A web
page which is an excellent source of true Progressive and Liberal Information
and allows you to form honest opinions about Neo-conservative and Conservative
extremists who infest our government and society:
http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/
We will also list others as they are created by the true patriots of this
country.
The Following Right Wing Individuals and
Groups have made statements and performed activities which by some standards
indicate actions detrimental to the United States of
America. Click on each Name for The Truth....
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Question:
"Separation between Church and State." Who coined the Phrase?
Give up? Answer: Thomas Jefferson - one of the founding
fathers of this geat Nation and a creator of the U.S. Constitution and the
First Amendment to that same Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson, in 1802, wrote a Letter to the Dansbury Baptist
Convention, referring to the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
In it he said:
"Believing
that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God,
that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that
the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not
opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole
American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no
law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and
State."
Richard Bruce Cheney (born January 30, 1941) is a former United States
Congressman, Secretary of Defense, the 46th Vice President of the United
States. He also served as White House Chief of Staff, and in the private
sector was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Energy
Services. Every decision he has ever made has been wrong.
Early life and family
Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to
Richard Herbert Cheney and Marjorie Dickey (sic). His family later moved to
Wyoming. In 1959, he matriculated to Yale University, where it was thought to be
impossible to flunk out. After flunking out, Cheney returned to Wyoming in 1960.
He ended up graduating from the University of Wyoming at the age of twenty-four,
the perfect age for a young black man to serve his country in the army.
In 1964, Cheney married Lynne Vincent,
his high school sweetheart. Mrs. Cheney would go on to become an
accomplished dick in her own right, serving as the Chair of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, and a writer of filthy pulp novels about lesbian sex and rape.
The Cheneys have two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, also dicks. Mary Cheney
is an attractive though somewhat tomboy-ish femme lesbian. Her
partner, Heather Poe, looks a bit like Dad. Mary Cheney and Heather Poe have
one child.
Cheney and the draft
Cheney is sub-species of coward known as
the
"Chicken Hawk,”
which is a person who publicly supports a war but is too much of a pussy to
fight in it himself. There is a scene in the movie "Office Space" when one of
the characters, Michael Bolton, is sitting in his fancy car listening to
hardcore gangsta rap, and then the black guy pulls up next to him, and he rolls
the window up. A chickenhawk is this sort of person.
In 1963, with the draft board
ramping up, Cheney enrolled in Casper Community College (one of the finest
institutions of higher-learning in Southwest Casper), and received his first
student deferment. Later that year, he got his second student deferment.
In August of 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, escalating
American military involvement. Twenty-two days later, Dick married his
wife, and a few months later received his third deferment. In July,
1965, President Johnson announced he would double the number of draftees.
Cheney moved quickly, entered graduate school that year, and received his
fourth student deferment. This was quite a sacrifice, as grad school
is known to be extremely boring. Cheney received a “hardship
exemption" in 1966 when he and his wife conceived their first child.
By the next year, he was no longer eligible for the draft. It had been
a long process, but Cheney learned a valuable lesson: if you get in a jam,
you can usually get out of it by
having sex with somebody.
Political
career
Cheney’s career is notable for having taken
place almost entirely within a "bubble." He began his career as in intern for
Richard Nixon and was campaign manager in 1976 for Gerald Ford -- a campaign
that managed to lose a governor of Georgia. Dick was then elected to the House,
where he served until 1989. Part of this service included voting against making
the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a holiday, voting against calling on
South Africa to release Nelson Mandela, and voting against the creation of the
Department of Education -- the kind of congressman that would be produced if
George Wallace and Barry Goldwater had a child who inherited the worst of each
and then grew up to be a congressman and also lost his hair.
In 1989 Cheney became Secretary of
Defense for President George H.W. Bush. In defending the decision not to
take Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein at the time, he said:
“I don't think you could have
done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties...And
the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is
Saddam worth? And the answer is, not that damned many.”
In 1995, Cheney decided he’d given
enough to his country and thought it was about time to do something for
himself. For the next five years, he served as CEO of Halliburton, one of
the top companies in the world for anyone looking for military equipment and
willing to pay three to five times above retail.
In the spring of 2000, Cheney was
put in charge of George W. Bush’s Vice Presidential search committee. Like
all great romantic comedies, the dick Bush was looking for to fill out the
ticket turned out to be right under his nose all along. If Bush was going to
be the worst President in United States history, he would need a partner
ready to step in and carry on that tradition if something should happen to
him.
Vice
President
Immediately following the 9/11 attacks,
Cheney was kept out of the public eye in an undisclosed location, partly for
security reasons and partly because it was thought that America had been through
enough already. Some (Lynn Cheney) have been quoted as saying that Cheney has a
charming side. This was on display in June of 2004 when, while walking by
Senator Patrick Leahy in the Capital, he said “go fuck yourself.”
Cheney is also known as the world’s
biggest supporter of the Iraq War. And it is certainly true that the
consistency of his acumen and judgment about the war have been unequaled.
Most famously, on May 31, 2005, he claimed that the insurgency in Iraq was
“in it’s last throes.” Roughly 2000 U.S. troops have been killed since then.
In 2006, Cheney shot his 78-year-old
friend in the face while quail hunting -- a practice some call "an accident"
and others call "good clean fun." The firearm used was a “Perazzi” shotgun,
an expensive model from Italy considered “gay” by many in the shotgun
community. Cheney's friend, Harry Whittington suffered a minor heart-attack,
though he survived. Cheney announced that he “accepted full responsibility,”
which meant announcing that he “accepted full responsibility.”
On October 28, 2005, Lewis “Scooter”
Libby, Dick’s Chief of Staff, was indicted for obstruction of justice in the
Valerie Plame investigation. After being sentenced to 30 months in prison,
in July of 2007, President Bush commuted Lewis “Scooter” Libby's sentence.
It is commonly assumed Cheney was behind this decision. The move outraged
many, including, no doubt, several inmates who were probably looking forward
to getting know a nice, fit, well-kept new inmate who hadn’t let his body
go.
With the really fun part of war
in Iraq winding down, in May 2007 Cheney gave a speech warning Iran about
its nuclear program. Many took this to be setting the stage for a war with
Iran, this one even possibly involving nuclear weapons. This alarmed many
people, even those in the dick community. One theory about why Cheney would
care so little about nuclear war and the casualties it would cause is
because, in fact, Cheney actually died several years ago, and is just too
big of a
ass to leave, instead simply willing his body to
carry on through sheer
evil will.
Post-vice-presidency
While generally former Presidents and
Vice-Presidents have nobly decided to step back from the public eye,
particularly when it comes to being critical of the next administration, Dick
Cheney has little history of being even moderately scrupulous, much less noble.
As of summer 2009, Cheney has become
Matthew McConaughey's character from Dazed and Confused who still
hangs around his high school because none of his actual peers want to hang
out with him. That is, minus the good looks, hair, and general mobility.
Regularly, Cheney spoke out in press
conferences refuting President Obama's policies on torture and national
security, going so far as to criticize the Iraqi troop withdrawal that
occurred at the precise time his own previous administration had planned.
In many countries, when an elderly
person has completely lost parts of their memory, constantly needs attention
to survive, and accidentally shoots someone, they are committed to some kind
of assisted living facility. In the United States, they are given more cable
news airtime.
As of March 2009, Cheney's approval
ratings were at 30% approval and 63% disapproval. Currently, Cheney is no
longer employed by the Government or engaged in any policymaking, meaning
that over 60% of Americans actually disapprove of his job of doing nothing.
Dick Cheney, the President Will Take
Your Apology Now
Uppa, Zhang Jun /
Zuma
If
the ex-VP still thinks Obama's soft
on terror, perhaps he should consult
Osama bin Laden. Oh wait, he's at
the bottom of the ocean.
Excerpts from
an article on motherjones.com by
David Corn
on Fri May. 6, 2011.
David Corn is
Mother Jones' Washington
bureau chief. For more of his
stories,
click here.
He's also on
Twitter
and
Facebook.
Get David Corn's
RSS feed.
Does Dick Cheney
owe President Barack Obama an apology?
Ever since Obama
entered the White House, the former vice
president has been decrying him as a
weak leader whose actions place the
nation at risk. He's been the
lead-singer of the
Obama-is-bad-for-national-security
mantra on the right. Yet in the wake of
the successful raid on Osama bin Laden's
suburban compound, Cheney has not
rescinded his previous assaults on the
president.
The ex-veep did
release a
statement
hailing the operation as "a tremendous
achievement for the military and
intelligence professionals who carried
out this important mission. Their
tireless work since 9/11 has made this
achievement possible, and enabled us to
capture or kill thousands of al Qaeda
terrorists and many of their leaders."
(Cheney did not rush into the debate
over whether enhanced interrogation
techniques—or torture—had yielded the
intelligence nuggets that led to Bin
Laden's comfortable whereabouts.)
Almost as an aside,
in that statement, Cheney added one line
about the president, "I also want to
congratulate President Obama and the
members of his national security team."
But there was, of course, no reference
to Cheney's past criticism of Obama and
no recognition that Obama had, if only
in this episode, performed ably as
commander in chief. After all, any such
acknowledgment, however slight, would
undermine over two years of Cheney's
Obama-bashing.
But let's roll the
tape. In 2009, after Obama was in office
less than a month,
Cheney told
Politico
that there was a "high probability" that
terrorists would attempt a nuclear or
biological attack in the coming years
and that, thanks to Obama's policies,
the odds were better that such an
assault would succeed. He also said,
"When we get people who are more
concerned about reading the rights to an
Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with
protecting the United States against
people who are absolutely committed to
do anything they can to kill Americans,
then I worry."
This was no hint:
Cheney was accusing Obama of caring more
about process than the security of the
American people. That was a profoundly
serious charge. The former vice
president was not merely engaging in a
debate over Obama's national security
policies; he was suggesting that his
adminstration fretted more about
terrorists' civil liberties than the
lives of American citizens. Cheney's
real charge was not that Obama was wrong
(any leader can make an ill-advised
policy choice), but that Obama really
wasn't devoted to defending the United
States. Cheney was not merely arguing
about the best way to counter
terrorists; he was trying to
delegitimize Obama as commander in
chief.
A month later,
Cheney, in
an interview with
CNN,
continued this line of attack: "Now
[Obama] is making some choices that, in
my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk
to the American people of another
attack." Again, Cheney went beyond
arguing policy. He questioned Obama's
motives, accusing the president and his
aides of not being sufficiently
concerned about terrorists: "They are
very much giving up that center of
attention and focus that's required."
Now, how would
Cheney know that? At that time, the CIA,
in response to a request from the
president, was actually coming up with a
revved-up plan to find Bin Laden. The
Obama administration also was
intensifying its drone war against the
Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other violent
extremist groups in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region.
Later in the year,
after the failed Christmas Day bombing
attempt of a Northwest Airlines plane,
Cheney again went on the offensive. In a
statement,
the former vice president derided Obama:
"He seems to think if he gives
terrorists the rights of Americans, lets
them lawyer up and reads them their
Miranda rights, we won't be at war." He
charged that Obama "pretends we aren't"
at war and once more proclaimed that
Obama had made America "less safe." He
was still pushing the spin that Obama
did not consider national security a
priority: "Why doesn't he want to admit
we're at war? It doesn't fit with the
view of the world he brought with him to
the Oval Office. It doesn't fit with
what seems to be the goal of his
presidency: social transformation, the
restructuring of American society." This
was no subtle dig. Cheney was contending
that Obama was placing his policy
agenda—health care reform?—above his
duty to protect the United States. It
was a polite way of calling him a
traitor.
This past January,
during
an interview with
NBC News,
Cheney was asked if he still considered
Obama a cause of concern: "You said you
believe President Obama has made America
less safe. That he's actually raised the
risk of attack. Do you still feel that
way?"
Cheney replied that
he was pleased that Obama had
intensified the drone attacks on
terrorist targets, adding, "That's a
plus that he's learned in that regard.
But I still worry." That is, Obama still
couldn't be fully trusted with national
security. Cheney noted that he and
President George W. Bush had possessed
an "absolute commitment" to preventing
another 9/11. As for Obama, Cheney
wasn't sure: "I hope President Obama is
to that point now where he has that same
basic attitude. But we might never find
out until there's actually another
attack." That wasn't much of an
endorsement.
In his statement
responding to the Obama-ordered mission
that killed Bin Laden, Cheney declared,
"[T]he message our forces have sent is
clear—if you attack the United States,
we will find you and bring you to
justice." But during the Bush-Cheney
years, that message was not always so
clear. In March 2002,
Bush indicated that
he was not that
fixated on Bin Laden.
Asked at a press conference about
efforts to find the terrorist leader,
Bush said:
We
haven't heard from him in a long
time. The idea of focusing on one
person…He's a person who's now been
marginalized…I don't know where he
is. I just don't spend that much
time on it…I'm more worried about
making sure our soldiers [in
Afghanistan] are well-supplied, that
the strategy is clear…I truly am not
that concerned about him.
Four years later,
conservative journalist Fred Barnes,
after interviewing Bush, said that
Bush had
told him
that capturing Bin Laden was not a "top
priority!!!"
Still, throughout the
Bush-Cheney years, intelligence
professionals maintained the hunt for
Bin Laden. It was Obama, once he took
office, who instructed the CIA (which
probably didn't need much more
motivation) to push ahead.
He signaled that
nailing Bin
Laden WAS
a top priority!
And
he signed the order authorizing the
risky mission that required unilateral
military action and that did not include
reading Bin Laden his rights. Obama was
the commander-in-chief who delivered the
message to Bin Laden and other
terrorists:
the United
States will hunt you down and kill you.
This hardly fits
the caricature of Obama that Cheney and
other Republicans have been promoting
since the president took office.
It's unlikely that
Cheney will retract his previous
remarks. But he and other conservatives
who denigrated Obama's devotion to
national security have lost a
much-valued possession: the
Obama-is-weak-on-defense card. They've
been playing it since the 2008 campaign
and, no doubt, they anticipated
deploying it during the 2012 contest.
GOP 2012 contenders for months have been
slamming Obama on national security
issues. But soft on terrorism?
If Cheney or anyone else ever again
hurls that charge, they will be met with
an obvious reply: Obama weak on
defense? Just ask Osama bin Laden.Oh, you can't. He's at the bottom of
the ocean. Ultimately, this
shield against an age-old canard often
tossed at Democrats is worth much more
than any apology from a grumpy old
ex-vice president.
On MSNBC, Rep. Alan
Grayson (D-Florida) posited that Cheney's criticisms are
just a scheme to boost book sales for his book release and
tour.
"You know, honestly I
think he's just trying to prime his book tour, his upcoming
book tour," said Grayson. "He got $2 million to write about
his memories, and he's trying to stay in the public eye in
order to push sales for his book. That's what I think."
"I'm wondering, though,
who's doing the introduction to his book? Is it
Mephistopheles? I don't know -- maybe it's Satan." Grayson
has previously wondered if the former vice president was a
vampire.
Later in the evening,
on "Larry King Live," Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) offered a more
reserved, but still damning critique.
"He's in your party,"
King asked, "what about Dick Cheney's complaints?"
Paul smiled
uncomfortably. "Well, I think he had his eight years and he
caused a lot of trouble for our country, and he perpetuated
a war in Iraq that was unnecessary and wrong headed. So I
would say it would be best he not be so critical right now."
WATCH Grayson
WATCH Paul
WATCH Arianna on
Coundown: "Dick Cheney is absolutely shameless"
Excerpts
from a interview of Jane Mayer by Keith Olbermann from Crooks and Liars
Tuesday Aug 25, 2009 6:00pm
Keith Olbermann talks with Jane
Mayer in this clip about the release of the CIA IG report and the
preliminary investigation into some of the worst practices of the torture
regime. She talks about how the IG report reads like "a crime scene,"
foregrounding the idea that the architects of the policy at CIA were warned
in this 2004 report and repeatedly thereafter that their agency would be in
deep legal trouble for continuing these actions, and yet they kept
justifying them and/or actually engaging in them for years afterward. Nobody
took the warnings seriously, knowing both the makeup of the Justice
Department and the Presidency at that time, and perhaps banking on how
Washington would view these efforts, as part of the past and best kept
their, given the Establishment culpability for torture.
Here's just a few of the facts of
what CIA interrogators did in our name, just the ones that come from this IG
report, as masterfully summarized by
Glenn Greenwald:
• Threats of execution, using
semi-automatic handguns and power drills
• Threats to kill detainee and his
children
• Threats to rape detainee's wife
and children in front of him
• Restricting the detainee's
carotid artery
• Hitting detainee with the butt
end of a rifle
• Blowing smoke in detainee's face
for five minutes
• Hanging detainee by their arms
until interrogators thought their shoulders might be dislocated
• stepping on detainee's ankle
shackles to cause severe bruising and pain
• choking detainee until they pass
out
• dousing detainee with water on
cold concrete floors in cold temperatures to induce hypothermia
• killing detainees through
torture techniques, whether accidental or not
• putting detainee in a diaper for
days at a time to live in their own filth
On that last point, Digby
notes that this could have been used in tandem with another technique we
know about, the use of
forced enemas, a particularly degrading technique, part and parcel of
the humiliations heaped on prisoners that were psycho-sexual in nature. A
lot of these stem from misreadings of books like
Raphael Patai's "The Arab Mind," which presumed a host of dubious
generalizations about Muslims and their predispositions, all of it willingly
lapped up by neoconservatives willing to believe that their opponents were
somehow subhuman. As if anyone would react favorably to being made to live
in their own shit. These stereotypical projections that manifested
themselves in essentially an allowance for torturing brown-skinned people
have dangerous and deadly repercussions.
more...
But whatever Patai's intentions,
the kind of thinking he engaged in does have real-world consequences,
ones that reverberate far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib. In their
recent book "Occidentalism" (Penguin), Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit
argue that a reciprocal negative stereotype of the West has arisen in
the Arab world, one that holds that the West is licentious, amoral,
overly sexualized, aggressive, and engaged in a crusade against Islam.
Buruma and Margalit trace this stereotype back to thinkers of the
Western counter-Enlightenment, but events like the abuse at Abu Ghraib,
in which soldiers reportedly not only raped prisoners but forced them to
eat pork and drink alcohol, suggest that an Occidentalist worldview has
sources much closer at hand, in the actual experience of domination.
In the wake of the Iraq war,
mutually reinforcing Occidentalist and Orientalist stereotypes have
contributed immeasurably to the fear and apprehension that divides Islam
and the West. It should be observed that the human rights violations
that took place in Abu Ghraib would have been no less horrific had they
taken place in Madison, Wis. But the explosiveness of the situation
makes them far more dangerous as we enter an era where each side defines
the other only by its worst excesses. Rather than plumbing some mythical
"Arab mind," we should affirm the shared humanity that transcends our
differences and binds us all together.
Because of the reliance on
stereotypes, the lack of factual information and the pressure from the top
to come up with any information in the early post-9/11 period, this all led
to
"unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented"
being used repeatedly and in violation of multiple federal laws and
international conventions. None of them made Americans safer, in fact many
of them probably made the country less safe, and all of them were decidedly
illegal, debasing and severely damaging to our moral capability. We have
made a mockery of the presumption that
in America, the law is king. Now a generation of torture-loving
conservatives believe that the ends justify any means, up to and including
murder.
They don't. And as soon as you
begin to have an argument over torture's effectiveness, the argument is
immediately lost. But it's worth noting that Dick Cheney, the Great
Dissembler, claimed for months that documents would show the how torture
worked in saving lives, and yet, while those documents were released along
with the IG report, as Mayer says none of the information contained in them
prove Cheney's hypothesis.
OLBERMANN: What about
Mr. Cheney's assessment that there
would be documents that prove that torture worked where traditional and
legal interrogation did not or would not. Is there anything in those
documents that were released today that supports that contention?
MAYER: Well, the documents
that I've seen, and maybe I'm missing something, but so far, I am amazed
at how little support there is for the things that Vice President Cheney
has been saying. There is nothing but a mass of claims that they got
information from this individual and that individual, many from KSM, who
apparently has been the greatest fount of information for them, but
there's absolutely nothing saying that they had to beat them to get this
information. In fact, as anybody knows who knows anything about Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, he was dying to tell the world, when he was interviewed
by Al Jazeera before he was in US custody, about everything he knew and
everything he did. He was proud of his role as the mastermind of 9/11.
He loves to talk about it. So there's no evidence that I see in this
that these things were necessary. I spoke to someone at the CIA who was
an advisor to them who conceded to me that "We could have gotten the
same information from tea and crumpets."
OLBERMANN: Or buying a copy of
the Al Jazeera interview.
The Cheney documents
were deliberately created at the time to rebut both this CIA Inspector
General report recommending prosecutions, and the heat put on by Congress
about allegations of torture. They were actually conceived to deceive people
into believing that torture works, an irrelevant point at best. And yet
these same memos
do not support Cheney's claims. They say that certain individuals gave
up information, but
only after questioned through traditional means, which was happening
contemporaneously to the torture. It is impossible to say definitively,
therefore, which information came as a result of what techniques.
And yet, not only has traditional
media
largely ignored the fact that the documents do not support Cheney's
claims (which were given tons of media attention previously), but an
extremely carefully worded statement by Cheney, stating that "The
documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected
to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we
gained about al Qaeda" - which says nothing of WHAT techniques caused this
intelligence to be gleaned - has been taken
completely at face value by reporters, in particular
CNN, which ran Cheney's comments as facts:
Cheney says documents show
interrogations prevented attacks
Former Vice President Dick
Cheney says documents released Monday support his view that harsh
interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects prevented attacks
and yielded crucial information about al Qaeda.
A simple read of the documents
shows this to be
completely untrue. Jane Mayer, as expert a journalist on this subject as
anyone, calls them unsupportable. But too many reporters just write down
these things and run with them, the facts be damned. It's part of a
disturbing pattern, as Digby says:
If you have followed the torture
revelations over the years, you can't help but be just a tad
disillusioned by the fact that the mainstream media acts over and over
again as if they were born yesterday and each time these stories are
validated it's as if it's the first time they've heard it.
We already know they tortured.
We know that DOJ bureaucrats illegally approved the torture on Dick
Cheney's request and we know that a bunch of unprofessional, untrained
interrogators complied and then went beyond even what was approved. We
know that innocent people were tortured and we know that prisoners were
killed. We've known all this for a long time. The question is not what
happened, it's whether anyone will be held accountable for it.
On that point, here's Jane Mayer
talking about the Durham investigation, actually hopeful about what it may
find:
MAYER: Well, my guess is that
if they actually open some kind of serious investigation, and Durham is
said to be a very serious prosecutor, that even if they start at the
very bottom, it's going to keep leading up and up through the chain of
command. Because, if nothing else, if they actually bring charges
against anybody at the CIA who was at the bottom of the food chain, the
first thing that person's going to do is say "I was authorized, let me
tell you what my orders were." So they've begun a process that could
lead to the top.
OLBERMANN: Well, if it works
along the Archibald Cox lines, as I analogized last week, where they've
supposedly circumscribed it, but people want to get out from the
scapegoat for the whole operation, then I think your assessment is
correct.
We know that none of the torture
here happened by happenstance, but through a directed policy emanating from
the top. Instead of prosecuting "bad apples" who were young MPs on the night
shift in Baghdad, we're talking about mid-level career CIA. They aren't
dupes, and they know how to shift the attention up the chain of command. I
don't think these interrogators will live with being the scapegoats. It may
take some time, but we really could see some legitimate accountability here.
And I hope so - because otherwise this will remain a black mark that can
never wash out.
Excerpted from an article by
Gareth Porter at huffingtonpost.com on November 9, 2007
Dick Cheney tried to
pressure intelligence analysts who have not drunk the neocon kool-aid on
Iran to go along with his line on the issues at stake in a National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran that the Bush White House held up for more
than a year.
Think Progress immediately noted the parallel between the Cheney's
effort to get an Iran NIE that is more to his liking and the way he pushed
intelligence analysts to accept the fabrications the neocons were pushing in
on Iraq in 2002.
The similarities between Cheney's efforts to cook the intelligence on Iraq
and on Iran are worth noting, but so are the differences. Cheney may have
had a bigger impact in shaping the intelligence estimate on Iran to fit the
policy he was pursuing than was the case on Iraq in 2002.
The Washington Post
reported in June 2003 that Cheney and his chief of staff Scooter Libby had
visited CIA analysts several times in 2002 to get them to reexamine
their skeptical analysis on the WMD issue. But equally important, the Post
quoted a "senior agency official" as saying that speeches by Cheney in
August 2002 charging Saddam with having a nuclear weapons program "sent
signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from
here."
The effect was achieved despite
the fact that the October 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD was done very quickly,
because it had been forced on the White House in September by the chairman
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Bob Graham. The White
House had only just begun to roll out its propaganda campaign on the fictive
Iraqi nuclear weapons program at that point.
Now flash forward to autumn 2006.
Cheney had a draft NIE on Iraq that he didn't like. The intelligence
community had already issued an NIE on Iran in spring 2005 that had
concluded Iran's nuclear program would not progress to the point of having
the capability to produce a nuclear weapon until sometime between 2010 and
2015. The new draft Iran estimate was still reportedly offering a similar
analysis. Cheney wanted it to endorse the neocons' alarmist view that Iran
could acquire the knowledge with which to make nuclear weapons much sooner
than that.
Furthermore, Cheney needed an NIE
that would support the policy of attacking Iran over its alleged role in
Iraq and seizing supposed Iranian "Quds force" personnel there. He wanted it
to endorse the charge that Iran is supplying armor-piercing weapons to
Shiites in Iraq who were killing American troops. But the draft NIE didn't
do that, according to former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi.
So part of Cheney's strategy was
to keep sending the draft back for further work while he was creating a new
political atmosphere on Iran's role in Iraq. He began in early 2007 to use
the U.S. military command in Iraq to wage an intensive propaganda campaign
on how the Iranians were supplying EFPs to anti-U.S. Shiite guerrillas
through the Quds force.
Ignoring intelligence available
to the military that EFPs were being manufactured in machine shops in Iraq,
Gen. Petraeus and his subordinates formulated a new narrative that would
dominate media coverage and political discourse on the issue of Iran and
Iraq.
That Iranian EFP narrative was
repeated without any alternative view being reflected in the media for
months. The complete dominance of that narrative in the society for so long
certainly had its effect on the NIE process. As a former CIA intelligence
officer told me, "Look, most of the intelligence analysts are young guys
with less than ten years of experience. A lot of them are willing to give
the administration line on Iran the benefit of the doubt."
My sources suggest that the
analysts ready to go along with the new narrative were finally in the
majority. Nevertheless, some intelligence analysts on Iran were reportedly
still refusing to say that there was concrete evidence to support the
official line that the Iranian regime was exporting EFPs to Iraq. They weree
insisting on including their dissenting views on the issue in the NIE.
That is why the Director of
National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, under orders from Cheney, refused to
circulate the NIE until all dissenting views on the issue had been removed.
There has been no comparable
administration propaganda campaign over Iran's nuclear program, so Cheney's
tactics were more direct. In April 2007 the chairman of the National
Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, who presided over the NIEs, was made to
go on National Public Radio and declare that the intelligence community
was reevaluating whether its judgment on how soon Iran might produce a
nuclear weapon needed to be revised. Fingar said the estimate "might change"
and vowed that the analysts were "serious about reexamining old evidence".
He even revealed the fact that the NIE on Iran was being delayed because of
the reexamination.
Although he didn't say so
explicitly, Fingar's statement left little doubt that the White House had
forced the reexamination of the analysts' judgment on the Iranian nuclear
program by holding the NIE hostage. How successful that hardball tactic was
in getting language more acceptable to Cheney is still not known, but there
were still differences of view on the issue in the draft NIE in October
2007, according to my sources.
These approaches to cooking the
intelligence on Iran were even more nefarious than Cheney's direct approach
on Iraq in 2002. They certainly gave Cheney language supporting his
belligerent policy that he could leak to the press and use to keep Congress
in line.
Vice President Dick Cheney is a
staunch defender of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, but
a 1994 video has now surfaced showing he opposed that very move after the
liberation of Kuwait, saying it would land America in a "quagmire."
In an April 15, 1994 interview
apparently with the American Enterprise Institute – recently posted on
YouTube
[Editor’s Note: Watch YouTube video here]– Cheney said he did not think
U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad in 1991, explaining:
"Because if we'd gone to
Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody
else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of
the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were
willing to invade Iraq.
"Once you got to Iraq and
took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you
going to put in its place?
"That's a very volatile
part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq,
you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it,
the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it - eastern Iraq -
the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years.
"In the north you've got
the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in
Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
"It's a quagmire if you go
that far and try to take over Iraq.
"The other thing was
casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our
job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed
in action, and for their families - it wasn't a cheap war.
"And the question for the
president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took
additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many
additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? "Our judgment was, not very
many, and I think we got it right."
Cheney helped President George
H.W. Bush direct the Gulf War, and Bush later came under criticism for not
seizing Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Now my question is: "Did he have a
Brain Lapse or did profit (say Haliburton) have a great deal to do with his
decision to recommend going into Iraq."
(HE RECEIVED ONE MILLION DOLLARS A
YEAR IN DEFERED COMPENSATION!!!)
Dick Cheney is known as a
neo-conservative and has always supported a Conservative Christian position
especially when it comes to Church and State issues. It is apparent
from the data collected, that the first amendment and other constitutional
articles are in danger from his past and future actions.
Upon calling his office in June
2002and asking about which religions he considers "real," we find that the
religion of Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Shintoism, and everything except
Christianity "..aren't "Real" religions." What is a real religion, Mr.
Cheney? What you have been practicing? Read the following and
remember: "By their Works may they be known."
(Remember it is best to
investigate on your own when looking at allegations about anyone.
Don't believe us, think for yourself and investigate for yourself!
And remember, the First Amendment Coalition does not represent any
political party nor do we recommend any political candidate, nor are we
involving ourselves in the political process. )
A recent Time Magazine
profile of Vice President Dick Cheney opened with the following anecdote:
When Richard Bruce Cheney was a student at Natrona County High School in
Casper, Wyo., he was a solid football player, senior-class president and an
above-average student. But he wasn't the star. That distinction
belonged to Lynne Vincent, Cheney's girlfriend and future wife. A
straight-A scholar, Lynne was elected Mustang Queen, the equivalent of most
popular girl. She was also a state-champion baton twirler, a big deal in
1950s Wyoming. To begin her routine, Lynne would set both ends of a
baton on fire and throw it in the air while her boyfriend stood
inconspicuously off to the side holding a coffee can filled with water.
When Lynne was finished with her
pyrotechnic act, she would pass her flaming baton to Cheney, who, while the
audience applauded and Lynne curtsied, would quietly douse the fires by
sticking each end of the baton in the coffee can.
Kind of like his current role, except the
baton is the world, and the coffee can might be filled with fuel oil.
Cheney was born in Casper in January 1941, so his brain crystallized into
its current form just before the 1960s introduced the idea of fun into
American life. Cheney's picture appears next to the definition of "dour" in
the dictionary. He dropped out of Yale in favor of attending the
prestigious University of Wyoming, where he majored in political science,
and he went on to earn his doctorate from the prestigious University of
Wisconsin. In your face, Yale!
His life in politics began during the Nixon
administration . When he arrived in Washington, D.C., then-Sen. Donald
Rumsfeld took Cheney under his wing. Rumsfeld was buddies with Gerald
Ford , and when Ford ascended to greatness, he took Rumsfeld along as chief
of staff. Rumsfeld took Cheney along, as deputy chief of staff.
When Rumsfeld took a stroll down the road
for his first stint as Secretary of Defense in 1975, Cheney rose to glory,
serving as Ford's chief of staff for more than a year, before the accidental
president was obliterated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.
After washing out of the White House,
Cheney adopted the same tactic as when he washed out of Yale he fled back to
Wyoming. In 1978, he ran for Congress and won handily. In
Congress, Cheney rose through the party ranks, endearing himself to Ronald
Reagan with his hawkish views on foreign policy and his fevered support for
the "Star Wars" missile defense system.
Cheney also distinguished himself as an
arch-conservative during these years, opposing everything from abortion to
gun control to Head Start and the Department of Education. If it
wasn't a laser-equipped satellite or a lunatic Nicaraguan commando, Cheney
wasn't going to waste federal funds on it.
Cheney voted to protect citizens'
constitutional right to own armor-piercing bullets. He voted against
the Clean Water Act. In fact, he voted against any bill that even
included both the words "corporate" and "pollution."
He voted to protect the sacred
constitutional right of a corporation to keep quiet about which local
communities they flooded with toxins that cause cancer and birth defects.
Unlike his constituents' wives, Cheney's baton-twirling spouse Lynne wasn't
just sitting around barefoot and pregnant all this time. Under Reagan,
Lynne Cheney served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
protecting innocent citizens against the depravations of public broadcasting
and from potentially confusing "propaganda" content, such as a documentary
suggesting Africans might have a few legit gripes about centuries of
colonialism, forced slavery and industrial exploitation.
After leaving the NEH, Lynne Cheney threw a
few flaming batons through the windows, demanding that the Endowment (and
the Endowment for the Arts) be completely dismantled rather than allowing
them to promote the sinister aims of the Clinton Administration and
defending Clarence Thomas' right to discuss long dongs with underlings.
When George Bush Sr. took office after the
1988 election, Bush settled on Cheney as Secretary of Defense, after his
first choice, John Tower, self-destructed in a haze of alcoholic booty
calls. Cheney helped lead the Gulf War , personally twisting the arm
of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia until the monarch allowed a massive contingent
of U.S. troops to set up shop in the kingdom. The resulting Arab
outrage was personified by Osama bin Laden , who used the presence of U.S.
troops on Saudi soil as the pretext for a declaration of jihad against the
West.
Once the Gulf War was won, Cheney gutted
the Defense Department, firing about a quarter of the military, cutting
billions in spending and even scaling back his beloved "Star Wars" program.
When Bush Sr. was drubbed by Bill Clinton
in 1992, Cheney decided it was high time he became a titan of industry.
With nothing but insider Washington credentials on his resume, he became
chairman and CEO of Halliburton Corp. in 1995. Cheney made millions
leading the massive oil industry construction company, while carefully
"tweaking" its accounting practices. A 1998 accounting change improved
the company's revenues by $234 million over the course of four years.
Prior to the change, Halliburton had booked sales when a client agreed to
pay for cost overruns and contract disputes. After the change, the company
took a guess at what they'd collect and booked the sales as a done deal.
Despite the fact that the practice looks and sounds a bit sleazy, it's
fairly commonplace in the industry. Of course, before Enron,
off-balance sheet financing was pretty commonplace too.
The practice was further complicated by the
fact that Halliburton was severely on the ropes at the time the change was
made. In addition to suddenly boosting the company's bottom line just
when Halliburton was going to get slaughtered on the stock market, Cheney
and crew "neglected" to inform the SEC about the change until more than a
year later.
When Cheney quit Halliburton to take the
vice presidential nomination in 2000, the company offered him a $20 million
going-away gift, characterized as a "retirement package" for his many (five)
years of service in the private sector. In a concession to public
outrage and concerns that Halliburton was buying access to the White House,
Cheney selflessly accepted only $13.6 million, indisputably preserving the
ethical integrity of the Executive Branch.
During the 2000 elections, Cheney's history of heart troubles
raised serious concerns among the electorate. Voters worried that if
Cheney died while in office, his running mate George W Bush might be left in
charge of the country. In a concession to these worries, Cheney had a
super high-tech pacemaker installed in 2001. Nevertheless, the heart
issue would continue to haunt Cheney.
When al Qaeda attacked the Pentagon and the
World Trade Center on September 11, the official version had the vice
president shuttled to an emergency bunker in the basement of the White
House. According to his own account, he was grabbed by a couple Secret
Service agents and carried to the basement, despite being fully conscious
and not at all having a heart attack.
While the President of the United States
jumped in a plane and began a daylong hiding spree, Cheney was running the
country from the White House basement, or so the story goes. In the
aftermath of the attacks, however, Cheney took a while to resurface.
The party line was very reasonable, pointing out that the vice president was
being kept in a secret location so that he could take over the country in
the event of another terrorist attack. But it was awfully tempting to
speculate that he had in fact suffered yet another heart attack while
watching the planes hit the Trade Centers.
Regardless of what actually happened,
Cheney gradually resurfaced, starting with short, limited appearances and
expanding back into a somewhat normal role, as American life returned to
somewhat normal.
Cheney was pissed, however. His old
hawkish ways rapidly reasserted themselves as the hunt for Osama bin Laden
began. Almost immediately after the attacks, Cheney and his old crony
Donald Rumsfeld (now Secretary of Defense) began beating the war drums for a
new invasion of Iraq , despite a complete absence of any evidence that
Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with September 11 or al Qaeda in
general.
Cheney got his way, eventually. After
a staged confrontation at the United Nations, where Secretary of State Colin
Powell was roped into making the improbable case for an invasion, the Bush
administration discarded all hopes of attracting allies (other than faithful
lapdog Britain ), despite Cheney's last-minute "can't we be friends" tour of
Europe. The U.S. went ahead with the invasion in spring 2003.
Cheney's enthusiasm for the war wasn't
solely driven by philosophy. His old buddies at Halliburton were
finally seeing a return on that $13.6 million (and the $1 million a year in
"deferred compensation" still being paid to supplement Cheney's measly
six-figure government salary). Halliburton's first quarterly earnings
report at the end of the short second Gulf War saw profits double from the
previous period (more than $20 million), a gain which news reports comically
characterized as coming "despite" the war.
Halliburton's construction and engineering
subsidiary was paid nearly $1 billion through government contracts
containing profit-guarantees, and various other contracts initiated since
the company's former CEO arrived in the White House. Halliburton built
military bases in the former Soviet Union and Turkey, and it made $33
million building jail cells for terrorists at Camp X-Ray . (In all fairness,
even these contracts don't make up for Cheney's major accomplishment as CEO,
an acquisition which is expected to cost Halliburton upwards of $4 billion
in asbestos liabilities.) Just before the Iraq war
started, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton an "emergency"
contract for oil fields reconstruction, which was awarded without the usual
government bidding process because of said "emergency" (and despite the fact
that the invasion wasn't on any particular timetable and the fact it had
been in the works for a year and a half).
The deal was authorized for up to $7
billion, but the Army didn't trash the country with sufficient enthusiasm to
make the whole amount, and the actual size of the deal is now estimated at
$600 million (assuming Halliburton survives the lawsuits from competitors
who inexplicably feel that something fishy was going on).
As though this were normal!
I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before
the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year
career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us
for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my
privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior
policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's
office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to
come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an
excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior
officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus,
there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought
of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is
extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that
inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Cheney got into the operational
side of intelligence as well. Reports in late 2001 that Iraq had tried to
acquire uranium from Niger stirred such intense interest that his office let
it be known he wanted them checked out. So, with the CIA as facilitator, a
retired U.S. ambassador was dispatched to Niger in February 2002 to
investigate. He found nothing to substantiate the report and lots to call it
into question. There the matter rested--until last summer, after the Bush
administration made the decision for war in Iraq.
Cheney, in a speech on Aug. 26,
2002, claimed that Saddam Hussein had "resumed his effort to acquire nuclear
weapons."
At the time, CIA analysts were
involved in a knock-down, drag-out argument with the Pentagon on this very
point. Most of the nuclear engineers at the CIA, and virtually all
scientists at U.S. government laboratories and the International Atomic
Energy Agency, found no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted its
nuclear weapons program.
But the vice president had spoken.
Sad to say, those in charge of the draft National Intelligence Estimate took
their cue and stated, falsely, that "most analysts assess Iraq is
reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
Smoke was blown about aluminum
tubes sought by Iraq that, it turns out, were for conventional weapons
programs. The rest amounted to things like Hussein's frequent meetings with
nuclear scientists and Iraq's foot-dragging in providing information to U.N.
inspectors.
Not much heed was paid to the fact
that Hussein's son-in-law, who supervised Iraq's nuclear program before he
defected in 1995, had told interrogators that Iraq's nuclear
capability--save the blueprints--had been destroyed in 1991 at his order.
(Documents given to the United States this week confirm that. The Iraqi
scientists who provided them added that, even though the blueprints would
have given Iraq a head start, no order was given to restart the program; and
even had such an order been given, Iraq would still have been years away
from producing a nuclear weapon.)
In sum, the evidence presented in
last September's intelligence estimate fell far short of what was required
to support Cheney's claim that Iraq was on the road to a nuclear weapon.
Something scarier had to be produced, and quickly, if Congress was to be
persuaded to authorize war. And so the decision was made to dust off the
uranium-from-Niger canard.
The White House
calculated--correctly--that before anyone would make an issue of the fact
that this key piece of "intelligence" was based on a forgery, Congress would
vote yes. The war could then be waged and won. In recent weeks,
administration officials have begun spreading the word that Cheney was never
told the Iraq-Niger story was based on a forgery. I asked a senior official
who recently served at the National Security Council if he thought that was
possible. He pointed out that rigorous NSC procedures call for a very
specific response to all vice presidential questions and added that "the
fact that Cheney's office had originally asked that the Iraq-Niger report be
checked out makes it inconceivable that his office would not have been
informed of the results."
Did the president himself know
that the information used to secure congressional approval for war was based
on a forgery? We don't know. But which would be worse--that he knew or that
he didn't?
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst
from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior
policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is
co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach
ministry in Washington. He can be reached at:
mcgovern@counterpunch.org.
For information on all
individuals and organizations listed in this website, or the name of a
contact person in your area that can give you further information on the
Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast, or the First Amendment
Coalition, contact us at
rfcse@hotmail.comLet us hear from you!
Or, you can write to us at: RFCSE, P.O. Box 673206, Marietta, GA
30006-0006
Excerpts
from a interview of Jane Mayer by Keith Olbermann from Crooks and Liars
Tuesday Aug 25, 2009 6:00pm
