Why Cheney Was So Wrong
About four months ago I flew to London on a red eye. In economy. I know a thing or two about stress positions. They do make you hostile to others. And combative. Definitely combative.
Joking aside, the issue of torture and detainment is a serious one. We kept people imprisoned at Guantanamo, some of them completely innocent. We did not give them access to lawyers or even contact with their families. We tortured them. And now we learn that the CIA was operating a terrorist assassination program with the program kept secret from Congress. On Dick Cheney’s orders.
Dick Cheney alone did not reduce our country to something we don’t want to be, but he did some significant damage. Oddly, since he was not the president, he seems to have wielded extraordinary power in the executive branch. Though his signature authorizes the assassination program, Bush is as silent and complacent now as he must’ve been as president, letting Cheney throw the hardballs and make the tough decisions. For those of us who thought the Bush presidency was a low point, this seems all the more a miscarriage of American government. After all, we elected George W. Bush, not Dick Cheney, to lead our country.
And the problem is where Dick Cheney seems to have led us.
Extradition and torture, and now assassination, all seem like reasonable treatment for terrorists. Terrorist organizations operate by definition outside of the bounds of sovereign nations and are therefore not protected by the same international law or general respect. The United States cannot always request extradition from the countries who host these terrorists, especially when the host country does not have an operating judicial system or is hostile to the US. But here’s the problem: the entire purpose of the court system is to ensure justice for both the guilty and the innocent. The US response to terrorism skirted the entire judicial process and sought to carry out a vigilante program of retribution. While most of us can get behind that when we’re sure the target is guilty, how many of us can support this approach when we’re not sure? Vigilante justice is illegal because you might kill the wrong guy.
Most of us want to remain Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” We want America to represent all the good a democracy can offer: citizens ruling together in a benevolent manner with a robust justice system that protects its people and an executive branch kept always in check by the courts and Congress. I just watched a video clip of Fox News’ Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly joking about torturing Democrats, those leftist Marxist loonies who want to hurt America — and felt ill. This is not the America I want to be. This is not Ronald Reagan’s America.
America’s greatness comes from the balance of all its powers, the shifting and change between Liberals and Conservatives is part of that balance. Both are represented and the sum of the two is our democracy. It could be argued that Cheney took extraordinary measures after 9/11 to keep our country safe, that he cannot be faulted for this. I don’t agree for the simple reason that we have laws and balances in place to keep us safe from dictators. I believe in our country enough to know that no one needs to break the law of our land to ensure our safety. This is its own danger.
The rhetoric today is that Obama is using the economic crisis just like Cheney used 9/11: to expand government powers into areas the public would never accept if circumstances were different. In a robust economy would we accept the massive debt the Obama administration is taking on? Maybe not, but it is legal and approved by Congress. In our country the rulers are powerful, but they remain citizens. They are expected to remain within the lawful boundaries of their positions. This is what separates us from dictatorships. No matter the threat, this is a fundamental tenet of our country and can’t be sacrificed even when terrorists wreak their havoc. Especially when terrorists wreak their havoc. America will remain the shining beacon.
Cheney Claims No Connection Between Iraq and al Qaeda, You Silly People
Old Happy Face, Dick Cheney, is reminding us that – duh! – there was never any connection between al Qaeda and Sadam Hussein. Wow, to think we were sharing a public hallucination all that time! Cause I believed it! Every word… that Dick Cheney, er… never said.
First, let me begin to dissect this befuddling illumination by pointing out that every time I see Old Happy Face is on the news, again and again, and NOT Bush, it reinforces the strange intuition many may have shared: that Mr. Bush was never REALLY the president at all! Now that Old Happy Face is trying to clean up his presidential story, it becomes more and more obvious that Bush was faking it the whole time. The whole time! THAT’S WHY HE NEVER KNEW ANY OF THE ANSWERS. HE WASN’T ACTUALLY PRESIDENT. Whew! Glad that’s cleared up.
Moving on to the story of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Here’s the money quote from CNN’s story entitled Cheney: No link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11:
“I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11.”
From the same story:
The former vice president said in 2004 that the evidence was “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and that media reports suggesting that the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks reached a contradictory conclusion were “irresponsible.”
“There clearly was a relationship. It’s been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming,” Cheney said at the time.
Condoleeza Rice has backpedaled from asserting that their were “ties going on between al Qaeda and Iraq,” to “No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11.”
Bush’s quotes: From this extensive list from the BBC of Bush’s assertions of a connection bewtween al Qaeda and Sadam Hussein to “No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.” September 17, 2004.
And here we find a quote from McClatchy News Service in which Cheney asserts that waterboarding at Gitmo was worthwhile because it did in fact turn up the OBVIOUS link between al Qaeda and Hussein:
Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq , asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true.
Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.
And more from an extensive chronology:
“Vice President Dick Cheney’s repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration’s claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed.” Additionally, CIA officials “charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president’s office had ‘pressured’ agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam’s capabilities and intentions.” [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03]
And even more:
Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney’s office kept close tabs on the questioning. “Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,” Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.
So, wow, now I’m confused. Cheney badly needed a connection so that he could, uh… deny there was a connection.
To sum up, Condi Rice, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a gigantic Senate Intelligence report all say there was never a link between al Qaeda and Sadam Hussein. Oh yeah, and George Tenet says he was pressured to come up with any evidence linking the two so that someone, not these people, but someone elsecould invade Iraq, someone who very badly wanted to.
And not for their oil.
The One and Only Reason to Love Bush
Leaving Bush behind, the old bedraggled Texan that he is now, will be easy and somehow just pitiful. Cheney, on the other hand, I’d love to see burn in hell. He’s the sinister force behind Bush’s (I’m being generous here) vulnerable ignorance. Cheney took the office of the vice president to new levels of executive control, at times even bypassing (“protecting”) the president from controversial executive decisions.
Past vice presidents have attempted to assume greater authority, with results that just look quaint next to Cheney. From Mark O. Hatfield and the Senate Historical Office:
In assuming substantive policy responsibilities, vice presidents often ran afoul of cabinet secretaries whose territories they invaded. As administration lobbyists, they also irritated members of Congress. My favorite example of this problem occurred in 1969. President Nixon had pledged to give his vice president a significant policy-making role and – for the first time – an office in the White House itself. Spiro Agnew was determined to make the most of that role and to expand his legislative functions as well. Since he lacked previous legislative experience, he had the Senate parliamentarian tutor him on the intricacies of Senate floor procedure. Soon he began to inject himself into the course of Senate proceedings, contrary to the well-worn practice that constrained his predecessors. During the debate over the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty, Agnew approached Idaho Republican Senator Len Jordan and asked how he was going to vote. “You can’t tell me how to vote!” said the shocked senator. “You can’t twist my arm!” At the next regular luncheon of Republican senators, Jordan accused Agnew of breaking the separation of powers by lobbying on the Senate floor, and announced the “Jordan Rule.” Under his rule, if the vice president tried to lobby him on anything, the senator would automatically vote the other way.
What did Cheney do?
According to a 2004 Executive Intelligence Review article, Cheney was already, pre-2004 election, racking up impeachable offenses. Remember the invisible weapons of mass destruction? The author says:
Cheney, beyond all other Administration officials, was the Joseph Goebbels of the Iraq war. As recently as his media interviews in Switzerland and Italy in late January, he continued to lie about Iraq’s weapons, claiming that several trailers seized by American inspectors, following the March 2003 invasion, were mobile bio-weapons labs.
David Kay, the CIA’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq until his hasty mid-January resignation, made clear in interviews and in testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 28, that these trailers had nothing to do with WMD. Former CIA chief of counterterrorism Vincent Cannistraro told Salon magazine on Jan. 29, “It’s disgusting. I just can’t find words to describe how horrible it is…. It just illustrates the peculiar worldview Cheney has and how distorted it is.
Here’s a quote from an NPR article in which Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman, author of Angler, discusses Cheney:
“Cheney created a new doctrine in which the president was accountable to no one in his decisions as commander in chief,” Gellman said. “What was new and innovative here, and quite radical, was the notion that the president’s interpretation could not be challenged, that because the executive is a separate branch, courts and Congress could not tell the president, in any way, how to exercise his powers as commander in chief.”
Indeed, so pervasive was Cheney’s control that when lawyers from the National Security Agency, which was conducting the domestic surveillance, went to the Justice Department to look at the legal opinion authorizing the warrantless surveillance, Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, showed up and angrily told them they had no right to see it.
On keeping Bush in the dark about the surveillance program, Gellman says:
“You had the FBI director, attorney general, the next five levels of officials — which is a couple of dozen people — in the Justice Department, the general counsel of the CIA and the FBI, were all going to resign, in principle because they believed this program was unlawful,” Gellman said. “And George Bush didn’t know it until an hour before it was going to happen.”
And are you ready for this? The New York Times reported last week that Bush rejected Israel’s request for bombs to drop on Iran. According to the NPR article:
When the president refused to give bunker-busting bombs to the Israelis for use against Iran’s nuclear sites, the president’s decision was made over Cheney’s objection, according to a high-ranking former administration official.
The Bush legacy is not pretty. But PROPS to Dub because in the end, he saved us from Cheney.
A World-Crisis: One More Opportunity to Play the Blame Game
Wow. There’s some heavy stuff going down in Washington. And once again, I am loathe to trust anything I hear because it’s all so steeped and occluded in “messaging,” “spin,” and deluxe finger-pointing. It’s really hard to be an informed citizen these days. You begin to feel as though there really is no TRUTH. Just somebody’s version of it. And as in all things politics, it’s being bent to serve a purpose.
From today’s decidedly left-leaning HuffPost:
Some people have been wondering whether Dick Cheney and George Bush, to preserve their legacy and their secrets, would spring an October surprise to secure the election of John McCain–the clearest and almost the only urgent goal of this administration as it winds down. We have wondered whether the trigger could be in Georgia, or Iran, or Pakistan. Yet the banking crisis, in the manner of its management, now looks like the October surprise one week early and with one week longer to turn it to advantage.”
Gawd. Really? I mean, could that be true? I think not. I think the people in Washington can’t help working every situation to their advantage, but I guarantee that this crisis was not “manufactured.” A ridiculous assumption. There are too many people in Washington, including Pelosi, Barney Frank, and a gazillion others who would be aware of it. It’s cynicism maximized into paranoid delusion. That said, would the Bush Administration and Cheney, et al, work this situation to their advantage? Yup. No doubt. One begins to wonder: if the result is the same as if it were manufactured, then there are far scarier things going on in Washington than I can stomach. I am naive enough to believe that the leaders of our country, ALL of them, care about the people and want to do what’s right. Greater good and all that.
Republicans, on the other hand, argue that the Clinton Administration forced the bad subprime loan practices by insisting that low/no credit borrowers be allowed to borrow anyway (Community Reinvestment Act). According to Investor’s Business Daily (emphasis added):
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Reinvestment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.” Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.
Uh, yeah. So, all that subprime credit was just irresistibly JUICY and the Democrats practically FORCED all those poor victimized hedge-fund managers and senior-level Wall Street investors to re-package it and sell it worldwide in a disguised form that then crumbled everyone’s assets. I understand. It’s quite clearly the Democrats’ fault. Those bad, bad social engineers and their JUICY, JUICY subprime mortgages! It was NOT POSSIBLE TO RESIST THAT TEMPTATION. Kind of like Eve bringing down the whole scene and the downfall of all humanity. Really. All her fault. Democrats. All their fault. Nothing to do with de-regulation at all. (Which, some Democrats supported, I might add.)
The important take-away for all this is to choose a side. Be sure to rant whenever possible about FAULT and point-
fingers. Be sure to maximize cynical thinking by looking intensely for political maneuvering rather than solutions. McCain’s decision to delay the debate seemed like a good idea. I was a little shocked by the Obama camp objecting to debate delays. I’m sure all he heard for days was, “Don’t do it! That’s what they want!” Then I read his statement that the American people need the debates more than ever. Oh yeah. Dang. It’s so hard to remember what I want!
Dood. All WE THE PEOPLE want is to know that our representatives are responsible, clear-thinking individuals who will do what’s right for the greater good. It’s just world markets we’re talking about. And remember, if you’re going to seek some completely unprecedented solution? Maybe you can make sure there’s some justice involved. Those bankers came from both parties. Jails don’t care who you voted for.
Cheney is Creepy and I Think He Eats Puppies.
Today’s SF Chronicle lists a front-page article with revelatory– REVELATORY –reporting: proof that Dick Cheney is a Dick. Er, I mean a dick, like as in, wiener. Here’s the quote:
Jason Burnett, a senior official with the EPA who resigned June 9th, charges that Cheney’s office urged him to delete or water down testimony to Congress by top administration officials on the impacts of global warming.
The article uses the old “long suspected, never proven” device to convince us this is news. I am turning into such a cynic, but gawd, is that it? They caught him (his office) urging people? That’s not even illegal. Don’t get me wrong, cause I really, really, really don’t like Dick Cheney, but that’s it? Couldn’t some reporter have opened that secret locker in his office full of dried kitten heads and plans to overthrow the Canadian government if they don’t give us more oil? Couldn’t they have caught him in the act of puppeteering the president into all the revolting foreign policy we now have to undo? 
COULDN’T THEY ARREST HIM FOR THAT HORRID SNEERING SMIRK HE PERPETRATES? Dang. There’s so much to get worked up about with Cheney. I’m sure he did use all his mighty evil-ruler power to thwart global warming policy. I’m sure he’d think it was fine to just live in an oxygen bubble with his rifle and his best buddies while the rest of us shrivel in the rising temperatures. What I want to know is why isn’t there a law against anyone in the EPA following his advice? Who is the real jackass here, the guy who tries to hide the truth? Or the guy who obeys?
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