LinkBlog: dick+cheney

Feingold, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and new Democrat Arlen Specter (Pa.) had the constitutional courage to oppose the Judiciary Committee bill eventually going to the floor that with few exceptions, leaves the Patriot Act intact. I'll be reporting on the crucial fight to bring the Bill of Rights back into the Patriot Act as Senate and House versions merge into a law to be signed by Obama as he continues the Bush-Cheney legacy. It was Feingold who, in October 2001, was the only member of the Senate to vote against the original Patriot Act as, on the floor, he accurately predicted our greatly weakened privacy, due process and other rights since then.

This would have violated both Fourth Amendment guarantees against search and seizure without probable cause and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it illegal to use the military for law enforcement. Despite those prohibitions, Cheney argued that the president did have the power to use the military on US soil, citing an October 23, 2001 Justice Department memorandum co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that presidential power extended to the domestic use of the military as long as it served a national security purpose. The Lackawanna Six were a group of young Yememi-Americans who had attended an al Qaeda training camp in 2001. They were arrested in September 2002, and President Bush bragged of having broken their “cell” in his January 2003 State of the Union address. However, an investigation by Salon failed to turn up any evidence that they were actually a “sleeper cell” or that they had been planning any kind of violent attack. Most of them were convicted merely of providing material aid to terrorists.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld each have made curious 9-11 statements on camera that are well worth pondering. Two particular video clips (see links at bottom) have some observers saying that these comments constitute 9-11 “blurt outs” suggesting inside knowledge of what actually happened on 9-11—Freudian slips, if you will. While this phenomenon of slippery lips regarding 9-11 is not altogether new, Cheney’s statement was on Mother’s Day on national television, a day when many moms remember their soldier-sons who died in the war on terror inspired by 9-11.

So no international tribunals or foreign countries have any power to investigate or prosecute American officials for war crimes (even when those war crimes are against citizens of those countries and/or committed within their borders). And, American political officials must also not be prosecuted inside the U.S., by American courts. "Nobody is entitled" to do that either, because "attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery." The implication of their argument -- which is now the conventional Beltway view -- is too obvious to require much elaboration. If our political leaders can't be held accountable for their war crimes and other serious felonies in foreign countries or international tribunals, and must never be held accountable in the U.S. either (because to do so is to "pour acid into our democratic machinery"), then it means that American political officials (in contrast to most other leaders) are completely and explicitly exempt from, placed above, the rule of law. That conclusion is compelled from their premises.

Cheney is charged with engaging in an organized criminal activity related to the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds financial interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies. Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment. The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons. Gonzales' attorney, George Terwilliger III, said in a written statement, "This is obviously a bogus charge on its face, as any good prosecutor can recognize." He said he hoped Texas authorities would take steps to stop "this abuse of the criminal justice system."

According to a written statement provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month and released on Wednesday by committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), officials were told that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation measures" routinely used in a survival training program for US soldiers would not cause "significant" harm if used on prisoners. Rice's statement is the first acknowledgment of those meetings by any of the officials involved. Rice did not name the other officials who were present, but reports last spring based on anonymous sources mentioned Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Which raises three questions for me:

Some news is just hard to comment on... I mean, sure, war is brutal business. And by war I mean... well, invading Iraq in 2003, for instance. But even if the Russians acted as brutally in Georgia as Mr Cheney says - why would the Vice President for Torture have a problem with that?

Oliver North, who worked on COG planning with Rumsfeld and Cheney in the 1980s, was asked in the Iran-Contra Hearings about his work on an emergency plan “that would suspend the American constitution.” Democratic Senator Inouye, who was presiding, pounded his gavel and interjected that this was a “highly sensitive and classified matter,” not to be dealt with in an open hearing.[7] Congress has never discussed COG plans publicly since that time.

A forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was ordered on White House stationery and probably came from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a new transcript of a conversation with the Central Intelligence Agency's former Deputy Chief of Clandestine Operations Robert Richer. The transcript was posted Friday by author Ron Suskind of an interview conducted in June. It comes on the heels of denials by both the White House and Richer of a claim Suskind made in his new book, The Way of The World. The book was leaked to Politico's Mike Allen on Monday, and released Tuesday.

Keith Olbermann was the only major U.S. media source to cover this huge story.

“There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war,” Hersh explained. “The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.” Given that only a few weeks ago Hersh’s exclusive story concerning the vamping up of covert U.S. military activity inside Iran made headlines everywhere, in every major publication and outlet, it begs the question where are they now for an even bigger story? The Financial Times even carries a story today about how Hersh is “The Last Great American Reporter”, yet the lengthy piece contains no mention of his latest revelations.

You may have heard that the Energy Task Force chaired by Dick Cheney prior to 9/11 collected maps of Iraqi oil, Saudi and United Arab Emerates fields and potential suitors for that oil. And you might have heard that the oil bigs attended the Task Force meetings. But you probably haven't heard that a secret document written by the National Security Council (NSC) on February 3, 2001 directed NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy:

Taken singly, any one of these stories would be startling and perhaps inexplicable if one believes the official story that America was attacked by an outside force on 9/11. Taken together, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the understanding of that day portrayed in the controlled corporate media is vastly distorted. By collecting this data into an easily digestible YouTube documentary format, these three videos make excellent tools for activists seeking to alert others to some of the many troubling unanswered questions about the defining political event of our age.

The impending invasion of Iran has been on the grapevine for the past three summers running and many are beginning to fear that the "boy who cried wolf" mentality is starting to discredit those who repeatedly warn of the coming attack. However, rhetoric has notably heated in the past few months. During Bush's recent visit to Israel, an Israeli official claimed that a senior member in Bush's entourage had stated in a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had resolved to attack Iran before they left office.

Is it possible that facing of a 55-year sentence, Ms. Palfrey was going to do some talking, in hopes of a reduced sentence? Were some persons concerned that an angry or vindictive Palfrey might write tell-all?

REPORTER: Could you tell us what you think of the value of appearing together and how you would answer those critics? PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, first of all, look, I mean, if we had something to hide, we wouldn't have met with them in the first place. I came away good about the session, because I wanted them to know, you know, how I set strategy, how we run the White House, how we deal with threats. The vice president answered a lot of their questions, answered all their questions. And I think it was important for them to see our body language as well, how we work together.

Excuse me, Mr. Emperor, Sir, but ... You can stifle our voices in the short run. But all tyrannical governments eventually end, and the tyrants are eventually thrown in jail or forced to flee.

Last night, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) took to the House floor to urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings into Vice President Cheney for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Wexler, who has already acquired nearly 190,000 supporters through his website, explained his next steps:

"Arson might seem a bit far-fetched to folks outside the Beltway, but it would not be the first time a small conflagration was planned by a White House official," writes Al Kamen Friday in his "In The Loop" column. "We recall that Watergate burglary mastermind G. Gordon Liddy plotted firebombing the Brookings Institution -- 'as a diversion,' he writes in his memoirs -- to get into the security vault and steal Daniel Ellsberg's Vietnam War papers."

You might even know that Cheney was one of the founders of the Project for a New American Century. The Project for a New American Century, in turn, called for a new American empire well before 9/11, and lamented that, without a "catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor", transformation of America into an empire would be very slow. But you may not know that -- in the 70's -- Cheney was instrumental in generating fake intelligence exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to undermine coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which conveniently justified huge amounts of cold war spending. See also this article. This scheme foreshadowed Mr. Cheney's role in generating fake intelligence in Iraq by 30 years.

Blue Gal posted Rep. Robert Wexler’s video yesterday, asking for citizens to sign the petition on his website in support of impeachment hearings for Vice President, Dick Cheney. Wexler was hoping to get 50,000 signatures and it didn’t take long — it took just 24 hours to meet his goal and the signatures are still rolling in. If you haven’t signed the petition yet, you can find it here.

As Ralph Nader describes it, Olver and the rest of Congress are afraid that -- if Bush or Cheney are impeached -- they might declare martial law and suspend the 2008 elections. How is Congress failing to remove Bush and Cheney from office based upon such fears any different from Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler so Hitler would not attack?

Take a few minutes to watch this important video. Nader reveals comments by Massachusetts Rep. Olver explaining why he can't push for impeachment... indeed, "Things are a lot worse than we thought."

Dick Cheney just spent a day shooting up pen-raised birds. Some hunters liken the sport -- killing tame animals that offer no resistance -- to having sex with a blow-up doll.

Massive evidence has come to our attention which shows that the backers, controllers, and allies of Vice President Dick Cheney are determined to orchestrate and manufacture a new 9/11 terror incident, and/or a new Gulf of Tonkin war provocation over the coming weeks and months. Such events would be used by the Bush administration as a pretext for launching an aggressive war against Iran, quite possibly with nuclear weapons, and for imposing a regime of martial law here in the United States. We call on the House of Representatives to proceed immediately to the impeachment of Cheney, as an urgent measure for avoiding a wider and more catastrophic war. Once impeachment has begun, it will be easier for loyal and patriotic military officers to refuse illegal orders coming from the Cheney faction. We solemnly warn the people of the world that any terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction taking place inside the United States or elsewhere in the immediate future must be considered the prima facie responsibility of the Cheney faction. We urge responsible political leaders everywhere to begin at once to inoculate the public opinion of their countries against such a threatened false flag terror operation.

I think we can expect to see the "capture" of a truckload of people identified as fighters, carrying weapons – perhaps some of those 190,000 weapons conveniently misplaced by the Pentagon in Iraq –coming over from Iran very soon. (Can you say "Gleiwitz radio station"?) Or some similar incident to "confirm" direct Quds involvement in killing American soldiers.

I wish more people in this country would really revere the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment. But Cheney and Bush themselves are intolerant of the freedoms that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights. In my book, “You Have No Rights,” I tell the story of a guy named Steve Howards who was walking through Beaver Creek, Colo., an open-air mall there. Of all people, Dick Cheney is there, shaking hands. And Steve Howards goes up to the vice president, about three feet away, and says, “Mr. Vice President, I think your policy in Iraq is reprehensible.” ... And then he walked away. But the Secret Service approached him 10 minutes later and said, “Did you assault the vice president of the United States?” Steve Howards said, “No, I was just expressing my First Amendment rights.” And they responded, “No, you assaulted the vice president of the United States. You’re under arrest.”

Suddenly, in the second week of February, 2007, Scooter Libby decided to lie down and let the steamroller of the criminal justice system roll all over him. He wouldn’t ask Rove or Cheney to testify. He wouldn’t call other witnesses from within the White House. His lawyer wasn’t going to bring up the Cheney memo again. Libby wouldn’t even take the stand in his own defense. And it all happened just about the time Rove and Cheney would have been forced to testify in court under oath. Coincidence or conspiracy?

Mineta is on video testifying before the 9/11 Commission, though it was omitted in their final report. He told Lee Hamilton: “During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President…the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!?"

While NSPD 51 has the appearances of a domestic national security decision, it is, nonetheless, an integral part of US foreign policy. It belongs to a longstanding military national security agenda. Were NSPD 51 to be invoked, Vice President Dick Cheney, who constitutes the real power behind the Executive, would essentially assume de facto dictatorial powers, circumventing both the US Congress and the Judiciary, while continuing to use President George W. Bush as a proxy figurehead.

Libby's crime was obstructing an investigation that appeared to be headed for Cheney and possibly Bush. The proper course of action for Congress, in the face of Bush commuting Libby's sentence, is to begin impeachment hearings against Cheney and then Bush. With the White House openly disobeying a stack of subpoenas, it is finally clear that impeachment is the only possible check on Bush-Cheney power remaining to Congress. In fact, in the wake of Bush's Scooter commuting, the following people all released statements condemning Bush's action and recommending that Congress and the public do absolutely nothing about it: Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson. In contrast, Joe Biden recommended that the public phone the White House and complain. That ought to show them!

Perhaps the real reason behind the Libby decision is that fact that the Bush administration knows full well that Libby took the rap for his criminal masters. Back in March a spokesman for the jury that convicted Libby told reporters immediately afterward that many felt sympathy for him and believed he was only the "fall guy." Denis Collins said that "a number of times" they asked themselves, "what is HE doing here? Where is Rove and all these other guys....I'm not saying we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of. It seemed like he was, as Mr. Wells [his lawyer] put it, he was the fall guy."

Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.” As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President's executive order.

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part. The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

Cheney delivered the remarks in the context of moral and ethical lessons that the graduating cadets at West Point had learned in the course of their study. "You have lived by a code of honor, and internalized that code as West Point men and women always do," he said. "As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for."

In this hour-long lecture recorded at the Arizona 9/11 Accountability Conference on February 25th, 2007, researcher Peter Dale Scott presents a host of contradicting accounts describing the actions of Vice President Cheney on the morning of 9/11, and how the 9/11 Commission cherry-picked its way through this minefield of contradictions, including contradictions by the Vice President himself!

When faced with evidence that elements of our own government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, millions of Americans smugly respond that the Bush administration was too incompetent to have done it. A common statement is "They're too incompetent to even win a war against a bunch of poorly-armed people; how could they have pulled off 9/11?" Bush certainly acts like a bumbler and a good old boy. Cheney accidentally shot his hunting buddy. And Rumsfeld -- Secretary of Defense when 9/11 occurred -- apparently mangled the planning of the war in Iraq. Right? Not so fast. Are Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld really that incompetent?

The poll from InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion asked a sample of 621 Americans, "Would you favor or oppose the impeachment by Congress of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney?" A total of 39% who answered said they favored impeachment, according to Towery. In opposition were 55% of respondents, with 6% answering undecided or don't know. There was a 4% margin of error.

While Speaker Pelosi had declared impeachment “off the table,” the Democratic Party rank-and-file has demonstrated its commitment to putting the issue “on” the table. And it’s no longer just the rank-and-file: Even among the members of the convention’s Resolutions Committee (appointed by the California Party chair), the impeachment resolution was the top vote-getter (tied with one other resolution).

Appearing on MSNBC's Tucker Carlson Show, Ray McGovern who served in the CIA for twenty-seven years, said, "the [forged] memo leads right back to the doorstep of the Vice President of the United States." According to McGovern, former CIA Director George Tenet told his "coterie of malleable managers" at the CIA to create a National Intelligence Estimate "to the terms of reference of Dick Cheney's speech of August 26, 2002, where Dick Cheney said for the first time Saddam Hussein could have a nuclear weapon in a year, he's got all kinds of chemical, he's got all kinds of biological weapons."

That preceding the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the vice president was fully informed that no legitimate evidence existed of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The vice president pressured the intelligence community to change their findings to enable the deception of the citizens and the Congress of the United States. That in this the vice president subverted the national security interests of the United States by setting the stage for the loss of more than 3,300 United States service members and the loss of 650,000 Iraqi citizens since the United States invasion; the loss of approximately $500 billion in war costs, which has increased our federal debt; the loss of military readiness within the United States armed services, through an overextension and lack of training and lack of equipment; and the loss of United States credibility in the world affairs and decades of likely blowback created by the invasion of Iraq.

Backers hope the resolution -- and similar measures proposed in a handful of other states -- will send a clear message to the White House.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), the former mayor of Cleveland who is seeking the 2008 Democratic nomination for president for the second time, has selected a date to introduce articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. A source who asked to remain anonymous told RAW STORY that the articles of impeachment would be introduced next week.

The Washington Post is reporting that Congressman Kucinich will file articles of impeachment against Cheney.

The main thing is that it is simply not correct that the fear of a Cheney or a Pelosi presidency provides Bush with some kind of insurance against impeachment. The only insurance Bush has against the impeachment he so richly deserves, and that a majority of Americans devoutly wish to see him receive, is a craven Democratic Party leadership, which because of a profound lack of principle, an excess of self-interested political calculation, and an astonishing misreading of the popular will, is going to any lengths to avoid doing what the Constitution demands it to do: impeach a president who poses a clear and present danger to the survival of Constitutional government and the rule of law in America.

Soon after becoming defense secretary, Robert Gates argued the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be closed because the international community would view any trials there as tainted, The New York Times reported on Thursday. Instead, Gates, who became Pentagon chief in December, argued that terrorism suspects should be tried in the United States to make the proceedings more credible, the Times said. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others argued against bringing detainees into the United States, and the discussion ended when President George W. Bush agreed with them, the newspaper quoted administration officials as saying.

We have seen an Army General or two fired in response to late-coming national publicity of abhorrent treatment of our maimed and recovering soldiers. But the real crime is much higher than three or four stars. The administration and the Pentagon didn’t plan for an occupation of Iraq, because that planning would belie our public optimism, betray the propaganda of cakewalks and a thousand flowers, and reveal the truth about the administration’s 2003 force-march to war. Likewise, to have planned for 25,000 injured Iraq and Afghan veterans, many permanently crippled, blinded, disfigured and brain damaged, and 100,000 psychological and emotional head cases trying to reintegrate into their former lives would have revealed the administration’s Iraq narrative to be dead wrong. No matter the cost, the Bush-Cheney narrative must be seen as the "reality."

So for those of you who draw the obvious conclusions about the real reason that Bush is setting these restrictive conditions for Rove and company during the attorney general scandal investigation, you may want to apply the same obvious conclusions to Bush’s behavior regarding the 9/11 investigation! Think about it!

I agree we are a nation of "cowards." But I disagree on the timing. We are not spaghetti-spined because we might exit Iraq anytime soon. We became a bunch of yellow bellies on Sept. 12, 2001. That was when, in our fear and anxiety, inspired by the endless images of the still smoldering remnants of the Twin Towers, we Americans checked 200 years of self-reliance and the Constitution at the door, and handed the keys to the store over to a White House run by one guy whose military derring do was performed in the skies over south Texas instead of South Vietnam and by another who ran from an opportunity to fight for his country no less than five times. FBI Director Robert Mueller's recent revelations about the agency's abuse of the Patriot Act, rammed into law two weeks after 9/11, proves Ben Franklin was right: trading security for liberty leaves you with neither.

What explains Bush-Cheney invulnerability to accountability? Perhaps the answer is that Bush has desensitized us. Like kids desensitized to violence by violent video games and movies and pornography addicts desensitized to sex, we have become desensitized by the avalanche of Bush-Cheney crimes, lies, and disdain for Congress, courts, and public opinion. Our elected representatives, if not the American people, now regard as normal such heinous actions as war crimes, the rape of the Constitution, self-serving use of government office, and the constant stream of lies and propaganda from the highest offices of the executive branch.

Halliburton is correct to jump ship to Dubai, a place proud of its independence and freedom of trade, as well as money laundering capacities. The UAE aspires to be the Switzerland of the region, and perhaps replace Switzerland entirely in an age where it is oil, weapons, and drugs, not gold, that constrain, or fail to constrain, the paper dollar.

We know now that when Dick Cheney makes a foreign policy or war policy decision regarding Iraq or Iran or Saudi Arabia, he is really thinking about what it will do for Halliburton and Dubai--and for Dick Cheney. Remember the big brouhaha that arose when a Dubai-based company was in line to take over the operation of several major U.S. ports last year? Members of Congress were in high dudgeon over that and in the end the plan was abandoned. So how do we feel knowing that virtually the entire supply line for our over-extended troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is now in the hands of a Dubai corporation, and that it has its hooks into the central policy arm of our government, Blair House and the Office of the Vice President?

To Dick Cheney's recent comments at an AIPAC conference (a shameful affair) that calls for withdrawal from Iraq only embolden our enemies, war hero Max Cleland had this to say: Where the hell were you in the Vietnam War? If you had gone to Vietnam like the rest of us, maybe you woulda learned something about war. You can't keep troops on the ground forever. They gotta have a mission. They gotta have a purpose.

Copies of handwritten notes by Vice President Dick Cheney, introduced at trial by attorneys prosecuting former White House staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would appear to implicate George W. Bush in the Plame CIA Leak case. Bush has long maintained that he was unaware of attacks by any member of his administration against [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson. The ex-envoy's stinging rebukes of the administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence led Libby and other White House officials to leak Wilson's wife's covert CIA status to reporters in July 2003 in an act of retaliation.

Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be convicted of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s. The case brought new attention to the Bush administration's much-criticized handling of weapons of mass destruction intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Defenders of the official myth say that the White House was not being evacuated at the time Mineta said, and that this proves Mineta got his story wrong, and that in fact Cheney wasn't in the PEOC until later -- after the Pentagon was hit. CNN Backs Mineta

Bill Maher has stirred outrage once again, this time saying it would be better if Vice President Dick Cheney was dead.

A suicide bomber attacked the entrance to the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, killing up to 23 people and wounding 20. Cheney was unhurt in the attack, which was claimed by the Taliban and was the closest that militants have come to a top U.S. official visiting Afghanistan. At least one U.S. soldier, an American contractor and a South Korean soldier were among the dead, NATO said.

Were Cheney a run-of-the-mill vice president, his inability to identify the line between fact and fantasy – or is it: truth and fiction – would be the stuff of comedy sketches. But, of course, Cheney is no ordinary second in command. Indeed, when it comes to foreign policy, he has for six years now been the real "decider." Only the most delusional observer of Washington fails to recognize that the Bush White House does what it does "because," as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill explained, "this is the way that Dick likes it."

If we could manage to get past the tedious and the odious — like the empty speculation on whether a woman can win, or whether Barack Obama is black enough — we might be able to engage the essential issue facing the U.S. at this point in our history. And that is whether, once the Bush administration has finally and mercifully run its course, the country goes back to being a reasonably peaceful, lawful, constructive force in the world, or whether we continue down the bullying, warlike, unilateral, irresponsible, unlawful and profoundly ineffective path laid out by Bush, Cheney & Co. The question is not so much whether a Republican or a Democrat takes the White House in the next election; it’s whether the American people can take back their country.

Because someone had leaked the highly classified information from the NSA intercepts, Cheney warned Graham, the Bush administration was considering ending all cooperation with the joint inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence committees on the government's failure to predict and prevent the September 11 attacks. Classified records would no longer be turned over to the Hill, the vice president threatened, and administration witnesses would not be available for interviews or testimony.

The long-held suspicions about George Bush's wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.

Let us contemplate, for a moment, the vagina of Mary Cheney, lesbian daughter of the Vice President. Let us think about its ridges and folds, let us think about the size of her clitoris, about whether it's secretly pierced, about the things that only Mary, Heather Poe, and perhaps a few others might know. For, indeed, Mary Cheney's vagina - in fact, her genitals and reproductive organs - have become our newest site of contention in the war between reality and religious fundamentalists, between the blatant hypocrisy of the Cheney family and the people who their followers would condemn.

They have indeed achieved their objectives. A troubled violent oil-rich region has become America’s own troubled, violent and oil-rich region. Our military provocation has birthed a multifaceted insurgency that can be manipulated directly, or used indirectly, to support any number of new government programs and policies, foreign and domestic. Want a war with Iran? It’s easy to justify, with "Iranians" working with Iraqi insurgents. Need to pump up the dollar, or to ensure we can still print and borrow at will? The situation in Iraq allows the President to be seen by the average Joe and Millie as "doing the right thing" in buying up oil to "double" the "Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Just being prudent, you know.

Attorneys for former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby won't know the specifics of former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer's unusual immunity-from-prosecution deal when Fleischer testifies against their client Monday.

A smorgasbord of Washington insider details emerged during the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff. No one served up spicier morsels than Cathie Martin, Vice President Dick Cheney's former top press assistant . Martin described the craft of media manipulation -- under oath and in blunter terms than politicians like to hear in public.

Under the claim that terrorism is a ubiquitous threat, the military has embroidered an unwarranted and dangerously expansive view of its own authority. The New York Times found that administrative subpoenas known as national security letters, which are issued internally with no court review, have been used since 9/11 to collect financial information in up to 500 investigations. Which means that thousands of such letters have probably been issued for personal banking and credit data. The military says all this is okay because the letters it issues are noncompulsory. You know, all those banks volunteered their customers' private information.

There's a lot more here, but frankly keeping up with the lies of Dick Cheney is a full-time job.

Two other unnamed officials who traveled with Bush on a state visit to Africa in July 2003 reportedly encouraged a Time magazine correspondent to ask about the circumstances behind Wilson’s trip, pointing him in the direction of Plame. At the top of the operation to counter Wilson were Bush, who approved the partial release of a CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD, and Cheney, who dispatched Libby to meet with reporters.

In answer to all those who have written me, over the years, disdaining my hope that this trial would ever reveal anything about the inner workings of the War Party and their crimes, claiming that "they" would put a stop to it before anything of value saw the light of day, I have to say: you were wrong. The republic is not doomed: its defense mechanism is working, even if it took a while to rev it up. So pull up a chair, kick back, and get out the refreshments: it's not just Scooter and his boss who are in the dock. The War Party is on trial in Judge Walton's courtroom, and the odds are damn good that they'll get the verdict they so richly deserve.

So what kind of "threats" does the military consider worthy of investigating? How about the Quakers or the Rhode Island Community Coalition for Peace? A new report by the American Civil Liberties Union documents nearly 200 incidents where the Pentagon accumulated and maintained in its "threat" database the activities of peace groups in the United States. The Defense Department has said it was a mistake to keep tabs on the plans of nonviolent protesters. Still, the ACLU had to sue to compel the department to disclose the extent of what it had done.

Have you noticed? Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any US intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq. This is a far cry from October 2002, when a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was rushed through in order to trick Congress into giving its nihil obstat for the attack on Iraq. Why no intelligence justification this time around? Because there is none.

One of the great mysteries of l'affaire Plame is why the Bushies lashed out so severely at Ambassador Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, by exposing her CIA connection and effectively ending her career. After all, there were plenty of internal government critics who opposed the rush to war, including in the CIA, and they were never "outed" or otherwise rendered professionally disabled. Why pick on Plame?

Cheney also brushed off a post-election poll showing that only 17 percent of the public supported sending more troops to Iraq. "And if we have a president who looks at the polls and sees the polls going south and concludes, 'Oh, my goodness, we have to quit,' all it will do is validate the al Qaeda view of the world. It's exactly the wrong thing to do."

Into the valley of death rode the 3,000. “U.S. Toll in Iraq Reaches 3,000” screamed The Washington Post ’s lead story on New Year’s Day, which included the Pentagon’s count of more than 22,000 troops injured. As is known, the Pentagon does not count dead Iraqis, but reputable estimates put that number at about 650,000. As we pass this sad milestone, it behooves us to pause and consider the enormity of what has been allowed to happen—and how to prevent it from happening again. The House and Senate Intelligence committees in the new Congress need to reinstitute genuine oversight, including a close look at why so many intelligence officers cooperated in the dishonesty leading to war. We owe that to the 25,000, not to mention the 650,000. Start with Tenet and McLaughlin and include Alan Foley, the retired chief of CIA’s Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC) and devotee of imaginative intelligence on bio-labs, uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes and other artifices to justify an unnecessary war. Most of the suspects owe their meteoric careers in large measure to Defense Secretary Robert Gates who, as head of CIA analysis and later as CIA director, institutionalized the politicization of CIA analysis more than 20 years ago, mostly by moving malleable managers up the pay scale.

The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public. The Bush administration didn't reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding until last fall. The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Before the coming of George Bush and his shadow president Dick Cheney, the greatest military blunder in American History was thought to be Custer's Last Stand. It did not take a lot of hindsight to know that general Custer's vain assault on a much larger force of better-armed native Americans would come to no good end. His own turncoat Indian scouts told him the encampment at Little Bighorn was far too large to be attacked. They were changing back into their native clothes en masse so as not to be associated with the white man. But in his supreme arrogance Custer believed that HE knew better than his own best sources of intelligence. We all know the result of that one. How uncanny are the parallels to the current situation in Iraq? The neocon ideologues who seized dictatorial control of our government brushed off all contrary advice and manufactured intelligence to support their case. They dismissed any challenge to their vision of the absolute power of American military dominance as a matter of right. They fired any underling who dared to try tell them the truth, that deposing Saddam would lead directly and inexorably to an Islamic theocracy, if not a sectarian civil war. They used the power of their crony associates in the corporate media to smear any public critic. And they are still doing it.

Mr. Vice President, isn’t it true that you and the defendant outed Valerie Plame to send a signal to others who might dissent from your Iraq policy that they would pay a terrible price for doing so? Mr. Vice President, do you understand that in the United States no person is above the law? No further questions, your honor.

Why then do 48% of Americans believe what they say about 9/11? Why should we believe the word of President Bush and Vice President Cheney when it has been proven time and time again that they can't be trusted?

The idea of hitting Iran may make sense from the Bush-Cheney bunker, where the only consideration is not what's good for the country, but what's good for Bush and Cheney. After all, if you're losing your war in Iraq, and if you have hit bottom politically at home (Bush's ppublic support ratings are now down in the 20s, where Nixon's were just before his resignation, and Cheney's numbers have been in the teens for months), and if the public is clamoring for an end to it all--and maybe for your heads, too--expanding the conflict and putting the nation on a full war footing can look like an attractive even if desperate gambit. From the nation's point of view, of course, an attack on Iran would be an unmitigated disaster. There are no more troops that the U.S. could throw into battle (the Pentagon is scrambling just to find another 20,000 or so bodies that Bush wants to throw into the Iraq quagmire), so an attack would have to be basically that--an attack. Certainly the forces the Navy is assembling in the Persian Gulf, together with the B-52s and B-1s and B-2s available at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and at bases in other countries in the region, are capable of destroying most of Iran's nuclear facilities, as well as its military infrastructure. But in terms of conquering territory, the most the U.S. could hope to do would be to perhaps hold a beachhead on the Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf links to the Arabian Sea. And even that would be a bloody challenge.

Cheney showed little regard for Congress when Republicans were in charge of the House and Senate. And no one expects him to display any more respect for the system of checks and balances now that Democrats are in control. But if the vice president is willing to testify in Libby's trial, then surely Congress has not just the right but the Constitutional duty to suggest that Cheney must also take questions from the Congress.

"We're calling the vice president," attorney Ted Wells said in court. Wells represents defendant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is charged with perjury and obstruction. Sitting presidents, including Clinton and Ford, have testified in criminal cases, but presidential historians said they knew of no vice president who has done so.

One reason that the Bush Administration can claim with a straight face that the U.S. does not torture is, of course, because all the top members of the Bush White House are world-class liars. The question here is, why? Why are they, first of all, rather openly employing torture? And secondly, what does this fact tell us about what is up with this brave new world of unspeakable horrors so thinly disguised that no one except the misinformed and gullible would believe the cover stories?

The biggest question I have about this part in Norman Mineta's testimony is why would the "young man" feel the need to run in and out of the room if he was given a "Shoot-Down" order? I would think, and if you're in the military, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that if the "young man" was given a "Shoot-Down" order, he would wait for confirmation of the shoot-down, and then go tell Cheney about it. He wouldn't run in and out of the room, finally asking if the orders still stood would he? The very question itself indicates that whatever the orders were, he questioned them.

The Bush administration asked a federal judge on Tuesday to dismiss a lawsuit brought by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and others for alleged involvement in disclosing her employment as a clandestine CIA operative. Cheney and the other high-level defendants in the lawsuit have valid claims of immunity because of their official positions, Justice Department lawyers said in their request to have the case thrown out.

This denial of reality by Mr. Hayden is a pristine example of doublespeak -- as when White House press secretary Tony Snow said on Oct. 27: "We don't torture, we don't condone torture, we don't do torture." We have heard the same indignant protestations from President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney (who acknowledges wryly that he has been described as "the vice president for torture" as he dismissed such nonsense). With regard to future likelihood of torture, the Republican-controlled Congress -- in passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- has given the president considerable leeway in deciding what forms of interrogation are not war crimes under our War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions.

Groups backing the effort include Progressive Democrats of America, CodePink, Gold Star Families for Peace and Veterans for Peace. While the pro-impeachment movement has received little media attention, polls show growing numbers support for Congress to take such action. A recent Newsweek poll found 51 percent of all Americans - including 20 percent of Republicans - feel impeachment should be on the table.

And this is waterboarding: "He directed the full flow of the now-gushing pipe onto my nostrils and mouth.… Water poured down my windpipe and throat and filled my lungs and stomach. The torrent was unimaginably choking. This is the sensation of drowning, on dry land, on a hot dry afternoon. Your humanity bursts from within you as you gag and choke. I tried very hard to will unconsciousness but no relief came." The beating and the interrogation continued. "I had nothing to say: I was beyond invention. So they turned on the tap again, and again there was that nausea of rising water from inside my bodily cavity."

Then came Sept. 11 – the date in l973 that the U.S. supported Allende’s overthrow by the dictator Gen. Pinochet. Frank was tortured so badly that the coffin could not be opened at his funeral in Chicago. My girlfriend was also tortured, and survived. Their tortures stopped my life.

He is the founder and president of Open Source Solutions, Inc., and is an acknowledged expert on computer and information vulnerabilities. Steele holds graduate degrees in International Relations and Public Administration from Leigh University and the University of Oklahoma. He has also earned certificates in Intelligence Policy from Harvard University and in Defense Studies from the Naval War College. Before the 2004 election Steele advocated the re-election of George W Bush and he has been cited by numerous Republican luminaries as a credible source. His testimony is added to the chorus of other credible 9/11 whistleblowers both in and out of government and academia.

But, okay, Karl, I will help you prepare for the worst. Here are some of the people that will be on the list, and some suggested official explanations, just in case someone gets a hold of the logs. (Let me remind you that if you had let me declare martial law back in 2001, we wouldn’t have to be dicking around with this pretend democracy crap at this very, very busy time. We have to fix elections in every state but Idaho and Utah this time around, dammit!) Jack Abramoff (578 times) -- I had to kept checking on him to make sure that he wasn’t doing anything illegal. I would call Jack into my office, look him right in the eye, and ask him if he was corrupting our very system of government by having his clients pay for votes in Congress. Every single time he told me no. In fact, he was so grateful for my mentorship and personal interest that he often brought me expensive gifts.

Even after extensively researching their book about Vice President Cheney – 'Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency' – Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein found they still had lots of unanswered questions.

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning. Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Yet Cheney isn't the only one who has benefited from the Bush administration's destructive policies. The Bush family has done quite nicely too. Just a few examples:

How did I know Cheney was in charge of NORAD, prior to it becoming public? - Easy, in the Army and whole of the DoD there is a thing called chain of command. Every solider is supposed to be aware of who his superiors are. When Cheney was announced to be taking over NORAD, the CoC was updated and passed out to all of us. This, I’m sure, was prior to the public release of this information. There were many military friends of mine, at the time, that questioned this action.

While you can obviously imagine or gerrymander or stipulate a situation in which torture might yield useful information, in practice the systematic authorization of torture creates an army of butchers, not a crack investigative team. Bush, Cheney, and those around them remind me of Nietzsche's line about staring too long into the abyss. They've become transfixed, hypnotized almost, by the evils they believe themselves to be fighting. Obsessed to the point where they've clearly developed an admiration for the brutal methods, ruthless dishonesty, and utter secrecy with which the enemies of liberalism conduct themselves.

On May 21, 1999, reacting to some satirical criticism of him, Bush snapped: "There ought to be limits to freedom."

Recently, the Army announced with much fanfare that it was canceling the monopoly logistics contract that Halliburton/KBR has used to bilk U.S. taxpayers since the occupation of Iraq began. The contract will be broken up and divided among at least three different companies, but it’s not clear that this will make much difference to taxpayers, or even that Halliburton will stop making a killing.

The CIA officer whose identity was leaked to reporters sued Vice President Dick Cheney, his former top aide and presidential adviser Karl Rove on Thursday, accusing them and other White House officials of conspiring to destroy her career.

The upcoming G-8 conference, scheduled for July 15-18 in St. Petersburg, is shaping up as the latest battleground in the developing conflict between Putin's Russia and the West.

Doing his best to stoke the always simmering fears of so many US residents (let us be careful how we use the word "citizen"), Cheney said of the terrorist groups in Iraq, "If we pull out, they'll follow us."

The very next morning, less than twelve hours after his 9/11 testimony had been unexpectedly "exposed" to the FOX faithful, Norman Minetta resigned as Secretary of Transportation. What an unbelievably amazing coincidence of timing!