The supreme act of corrupt power is to murder with impunity, and it is this act that may bring down Dick Cheney. Today Lawrence Wilkerson had this to say about Cheney’s secret death squads:
“What I suspect has happened is what began to happen while I was still in the government, and that was we’re killing the wrong people,” Wilkerson added. “And we’re killing the wrong people in the wrong countries. And the countries are finding out about it, or at least there was a suspicion that the countries might find out about it, and so it was shut down. That’s my strong suspicion.”
For monsters like Cheney and Bush, the thrill of the kill was not diminished by making mistakes. No, this simply added to the feeling of unbridled power. That’s what it means to kill with impunity. There were no checks on the heads of our national security state. They were no different from Louis XIV or Caligula. They held the power of life and death over hundreds of millions of people, and it was intoxicating.