So not only did he craft the policy, he lobbied members of Congress about it.
When do we see him in the dock?
The rule of law has to stand for something.
Category: Dick Cheney
Signs of the Apocalypse
Richard Bruce Cheney has admitted that he was wrong:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.
Cheney said today that information by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still, Cheney said a longstanding relationship existed between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Not only is he admitting error, he is doing so on a signature issue.
I have no clue as to what is going on. First, he embarks on his “human snarl tour,” in which he says that he is right about everything, and now he is backing off of his biggest lie.
Either there are wheels within wheels beyond my understanding, or he’s throwing small strokes, and I cannot figure out which.
What Josh Said
I don’t have much to say on Obama’s speech, I’ve only read the transcript, and Obama needs to be watch, but Josh Marshal finds the reality on Richard Bruce Cheney when suggests that Cheney is at best a figure of mockery and derision:
This is someone who not only organized and seemingly directed a policy of state-sponsored torture. He did it in large part to get people to admit to crankish conspiracy theories he got taken in by by a crew of think-tank jockeys in DC whose theories most even half way sensible people treated as punch lines of jokes. So it’s Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks.
This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure — and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain’t Shakespearean.
Indeed.
Not Shocking: Habits are Hard to Break
and paying bonuses to KBR for substandard work that killed soldiers was SOP when Halliburton owned them, because they were still paying bribes deferred compensation to him, and organizational inertia took over, even after their shoddy electrical work killed American GIs.
Signs of the Apocalypse
It’s by Lanny Davis, a Washington, DC insider, and the guy who accused people supporting Ned Lamont in 2006 against Joe Lieberman of “Liberal McCarthyism“, and he is calling for the criminal prosecution of Dick Cheney for authorizing torture:
I have agreed with President Obama on the need to look forward, not backward.
But … I have changed my mind about the need to indict former Vice President Dick Cheney for complicity in illegal torture.
…
Even more, they seem to be an in-your-face dare by Mr. Cheney to the U.S. criminal justice system: “I am Dick Cheney, I approved violations of the law in the name of the war on terror, and what are you going to do about it?”
It reminds me of Gary Hart’s reaction in the early days of his 1988 presidential campaign to the rumors of his womanizing. …..
So as to Mr. Cheney: I think it is time to take him up on his implicit dare and indict him for violating the 1994 federal law against torture.
This is as big a Beltway Blowhard™ as they come, and he called for Dick Cheney to be prosecuted, and got it published in the Moonie Times (Link is to The Hill, which republished it.
I don’t think that he is suggesting this out of any real moral imperative, it’s just that he feels that Dick Cheney is, to paraphrase Bull Durham, “Calling the umpire a called the guy a c$#@sucker,” which offends his genteel Beltway sensibilities.
The Smoking Gun For Dick Cheney
And no, this is not from the Smoking Gun, it’s from The Daily Beast, and it’s a big one.
Specifically, Robert Windrem, formerly a senior investigative producer with NBC News, has uncovered information that the office of the Vice President specifically requested that the a senior Iraqi official be waterboarded so as to extract a statement that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in league and cooperating on terrorism:
At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.
…
In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”
Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case. (The Daily Beast placed a call to Cheney’s office and will post a response if we get one.)
(emphasis mine)
This isn’t about a ticking time bomb. This isn’t about ongoing plans. This is a request to torture someone until they say something that benefits you politically.
Can we put him on trial now?
Yes, I know that OVP does not necessarily equal Dick Cheney, but we also know that his office would not make such a request without his tacit or explicit approval.
Completely Not Surprised
It turns out that KBR contracts constitute the “vast majority” of fraud referrals in Iraq.
To refresh your memory, it used to be a part of Halliburton, which paid Dick Cheney before, and during, his stint as Vice President.
Hoocoocanode?
Ross Douthat is a F$#@ing Moron
So, the latest New York Times OP/ED page 
conservative affirmative action case has his debut editorial for the paper, and what is his trenchant analysis?
It’s that the Republicans should have nominated Richard Milhaus Cheney as their presidential nominee in 2008.
I guess that’s because Cheney is such a photogenic and friendly dude, whether talking about his penis (top picture), or simply snarling at the American public (bottom).
Of course this is not really what the author believes. He wanted Cheney to run because he would have been beaten like a baby seal while showing how the right wing orthodoxy needs to be repackaged: It’s simply link bait, as Froomkin notes.
He wants people to read him, so Douthat says something outrageous, and finishes with, “And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.”
No. Simply put, he is being a tool to get buzz, and it increasingly appears that the Republican Neocons are simply some sort of truly subversive performance art group.
I miss William Safire, who while right wing, had a brain, and could actually string together words in an attractive way.
Between Tierney, Kristol, and now Douthat, it appears that the sure sign that you are really, really, stupid is getting a regular Times OP/ED slot.
Yes, I know, I am really describing him being an asshole, not stupid, but his argument boils down to, “We should have nominated Dick Cheney, and we would have lost much better.”
That’s Doug “The Stupidest Motherf^%$er on the Planet” Feith stupid, and the New York Times already has a surfeit of stupid among their regular columnists, with Maureen Dowd, who covers politics like she is a junior high schooler dissing a classmates choice in shoes.
Still it appears that but it appears that Andrew Rosenthal, the Editorial Page Editor, feels that they need some more stupid.
Living in Bizarro* World
Because Dick Cheney is demanding that more torture memos be declassified, because his memos, or at least the ones that he wants released, show that torture worked, and got important information.
Not surprising, as Cheney is a master of bureaucratic infighting and the CYA memo
I agree with Dan Froomkin when he says, “Call Cheney’s bluff,” I also think that if he wants memos releases, they should be reports from the agents in place, and not self serving memos from the OVP.
*If you do not know what Bizarro World is, go here, or better yet, read some classic Superman® comic books….Bizarro, and Superman® are a part of basic American cultural literacy.
Reviewing Dick Cheney’s Security Clearance
So I was reading this account of a Seymour Hersh interview on Fresh Air in which he says that Cheney loyalists have been “burrowed” into sensitive government positions, and continue to feed him information:
“I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay-behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve been driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay-behind that you can continue to have contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay-behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.”
(Audio at bottom)
And the first thing that went through my head was, “People from the NSA are talking to a guy who orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent?”
Then I realized that the real question was, “Why does Richard Bruce Cheney still have a security clearance?”
Based on my reading of the entire Lewis “Scooter” Libby case, it’s clear that Patrick Fitzgerald had concerns that Cheney was aware of the leaks on some level, though he lacked any hard evidence (missing emails anyone?) to go any further.
That being said, a security clearance is not a legal procedure, it’s an administrative procedure, and to a significant degree, it is necessary for the holder of this clearance to show that they not a security risk, either intentionally or through negligence.
There is also an additional duty to report any credible potential security violations to the appropriate authorities.
This is a lower standard of proof than, for example, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, or obstruction of justice statutes.
There is therefore a significant concern that Dick Cheney violated the terms of his clearance, and pending an investigation, his clearance should be suspended pending an investigation.
Unlike a government employee whose livelihood is dependent on having a clearance, this should not provide an undue burden, and a hearing, with witnesses, including Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Mr. Cheney, testifying under oath, would be an appropriate venue to decide whether or not he was either deliberately or negligently cavalier with sensitive intelligence data.
Of course, if Mssrs Cheney or Libby were to make untrue statements in the process of giving their testimony, that would be a matter for the federal prosecutors.
Strange Days: Quoting Andrew Sullivan Again
He makes the point that Dick Cheney is confessing to war crimes in the process of justifying his role in committing them.
Sullivan is correct. Dick Cheney’s justification of his own actions, and his condemnation of Barack Obama’s position, make it clear that he knowingly broke both US and international law.
National Archives to Get Boxes of Poo from Dick Cheney
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has ruled that Dick Cheney has the power to decide which of his papers are transferred to the national archives:
The Justice Department provided what U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called “constantly shifting arguments” in the case, but, she said, “That confusion is not evidence” that would undermine the sworn deposition of Claire M. O’Donnell, a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping and other administrative tasks.
“The Court expects,” she said, that White House officials “will, in good faith, comply with the representations that their officials have made, by way of testimony, in this case.” As a result, she granted summary judgment on the White House’s behalf and lifted a five-month-old injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney’s records.
And I’m Jamie Lee Curtis.
One of the plaintiffs, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said he remains worried that “when the Archives goes to open Cheney’s papers, they are going to find empty boxes.”
Nope, they want some weight there, and an empty box is not his style. My guess is that Cheney threw out his back squatting over his document boxes and taking a dump in them.
Because Cheney is not leaving without a hearty f#@k you to everyone.
Let Dick Cheney Live
Because I want him to spend the next 25 years in a cage, where tourists can throw rotten fruit at him.
He was taken to hospital with a heart rhythm problem, though that appears to have been corrected.
Cheney on Peace Mission? That’s Like a Prostitute On a Chastity Mission
I swear, Bush and His Evil Minions™ exceed my wildest dreams of satire.
No oiffense to the good folks at The Onion, but this exceeds everyone’s capacity for satire.
Gaaahhh!!
I Need to Send Dick Cheney a Hard Hat
But first, I have to magnetize it.
U.S. Spy Satellite, Power Gone, May Hit Earth – New York Times
Just a second, the Secret Service is knocking at my door.