, but survived. The UCLA School of Public health provides a list of anthrax attacks outbreaks in the U.S., including those related to the 2001 anthrax letters.

Steven Hatfill

The Bush administration tried to suggest that Iraq was somehow behind the attacks, but that hypothesis fell through when the chemical signature of the anthrax from the envelopes was shown to have come from a U.S. lab. The FBI then focused on Dr. Steven Hatfill, bio-weapons expert and virologist. When the FBI named Hatfill as a “person of interest,” the media went into a feeding frenzy, completely destroying this man’s career and reputation. In the end the government had to pay him a $5.8 million settlement.

In 2005, after the case against Hatfill fell apart, the agency found a new scapegoat in Bruce Ivins, an emotionally troubled bio-defense scientist at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. Ft. Detrick is notorious for its connection with the MKULTRA project and the mysterious suicide of distinguished researcher Frank Olson, who had been (probably) unknowingly dosed with LSD a couple of days earlier. But I digress. From the LA Times:

By the mid-1970s, Bruce Ivins had earned his doctorate and was a promising researcher at the University of North Carolina. By outward appearances, he was a charming eccentric, odd but disarming. Inside, he still smoldered with resentment, and he saw a new outlet for it.

Several years earlier, a Cincinnati student had turned him down for a date. He had projected his anger onto the young woman’s sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma. There was a Kappa house in Chapel Hill, N.C., and Ivins cased the building. One night when it was empty, he slipped in through a bathroom window and roamed the darkened floors with a penlight.

Upstairs, he found something that fascinated him: a glass-enclosed sheaf of documents, called a cipher, necessary for decoding the sorority’s secrets. The cipher would help him wage a personal war against Kappa Kappa Gamma into the sixth decade of his life.

This was the side of himself that Ivins kept carefully hidden. He devised sneaky ways to strike anonymously at people or institutions he imagined had offended him. He harbored murderous fantasies about women who did not reciprocate his overtures. He bought bomb-making ingredients and kept firearms, ammunition and body armor in his basement.

Yet Ivins managed to work his way into the heart of the American biodefense establishment, becoming a respected Army scientist and an authority on the laboratory use of anthrax.

In fact, Ivins obsession with Kappa Kappa Gamma was the main connection the FBI had between Ivins and the anthrax letters–they were mailed from a box in Princeton, New Jersey that wasn’t far from a business office rented by the sorority. Jim White at Emptywheel writes:

One former object of Ivins’ attentions, researcher Nancy Haigwood, is relied upon almost exclusively for making the leap from Ivins’ obsession with the sorority to his role in the anthrax attacks….Haigwood began to suspect Ivins in the attacks because of an email he sent to her and others in November, 2001 highlighting his work with the anthrax isolated from the attacks. In one a photo in the email, he is handling culture plates without gloves, a break of containment protocol for working with such dangerous material. Haigwood felt that by sending out this photo, Ivins was emphasizing his immunity to anthrax because he had been vaccinated.

Haigwood later suggested Ivins to the FBI as a suspect, and the agency used pretzel logic to build a connection between Ivins’ Kappa fixation and the mailbox used in the anthrax attacks. But White explains that

this shaky claim already has been thoroughly destroyed. In this post from August, 2008,

Marcy [Emptywheel] showed that Ivins’ work records–from data released by the FBI–indicate that it would not have been possible for him to make the round trip to Princeton and put the letters in the mailbox with them getting the appropriate postmark[.]

Ivins committed suicide in 2008 by taking an overdose of Tylenol–after years of being followed and spied upon by the FBI and named as “an extremely sensitive suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.” After Ivins’ death, the FBI quickly closed the case and blamed the attacks on this man who could no longer defend himself and argued that no one else had been involved.

Yesterday morning, The New York Times published an article on the findings of a group of scientists who analyzed the FBI’s investigation and found it wanting. The results of their work will be published in the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense.

[T]hree scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated….

F.B.I. documents reviewed by The New York Times show that bureau scientists focused on tin early in their eight-year investigation, calling it an “element of interest” and a potentially critical clue to the criminal case. They later dropped their lengthy inquiry, never mentioned tin publicly and never offered any detailed account of how they thought the powder had been made.

The new paper raises the prospect — for the first time in a serious scientific forum — that the Army biodefense expert identified by the F.B.I. as the perpetrator, Bruce E. Ivins, had help in obtaining his germ weapons or conceivably was innocent of the crime.

The Times goes on to try to discredit the scientific analysis, but I just don’t buy it. Here is their summary of what the study authors had to say.

The tin is surprising because it kills micro-organisms and is used in antibacterial products. The authors of the paper say its presence in the mailed anthrax suggests that the germs, after cultivation and drying, got a specialized silicon coating, with tin as a chemical catalyst. Such coatings, known in industry as microencapsulants, are common in the manufacture of drugs and other products.

“It indicates a very special processing, and expertise,” said Martin E. Hugh-Jones, lead author of the paper and a world authority on anthrax at Louisiana State University. The deadly germs sent through the mail to news organizations and two United States senators, he added, were “far more sophisticated than needed.”

In addition to Dr. Hugh-Jones, the authors of the new paper are Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biologist, and Stuart Jacobsen, a chemist; both have speculated publicly about the case and criticized the F.B.I. for years.

But these scientist are not the only people who have questioned the FBI’s investigation. McClatchy published an article in May on their analysis of the FBI lab reports:

Buried in FBI laboratory reports about the anthrax mail attacks that killed five people in 2001 is data suggesting that a chemical may have been added to try to heighten the powder’s potency, a move that some experts say exceeded the expertise of the presumed killer.

The lab data, contained in more than 9,000 pages of files that emerged a year after the Justice Department closed its inquiry and condemned the late Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator, shows unusual levels of silicon and tin in anthrax powder from two of the five letters.

Those elements are found in compounds that could be used to weaponize the anthrax, enabling the lethal spores to float easily so they could be readily inhaled by the intended victims, scientists say.

The existence of the silicon-tin chemical signature offered investigators the possibility of tracing purchases of the more than 100 such chemical products available before the attacks, which might have produced hard evidence against Ivins or led the agency to the real culprit.

But the FBI lab reports released in late February give no hint that bureau agents tried to find the buyers of additives such as tin-catalyzed silicone polymers.

I guess it was just more convenient to blame “crazy Bruce” instead of continuing to pursue the evidence wherever it might lead.

In a book released last month, Jeanne Guilleman “a medical anthropologist, a Professor of Sociology at Boston College and a senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,”is also highly critical of the FBI investigation.

Tonight at 9PM Eastern, the season premiere of PBS’s Frontline will “take a hard look” at the FBI’s investigation of Amerithrax. I plan to watch, and I hope you will too.

I think it may be time for an independent investigation of this crime. The FBI has already had ten years to solve it, but they’ve mainly managed to destroy the lives and careers of two men and cause untold pain to their families and friends.

Now what are you reading and blogging about this morning?

Amanda Knox: Victim of “Outlandish” Misogyny

Posted: October 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

An emotional Amanda Knox and her mother at press conference in Seattle

Thank goodness, Amanda Knox is finally free! Apparently the Prosecutors in Perugia still plan to appeal, but the U.S. should never allow her to be returned to Italy. Years ago, I read a long piece in the NYT about this case, and I was horrified at the accusations that were hurled at this young woman. I never thought she would be convicted in the first place, and that it took this long for the conviction to be reversed is an outrage.

Knox was a victim of anti-Americanism, as Joseph Cannon wrote, but most of all she was a victim of fear and hatred of the feminine. There’s a very good article in the LA Times today by Nina Burleigh that I think most women can identify with, although the misogyny and superstition behind the Knox conviction were extremely bizarre. Burleigh writes:

There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case. It became clear that it wasn’t facts but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case.

In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior. A prison “doctor” (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox’s blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she’d had sex with. Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it. Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was mistaken and she didn’t have AIDS.

Outside prison walls, Italian criminologists were opining in the media and eventually on the witness stand that because the body had been covered with a blanket, the killer was surely female because such an act was evidence of feminine “pieta.”

Finally, there were the prosecution’s operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a “luciferina” — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity. She was “dirty on the inside.” Always, even from the defense lawyers, the closing arguments ended with appeals to God, in a medieval courtroom with a peeling fresco of the Madonna on the wall and a crucifix hanging above the judge.

Long story short: Knox returned from visiting her boyfriend on the night after Halloween in 2007 to find her roommate Meredith Kercher raped and murdered. Although, as Nina Burleigh points out in the LA Times article linked above, 1 in 5 women in Europe have been sexually assaulted and 98% of the perpetrators are men, Knox and her boyfriend were immediately suspected.

A local man, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the crime in 2008. But that wasn’t good enough for the prosecutor. He made up a story out of whole cloth: the story of an American girl who was a “witch” and had masterminded the Satanic rape and murder of her roommate. Never mind that Knox was a naive young woman who hadn’t even had a boyfriend until she was 19. She had dreamed all her life of going to college in Italy, and had worked multiple jobs during high school to save up the money to go to Perugia. What possible motive could she have had to organize this horrible crime just a a couple of months after she had achieved her dream?

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini

From the New York Post, another article by Nina Burleigh:

The story of Amanda Knox in Italy is of media, misogyny, mistranslation, misbehavior — but chiefly superstition. Kercher’s death was a terrible but simple act of sexual aggression against a young woman in her home. Yet while a prosecutor in the United States might see only the forensic evidence, the motives and the opportunity — the small-town Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini saw something more. It was a Halloween crime, and that was one of the first clues to register with Mignini, called to the crime scene fresh from celebrating All Souls’ Day, a day when proper Italian families visit their dead.

And on scene was a pale, light-eyed 20-year-old girl who, prosecutors said in their closing arguments last week, had the look of a “she-devil.”

Mignini always included witch fear in his murder theory, and only reluctantly relinquished it. As late as October 2008, a year after the murder, he told a court that the murder “was premeditated and was in addition a ‘rite’ celebrated on the occasion of the night of Halloween. A sexual and sacrificial rite [that] in the intention of the organizers … should have occurred 24 hours earlier” — on Halloween itself — “but on account of a dinner at the house of horrors, organized by Meredith and Amanda’s Italian flatmates, it was postponed for one day.”

Unbelievable! Read the entire article for some startling insights into the roots of Mignini’s fantasies. I guess we should be grateful that church and state are still somewhat separate in the U.S., but for how long?

Finally, yesterday Knox was freed. Here’s the scene in the courtroom:

Knox arrived in Seattle earlier today, where she spoke to supporters:

“I’m a little overwhelmed right now,” Knox said, adding that looking down from the airplane on her flight home was surreal.

“Thanks to everyone who believed in me, who has defended me, who supported my family,” Knox said before tearing up. “My family’s the most important thing right now and i just want to go be with them.”

Knox then appeared to be too overcome with emotions to continue.

I wish her well, and hope she’ll be able to recover from her nightmarish experience. Meanwhile, we have another example of the extreme misogyny that is still so powerful around the world. Dakinikat gave us another reminder in her post about earlier today. We know from what happened to Hillary in 2008 and the attacks on women’s reproductive freedom that have taken place over the past few years that fear and hatred of women is right below the surface here in the U.S. as well.

Late Night: Texas Refuses to Allow Chef to Provide Last Meals to Death Row Inmates

Posted: September 27, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, Psychopaths in charge, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Execution chamber in Texas

While I was out in the car today, I heard a story on NPR about the recent banning of special last meals for people about to be executed in Texas.

Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was executed Wednesday for the hate crime slaying of James Byrd Jr. more than a decade ago, asked for two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. Prison officials said Brewer didn’t eat any of it.

“It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege,” Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, wrote in a letter Thursday to Brad Livingston, the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Within hours, Livingston said the senator’s concerns were valid and the practice of allowing death row offenders to choose their final meal was history.

Whitmire claims to be a Democrat.

Today on NPR’s All Things Considered, there was an interview with Brian D. Price, a former prison inmate who served for years as a death row chef and wrote a book called Meals to Die For. Price is now out of prison and owns a restaurant in East Texas.

In his interview with NPR’s Melissa Block, Price said he had offered to pay for and prepare the requested last meals, since Texas is too cruel and stingy to do so. But he was turned down. In addition, Price revealed that in fact the “special meals” have never been what those about to die actually requested. For example, if the inmate requested lobster, he or she would get whatever piece of fish was available. So Brewer never actually got all that food he requested–the fantasy meal that caused Whitmire to throw a tantrum.

Price argued that Texas’s elimination of last meals is inhumane.

Price made the case that “as a civilized society and a Christian nation … why not … show that softer, more compassionate side?”

Granted, Price said, most murderers don’t offer their victims last meals. “But … are we going to lower ourselves to that same level as that crime that was committed and be so cold and heartless?”

I agree with the sentiment if not the “Christian nation” characterization. Here’s a little more from the UK Guardian, which is published in a country that views the death penalty as uncivilized.

Since Texas resumed carrying out executions in 1982, the state correction agency’s practice has been to fill a condemned inmate’s request as long as the items, or food similar to what was requested, were readily available from the prison kitchen supplies.

The exact request was rarely fulfilled, Price said. He noted that when one condemned inmate asked for two T-bone steaks, the prisoner got a hamburger steak instead.

Price made 220 final meals, from 1991 until his parole in 2003, while serving 14 years in the Texas department of criminal justice Huntsville unit for a pair of convictions related to the abduction of his brother-in-law and a sexual assault on his ex-wife.

We are living through one of the worst economic crises in our country’s history. Millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their faith in our political system. That a Texas legislator saw fit to make a fuss about people being given a choice of meal before they are strapped to a gurney and killed is a sure sign that this country is doomed. The psychopaths are in charge–and I don’t mean the ones in prison.

Profiting from Torture, War, Outing CIA agents, and Ruining America

Posted: August 30, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Central Intelligence Agency, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crime, cyber security, Democratic Politics, Diplomacy Nightmares, Domestic terrorism, toxic waste, U.S. Military | Tags: | 18 Comments

Now, ask me how I really feel about the dueling book tours of war criminals Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld?

Better yet, ask me why I disagree with President Obama who hasn’t said anything about the Dark Lords’ Book Tours and still thinks we should just put all this behind us?

MSNBC and NBC interviewed the vile creature that was our vice president, and I’ve actually watched the interviews. One of the most disgusting parts of the book and of the interviews was his continued plea for exoneration of Scooter Libby for all the lying and law breaking he did to cover up Cheney’s role in the outing of Valerie Plame.  He continues to point the finger at Colin Powell for the investigation and seethes about Dubya’s refusal to pardon Libby. He also characterizes Condoleeza Rice as “tearful” for her public apology on the 16 words that drove Joe Wilson to the op-ed pages to try to stop the incredible mistake that was and is the Iraq war.  If there ever was a reason to never bring Republicans back to a realm where they can influence the foreign policy of the U.S., Cheney is out there making that case right now.  How can so few people cost one nation so much in lives and treasure and then be allowed to go out and profit from their reckless, stupid, costly, deadly ideology and policy?

Here’s a link to The Atlantic to remind us “Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney”.  There’s a huge, long list that includes Halliburton, spying on Americans, indefinite detentions, torture, and the radical view of executive power that haunts us today.  Each item on the list comes from a long list of books that investigated Cheney’s misdeeds and each of them should be enough to start a righteous Justice Department investigation of his actions while in office. Here’s the conclusions from author Conor Friedersdorf.

Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decision-making, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.

After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail.

Glenn Greenwald got a jump on the corporate media by  publishing his diatribe in Salon on Thursday.  Oh, wait the corporate media is being somewhat deferential to grab the interviews. Greenwald lists the results of the poison fruits of elite immunity.  While CNN is fretting about the dying Lockerbie bomber who killed hundreds, here’s what’s going on with Dick Cheney, who is responsible for the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands.

That’s what happens when the Government — marching under the deceitful Orwellian banner of Look Forward, Not Backward — demands that its citizens avert their eyes from the crimes of their leaders so that all can be forgotten: the crimes become non-crimes, legitimate acts of political choice, and the criminals become instantly rehabilitated by the message that nothing they did warrants punishment.  That’s the same reason people like John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are defending their torture and illegal spying actions not in a courtroom but in a lush conference of elites in Aspen.

The U.S. Government loves to demand that other countries hold their political leaders accountable for serious crimes, dispensing lectures on the imperatives of the rule of law.  Numerous states bar ordinary convicts from profiting from their crimes with books.  David Hicks, an Australian citizen imprisoned without charges for six years at Cheney’s Guantanamo, just had $10,000 seized by the Australian government in revenue from his book about his time in that prison camp on the ground that he is barred from profiting from his uncharged, unproven crimes.

By rather stark contrast, Dick Cheney will prance around the next several weeks in the nation’s largest media venues, engaging in civil, Serious debates about whether he was right to invade other countries, torture, and illegally spy on Americans, and will profit greatly by doing so.  There are many factors accounting for his good fortune, the most important of which are the protective shield of immunity bestowed upon him by the current administration and the more generalized American principle that criminal accountability is only for ordinary citizens and other nations’ (unfriendly) rulers.

Even George Will says that Dick Cheney–at the very least–owes the world and the US an apology.

Five hundred and sixty five pages and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years is we went to war—big war, costly war—under false pretenses. And…to write a memoir in which you say essentially nothing seriously went wrong…if I wrote a memoir of my last week, I would have things to apologize for.

From what I can tell from these bits and blurbs from the interviews with NBC, Cheney thinks everything he did was right and every one else is wrong.  This includes the President he served and the people he served with maybe the exception of Donald Rumsfeld.  It’s a little odd, don’t you think, that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Dubya can’t leave the country for fear of being sent directly to The Hague to be tried for Crimes against humanity?   Yet, Cheney can’t think of one thing that he wasn’t right about.

If you can stomach it, here’s a Youtube of NBC’s ‘exclusive” with Dick Cheney.  Isn’t this just ducky? Oh, and his book is up there on the bestseller list now.  How on earth could we let this vile creature out on a rehabilitation tour and enrich him for his inhumane agenda?

Oh, and just in case you’re inclined to give our President a Break, here’s a little reminder on something from Wikileaks via Jonathan Turley and David Corn from 2010 w/ht to Susie Madrak.

One of the little reported details from the latest batch of Wikileaks material are cables showing that the Obama Administration worked hard behind the scenes not only to prevent any investigation of torture in the United States but shutdown efforts abroad to enforce the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. This includes threatening the Spanish that, if they did not derail a judicial investigation, it would have serious consequences in bilateral relations. I discussed these cables on Countdown.

For two years, President Obama has worked to block the investigation of torture under the Bush Administration — even as both Dick Cheney and George Bush publicly admit to ordering waterboarding of suspects.

David Corn in Mother Jones has an interesting posting today on the issue.

A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department discloses how the Administration discarded any respect for the independence of the judiciary in Spain and pressured the government to derail the prosecution of Bush officials. Human rights groups around the world had called for such enforcement in light of Obama promise that no torturers would be prosecuted and Holder’s blocking of any investigation into war crimes.

The Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had filed a demand for prosecution with Spain’s National Court to indict former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. It had a compelled factual basis that these men ordered or facilitated war crimes — a record that has only become stronger since this confrontation.

American officials pressured government officials, including prosecutors and judges, not to enforce international law and that this was “a very serious matter for the USG.” It was Obama’s own effort at creating a “Coalition of the Unwilling” — nations unwilling to enforce treaties on torture and war crimes when the alleged culprits are American officials.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) joined the embassy’s charge d’affaires in the secret campaign to block the prosection of Judge Baltasar Garzón.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →