Oh, For “A Few Good Men”

I doubt that many of you watched the FOX “News” interview of Dick Cheney by Bret Baier, but I did. It’s worth a look. Surprise of surprises, Cheney was unrepentant and unapologetic. “We did exactly what we had to do” and the CIA did exactly what we wanted them to do. He dismissed the claim of the Senate Report that President Bush did not know the detail of our “interrogation” program, saying that Bush knew and approved of everything.

Baier actually did a pretty good job at times, pressing Cheney to confirm that he was fully aware of what was going on. (He was.) My favorite part was when Baier asked about pureéing a prisoner’s food and force-feeding him through his rectum. A hint of a smile passed over Cheney’s lips before answering. (I am not making this up.) He also got Cheney to concede that he hadn’t read the report or the 500 page summary, which he described as a “piece of crap”.

Cheney said he strongly encouraged the Justice Department to come up with a “legal” opinion justifying the “enhanced interrogation” program – talk about a piece of crap – and he returned several times to the theme that everything the CIA did was justified to avenge the deaths of 3,000 Americans and to save American lives.

Cheney will appear on Meet The Press on Sunday. I would like to see Chuck Todd point out to Dick that his concern for American lives rings a bit hollow in light of the fact that he, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Condi Rice, et al., lied us into a war that cost more than 4,000 Americans their lives and left tens of thousands of Americans grievously injured.

I doubt that there’s any point to Chuck Todd’s asking Cheney if he has any remorse for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and wounded or the 4 million Iraqis who were forced to flee their homes, leaving millions in refugee camps. (Get serious.) Does he care that millions of Iraqis now live in dire poverty, that many Iraqi women refugees have had to resort to prostitution to survive, or that the land of Iraq has been poisoned by depleted uranium munitions and the chemical poisons of war? (That might bring a full-blown smile to Cheney’s razor-thin lips.) Does the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, the loss of its cultural heritage through the looting of museums and ancient sites, and its disintegration as a country cause him to lose a moment’s sleep? (Bitch, please.)

Other areas that Todd might explore are Cheney’s putting CIA agents at risk by outing Valerie Plame (as payback for her husband exposing one of Cheney’s lies), his hastening the destruction of the planet by sabotaging Bush’s promise to reduce CO2 emissions, and the explosion of the deficit resulting from his pushing Bush to ask for repeated massive tax cuts for the rich. Apparently, Cheney is most sensitive about any insinuation that he had a financial interest in going to war, e.g., to create profit centers for Halliburton. (It was over such an insinuation that he told Sen. Leahy to “fuck himself.”)

I would love to see Chuck Todd get under Cheney’s skin enough to provoke a “you can’t handle the truth” moment, but Chuck’s not up to it and Cheney’s too reserved and cold-hearted for anything like that. But I can dream, can’t I?

New Year’s Day Message For Dick “The Dick” Cheney: STFU

Remember Dick “The Dick” Cheney?  He’s the guy who supported the Vietnam War, but dodged the draft by getting five deferments.  He’s the guy who said, after 9/11 that America would “have to work on the dark side, if you will” and oversaw the U.S. policies of torture and “rendition” of prisoners to black prison sites for “enhanced interrogation”.  He’s the coward who allowed enlisted men to be sent to jail for engaging in the interrogation techniques he and Rumsfeld had specifically approved, e.g., using dogs to terrify Iraqis.  He’s the guy who lied us into the Iraq War, telling us that “it is pretty well confirmed” that Mohammed Atta (one of the al Qaeda 9/11 terrorists) had met with Iraqi officials in Prague prior to 9/11 and then lied again by denying he had said such a thing.  He’s the guy who lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.  He’s the guy who said we would be greeted in Iraq with flowers and candy and that the war would be over quickly, “in weeks rather than months.”  He’s the guy who (along with Rumsfeld and the rest of the neo-cons) was so committed to attacking Iraq that he diverted troops from Afghanistan to Iraq, allowing bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora.  And he’s the guy who headed the conspiracy to “out” an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame, because her husband,  Joe Wilson, had exposed Cheney’s lie about Iraq acquiring yellow-cake uranium from Niger, but then claimed he couldn’t remember anything and let his little helper, “Scooter” Libby, take the fall.

He’s also the guy who was pretty much invisible while he was Vice President, hiding out in “undisclosed locations” and pulling the strings that operated his puppet, George W. Bush.  But since leaving office, you can’t shut “The Dick” up.  He has been on FOX about as often as Glenn Beck.  Less than a month after President Obama took office, “The Dick” began criticizing the President for increasing the nation’s risk of being attacked by terrorists.  He accused President Obama of weakening America by shaking hands with Hugo Chavez.  He criticized President Obama for speaking in foreign countries.  He accused President Obama of making America vulnerable to terrorist attacks for investigating the Bush Administration’s use of torture.  He accused President Obama of “dithering” and “waffling” about sending troops to Afghanistan and said that President Obama “seems afraid” to make a decision on Afghanistan.

And this week, in the aftermath of the attempted al Qaeda bombing of a Northwest jet over Detroit, “The Dick” had this to say:
As I’ve watched the events of the last few days, it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war.  He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airline and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. . . He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there we won’t be at war.”

A brief review of history of who has made America vulnerable to terrorist attack is in order.    Shortly after he took office, Cheney was told by Richard Clarke  that the threat from al Qaeda was serious and that an attack on American soil was likely.  The CIA’s June 30, 2001 Senior Executive Intelligence Brief included an article titled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real”.  On July 27, Richard Clarke warned that new intelligence revealed that an al Qaeda attack on America had been postponed for a few months and “will still happen.”  On August 6, 2001, the President’s Daily Brief contained a two-page assessment of the current threat posed by terrorists, headed:  “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.”  This message was the thirty-sixth occasion during the preceding eight months that the CIA had alerted the White House to the threat posed by al-Qaeda or bin Laden.  When the White House again blew off the CIA, Richard Clarke sent Condi Rice an e-mail in early September 2001 asking how she and her colleagues in the White House would feel “when in the very near future al-Qaeda had killed hundreds of Americans: ‘What will you wish then that you had already done?'”

Further, on the question of who has endangered America, Osama bin Laden’s goal throughout the ’90s had been to draw the U.S. into a war in Afghanistan that would bleed us dry of blood and treasure, as had been the case with the USSR, and inflame Muslim hatred of the West.  He described the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a “rare and essentially valuable” opportunity to spread jihad.  All of that happened on Cheney’s watch.

In light of “The Dick’s” disastrous record as vice-president, it is both mind-boggling and disgusting to listen to him criticize President Obama for weakening America.  James Fallows put it best in a recent piece in The Atlantic, where he said of “The Dick’s” conduct since leaving office:
The former vice-president, Dick Cheney, has brought dishonor to himself, his office and his country.  I am not aware of a former President or Vice-President behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power.  .  .  .  Cheney has acted as if utterly unconcerned with the welfare of his country, its armed forces or the people now trying to make difficult decisions.  He has put narrow score-settling interest far, far above national interest.

My New Year’s Day message to our craven and mendacious former vice-president is simpler:  Dick, why don’t you just STFU?