"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."-- Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Part II
Good piece by UK blogger..
Dick Cheney is the 'Vice-President for torture'. Though this is my personal opinion of the man, the expression is not mine; it is rather the opinion of Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA director from 1977 till 1981. I believe he stated it upon the enactment of the torture prohibition law when Cheney said that the law would cost thousands of lives.
I had examined what interests the Arab readers in the Bush administration or what is left from this administration in the aftermath of the rats' escape from the sinking ship. Today, I carry on with a discussion on Cheney by focusing on what is interesting for us in his work. Many people tend to say that the administration is the Bush/Cheney administration, and some insist that it is the Cheney administration and that George Bush is a mere façade for his deputy, the head of the war cabal.
I can write a book on Dick Cheney, but the readers and I do not need a new book as there are many books on him the last of which, is written by the neocon Stephen Hayes, a neoconservative, has his name as a title and masks his deeds. Another more objective book entitled The Opportunist: Dick Cheney's Path to Power is by Robert Sam Anson. A third and better than the two is The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind who relates the experience lived by O'Neill, the first Treasury Secretary in Bush's first mandate, who resigned and disclosed the administration secrets.
O'Neal openly says that a few days following Bush's entry to the White House, he started talking about a war on Iraq and its postwar administration, which was nine months before the 11/9/2001 terror act. Now we know that a committee entrusted with doing energy research was supervised by Cheney and carried his name. It was called The National Energy Policy Development Group or The Energy Task Force, and in March of that year it released a report referring to control over oil in Iraq. Cheney led the war cabal with the then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom had been allies since the Gerald Ford administration. Once again, I put aside my opinion and the opinions of Arab and Muslim readers about a man who caused the massacre of a million Iraqis in a tragedy that is not over yet. I have chosen excerpts from statements made by American MP Dennis Kucinich who asked Congress in vain to remove Cheney from power. He submitted Cheney's statements as an argument against him. In fact, Cheney greatly inflated the available evidence and kept insisting on the existence of a WMD program under Saddam Hussein and on a relationship with Al-Qaeda, though the invalidity of such accusations was proven. The MP believes that Cheney did not err; he rather lied deliberately and killed 3300 Americans- the number is getting close to 4000- and consequently he has to be removed and tried. However, Congress rejected his proposal last week and did not debate it.
'The Vice-President for torture' did not content himself with lying. He surrounded himself with advisors, similar to him, who submitted to him studies supporting torture or sending the detainees to their countries to be tortured there. David Addington is one of those advisors and he was an advisor when Cheney was the defense secretary in the George H. W. Bush administration. Afterwards, he became legal counsel and succeeded Lewis Libby as the director of the vice-president's office after Libby was convicted of disclosing the name of the intelligence agent Valerie Plame. As for Alberto Gonzales, Congress removed him from the Justice Department after he had been close to Bush since his Texas days, because congressmen could not stand his violation of the law he is supposed to represent. Addington and Gonzales wrote weird legal studies for the vice-president, whose essence indicates that the Geneva Conventions are outdated and that the same conventions do not apply to the president during the war. The result is that Cheney is behind torture, wiretapping citizens, the kidnapping of all those classified as 'enemy fighter' and their deprivation of their legal rights, Guantanamo, and others.
A small note before I go back to the readers' interests. We are focusing on an occupation and the calamities it has brought, but Cheney is a great catastrophe that goes beyond our affliction with him. He waged a parallel war on the environment to protect the oil industry from which he comes with George W. Bush, to the extent that Eric Schiffer, the person in charge of protecting the environment, and Christie Whitman, the Administrator of The Environmental Protection Agency, resigned because of Cheney's interference in their work and his rejection of all reports restricting industrial freedom.
Cheney asked the question about himself in a TV interview: 'Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?' This is indeed a good work approach. As a matter of fact, it is his own approach. He was caught destroying documents and the names of his closest associates which are not recorded like the rest of civil servants. He opposed recording the names of his visitors as he refused to submit his work papers. There is a unanimous opinion that he will not leave any trace behind him after he leaves office.
Since he avoids journalists, and in case he does not, he usually contents himself with allies and radicals like him, and he rarely says something he regrets later. Despite this, he caused an uproar in the Hot Talk radio program that was supposed to end without people hearing of it, had it not been for the accidental question asked by the host Scott Hennen, 'Mr Vice-President, would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?'Cheney agreed by saying, 'Well, it's a no-brainer for me', which means it is accepted and does not need thinking.
This man sought the war as of his first day as vice-president and repeated all the lies that have now become common. He even insisted on repeating them even when the American intelligence itself denied them. Examples include the meeting between Mohammad Ata and Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague and the attempt at buying uranium from the Niger.
Countless websites are asking for his removal from office and his trial. Yet none of this will take place while he is in the administration that carries Bush's name, though it is under his control. I will continue the discussion tomorrow by examining how Cheney has worked to make the power of the presidency prevail at the expense of Congress, and how he has succeeded in making the position of the vice-president, originally ceremonial, change into a second executive power.
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