California Eye » Dick Cheney

CIA withheld info from Congress for 8 years

Featheriver — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:21:30 +0000

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday. [New York Times]

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

Democrats and Lobbyists and Money

Featheriver — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:38:30 +0000

I joined working in the Obama Presidential campaign when I learned he eschewed taking campaign contributions from lobbyists. I have viewed lobbyists as corporate agents used to retain corporate ownership of the United States Congress. Bluntly, big corporations own Congress by using lobbyists to make campaign contributions to help re-elect Senators and Congressmen/women to office who help the corporations make more money.

I’ve posted blogs in the past stating that we ordinary people will have to buy back Congress so that Congress will have to represent us ordinary mortals rather than Corporate America.

In today’s Politico is an article that troubles me. I am troubled by Democrats looking for ways around Obama’s avoidance of lobbyist contributions.

Tonight there is a Democratic fundraiser scheduled to take place at some hotel. They call it an Issues Conference. It is an invitation only event—costs $5,000 a head to go. (You do have $5,000 laying around don’t you? But do you have an invitation?) I’m sure lobbyists have invitations and the $5,000 admission. The Obama rule is that no money be taken from lobbyists at tonight’s Conference. So the Democrats won’t take lobbyists’ money tonight. But Friday morning, after Obama is gone, the lobbyists can line up with their campaign contributions in hand to pass over to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who will willingly accept those campaign contributions. See the following quote from Politico:

Please note that the Friday Issues Conference is NOT subject to lobbyist restrictions, though the event is intended for personal contributions only,” a finance official from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wrote in an e-mail sent to lobbyists Tuesday and obtained by POLITICO, bolding the entire sentence to underscore the clarification. “The Issues Conference is separate from the DSCC/DCCC events with President Obama.”

Democratic Senators and Congressmen/women are just as susceptible to accepting corporate contributions as are Republicans. Common sense tells you that those that accept the money will see that those that gave the money get the red-carpeted treatment.

We ordinary Democrats will take a second seat while corporate American continues on with business as usual.

There has got to be a better way to finance political campaigns. Money is the mother’s milk of politics. Obama’s presidential campaign demonstrated that us ordinary people can have our voices heard with $5, $10, $20 campaign contributions so long as we remain engaged and make such contributions by the thousands. Democratic and Republican Senators and Congressmen/women need to learn that lesson and gear their campaigns to appeal to the ordinary voter for their contributions and support rather than the wealthy corporations.

I don’t expect that to happen. But I think it should. Democratic politicians are following the same old path which leads to corruption as we saw during the Bush-Cheney regime. We never learn.

Photos of rape and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners

Featheriver — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:24:41 +0000

LONDON (Reuters) – Photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse which U.S. President Barack Obama does not want released include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Thursday.

U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba, now retired, said:

“These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.”

Taguba said he supported Obama’s decision not to release them, even though Obama had previously pledged to disclose all images relating to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others are said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

The photographs relate to 400 alleged cases of abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons between 2001 and 2005.

And Bush-Cheney look like they’re going to get away with it.

Cheney defends torture policy

Featheriver — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:07:55 +0000

Former vice-President Dick Cheney, today, dismissed critics who said the policy amounted to the torture of suspected terrorists, Cheney said the methods were “legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.” He claims President Obama has weakened the country’s ability to combat al Qaeda and other extremists by eliminating them. [CNN]

The former vice president said U.S. intelligence officers “were trying to prevent future killings” and did not commit torture. But he defended the use of “waterboarding,” which the United States has prosecuted as torture in the past, as a valuable tool used on three top al Qaeda figures.

“In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists,” he said.

Cheney asserted the acts were constitutional. He criticized Obama for closing Guantanamo.

Same old stuff from Cheney.

Olbermann’s Special Comment on Cheney

Featheriver — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:36:58 +0000

Olbermann\’s Special Comment on Dick Cheney

Here is the transcript text of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s speech today. I haven’t been successful in putting up the video:

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment about Mr. Cheney’s speech. Neurotic. Paranoid. False to fact and false to reason. Forever self-rationalizing. His inner rage at his own impotence and failure dripping from every word and as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane, as any terrorist.

The former vice president has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.
The delusional claims he has made this day could be proved by documentation and first-hand testimony to be the literal truth, and still he himself would be wrong, because the America he sought to impose upon the world and upon its own citizens, the dark hateful place of Dick Cheney’s own soul, the place he to this hour defends and to this day prefers, is a repudiation of all that our ancestors, all that for which our brave troops of 200 years ago and two minutes ago, have sacrificed and fought.

I do have to congratulate you, Sir. No man living or dead could have passed the buck more often than you did in 35 minutes this morning. It’s not your fault we water-boarded people, you said. It isn’t torture, you said, even though it is based on 111 years of American military prosecutions. It was in the Constitution that you could do it, even if our laws told you, you could not. It was in the language of the 2001 military authorization you force-fed the Congress that you could do it, even if our international treaties told you, you could not.

It produced invaluable information, you said, even though the first-hand witnesses, the interrogators of these beasts, said the information preceded the torture and ended when it began. It was authorized, you said, by careful legal opinion, even though the legal opinions were dictated by you and your cronies, and, oh by the way, the torture began before the legal opinions were even written. It was authorized, you said, and you imply even if it really wasn’t, it was done to “only detainees of the highest intelligence value.”

It was more necessary, you said, because of the revelation of another program by the real villains, the New York Times, even though that revelation was possible because the program was detailed on the front page of the website of a defense department sub-contractor. It was all the fault of your predecessors, you said, who tried to treat terror as a “law enforcement problem,” before you came to office and rode to the rescue… after you totally ignored terrorism for the first 20 percent of your first term and the worst attack on this nation in its history unfolded on your watch.

“9/11 caused everyone to take a serious second look at threats that had been gathering for awhile,” you said today, “and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated.” Gee, thanks for being motivated, by the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans, to go so far as to “take a serious second look.” And thank you, Sir, for admitting, obviously inadvertently, that you did not take a serious first look in the seven months and 23 days between your inauguration and 9/11.

For that attack, Sir, you are culpable, morally, ethically. At best you were guilty of malfeasance and eternally-lasting stupidity. At worst, Sir, in the deaths of 9/11, you are negligent. The circular logic, and the self-righteous sophistry, falls from a copy of Mr. Cheney’s speech like bugs from a book on a moldy shelf. He still believes in “dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.” He still assumes everyone we captured is guilty without charge or trial, but that to prosecute law-breaking by government officials is “to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors.”

And most sleazy of all, while calling the CIA torturers “honorable,” he insists the grunts at Abu Ghraib were “a few sadistic prison guards (who) abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency” even though — and maybe he doesn’t know we know this — even though there is documentary proof that those guards were acting on orders originating in the office of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

It is, in short, madness.Madness, Sir. Mr. Cheney, your speech was almost entirely about you. There are only five or six other people even mentioned, and only two quoted at any length. And why would you have quoted, as you did, the man who said this. “I know that this program saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.”

As you know, Sir, you are quoting former CIA Director George Tenet. That would be the George Tenet who told Congress, on February 11th, 2003, quote: “Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of al-Qaida.” Mr. Tenet then went into elaborate detail about the Iraq/al-Qaida connection. None of it was true.
This is your source. As he was your boss’s source.

“George, how confident are you?” President Bush asked Tenet about Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, just before the Iraq war, according to Bob Woodward’s book “Plan Of Attack.” “Don’t worry,” Tenet answered. “It’s a slam-dunk.” That is your independent authority on how well torture worked. Next time you see him, Mr. Cheney, you might as well ask Mr. Tenet if he thinks he is Napoleon. I don’t want to know who you think you are:
“…those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations,” you concluded. “And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.”

You saved no one, Sir. If the classified documents you seek released really did detail plots other than those manufactured by drowning men in order to get it to stop, or if they truly did note plans beyond the laughable ones you and President Bush already revealed — hijackers without passports targeting a building whose name Mr. Bush couldn’t remember, clowns who thought they could destroy airports by dropping matches in fuel pipelines 30 miles away, men who planned to attack a military base dressed as Pizza delivery boys forgetting that every man there was armed, and today: the four would-be Synagogue bombers, one of whom turns out to keep bottles of urine in his apartment, and to be on schizophrenia medicine.

If those documents contained anything of value… you would have leaked them already! As you leaked those revenge fantasies of the Library Tower and the JFK Bomber, and the Fort Dix Six. “When they (terrorists) see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. “Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.”

The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of blind rage replacing essential cold logic.The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of judgment suspended, in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of moral force supplanted by violence and revenge fantasies. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of Dick Cheney. And yet, still, ceaselessly, indefatigably, you moralize and lie to us.

“I might add,” someone said today, “that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about ‘values.’” Very apt. The quote is from your speech. Your speech, which was at essence, about your fantasy that you and Mr. Bush were not negligent. About your pig-headed certainty first that these attacks were impossible, then that they were a good excuse for a war you had already planned in Iraq, and finally that they were to be imminently repeated and only you knew whence the next threat would next come.

You saved no one, Mr. Cheney. All you did was help kill Americans. You were negligent before 9/11. Your response to your complicity by omission on 9/11, was panic, and shame, and insanity, and lying this country into a war that did nothing but kill 4,299 more of us. We will take no further instruction from you, Sir. Let me again quote Oliver Cromwell to you, Mr. Cheney: You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Cheney answers Obama on National Security

Featheriver — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:17:07 +0000

George W. Bush’s Library

Featheriver — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:37:00 +0000

Cartoon by Bob Englehart