A chief lesson of the Watergate scandal was that a cover-up, otherwise known as obstruction of justice, can be more dangerous to powerful leaders than the offense they are attempting to conceal. There is increasing reason to believe that attempts to cover-up their involvement in torture will lead to prosecution of Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove and other lawless members of the Bush administration.
We already know that Rice failed to tell Congress that she explicitly authorized torture techniques. We also know that video evidence of the torture of captives by the CIA was destroyed. It is highly unlikely that the CIA undertook to destroy these recordings on its own initiative. But what about the transcripts of the interrogations, and the recorded summaries and analyses of the “confessions” extracted under torture? What about “missing” emails from the White House? If these have been destroyed or altered, there will be very serious consequences for anyone involved in obstruction of torture investigations.
Now that the torture information floodgates have opened and multiple investigations are likely, it is probable that a few of the dozens of people involved in the torture system will talk and reveal actions taken to conceal evidence of involvement in torture. It will likely be the cover-up that takes down Cheney, who I believe was the prime instigator of the torture practices of the Bush administration.
