Tell it, Jimmy!

But this is kinda old news. I think most Americans were onto Dick from the beginning. Still nice though to hammer Cheney’s ass in the public arena whenever the chance presents itself.

Jimmy Carter calls Dick Cheney a ‘disaster’

Former president also says U.S. tortures prisoners

WASHINGTON - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday denounced Vice President Dick Cheney as a “disaster” for the country and a “militant” who has had an excessive influence in setting foreign policy.

Cheney has been on the wrong side of the debate on many issues, including an internal White House discussion over Syria in which the vice president is thought to be pushing a tough approach, Carter said.

“He’s a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world,” Carter told the BBC World News America in an interview to air later on Wednesday.

MSNBC News Services

And what does the Dick camp have to say about all of this?

Oh please! Anyone not toeing the republican line gets taken to the woodshed. In this case, they simply can’t argue with Carter’s statements.

MSNBC.com

God forgive me for saying this……but I wish this evil bastard’s pacemaker would quit on him. He has already caused so much death and destruction and his only vision is for more of the same.

Officials in the Bush administration are divided over the significance of intelligence provided by Israel that led to last month’s strike inside Syria on a reported nuclear facility, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

According to the Times, at issue is whether intelligence presented by Israel months ago to the administration that Syria had begun work on a nuclear weapons program was conclusive enough to justify military action by Israel, and subsequently, a rethinking of American policy toward the two nations.

US Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives in the administration are portraying the Israeli intelligence as credible and argue that it should cause the US to reconsider its diplomatic overtures to Syria and North Korea.

By contrast, the Times reports, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her allies in the White House said they do not believe that the intelligence presented so far merits any change in the American diplomatic approach.

More at The Jerusalem Post

Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney explaining why *not* to invade Iraq. What changed?

A whacko group who wants religious rule. It’s been said of them: “The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren’t going to be visible on television next week.”
From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Vice President Dick Cheney will speak to a super’secret, conservative policy group in Utah on Friday during his second trip to the state this year.
Cheney will address the fall meeting of the Council for National Policy, a group whose self-described mission is to promote “a free-enterprise system, a strong national defense and support for traditional Western values.”
The organization - made up of few hundred powerful conservative activists - holds confidential meetings and members are advised not to use the name of the group in communications, according to a New York Times profile of the group.
“The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before [or] after a meeting,” a list of rules obtained by The Times showed. The group did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

-Tony Blair, October 2nd, 2001.

9/11 remains a day of reflection and remembrance. Here’s overwritten-but’sincere pieces on 9/11 from 2001 and 2002, as well as blog posts from 2005 and 2006.

As I’ve written before, I always knew that eventually 9/11 would be politicized and misappropriated, but I hoped it would take a while and the damage might be minimized. However, this year, even with less blatant demagoguery about 9/11 (so far; Bush will speak later this week), the manipulation feels more present and grating to me. “Rising above it” may be the right response for some people, and they are certainly entitled to it. But this year, for me, that feels irresponsible. It’s impossible for me to not to think of Petraeus and Crocker and their misleading (at the very least, mistaken) testimony to Congress. It’s impossible for me not to think about the shell game going on yet again, the amazing missed opportunities, and the deep moral crime of sacrificing something sacred and profound for personal gain and group greed. In the process of what the Bush administration has wrought, so many have been punished for absolutely no good purpose. I can still feel sad and disappointed, but so far, anger and disgust are frankly winning out.
Read more »

By Sidney Blumenthal
from SALON.COM

Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top’secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top’secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

read more HERE

By Michael Corcoran, Emerson College
from Campus Project.org

These days it is not an easy task to write a 500-page biography on Dick Cheney and make him look good. The man is the least popular vice president in recent history; the war in Iraq, which he will always be remembered for, is viewed as an unambiguous failure in the eyes of most Americans; and the administration he serves in has been mired in scandals: warrantless wiretapping, the politicization of the Department of Justice, the leaking of the name of an undercover CIA agent, and on and on. Cheney even managed to shoot an old man in the face, but at least that was merely a reckless accident, in contrast to all the harm he has caused intentionally. So it is only natural that when Dick Cheney needed an official biographer to put something pro-Cheney into the annals of history he would look for someone who has shown an ability to portray falsehoods as truths’someone who could make “non-fiction” out of nonsense.

Enter Stephen F. Hayes.

Hayes is a senior writer for The Weekly Standard, the country’s most vociferously pro-war magazine. Cheney has always been a fan. According to The New York Times, Cheney sends someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine each week. “Reader for reader, it may be the most influential publication in America,” said Eric Alterman of the Standard, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. “Anybody who wants to know what this administration is thinking and what they plan to do has to read this magazine.”

Hayes played a crucial role in the Standard’s notorious cheerleading for the war in Iraq, writing two high-profile articles asserting the now-discredited claim that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The first of these, 2003’s “Case Closed,” earned public praise from Cheney himself, who called the article the “best source of information” detailing a relationship between Hussein and Al Qaeda. Hayes even extended these falsehoods into a 2004 book called The Connection: How Al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. Clearly, if your goal is to present a truly distorted perception of the post-911 world, Hayes is the right man for the job.

read more HERE if you can stomach it

I’m shocked I tell ya…….shocked! I wonder if that man’sized safe is big enough to stuff him into and leave until January 09.

Vice President Cheney’s office acknowledged for the first time yesterday that it has dozens of documents related to the administration’s warrantless surveillance program, but it signaled that it will resist efforts by congressional Democrats to obtain them.

The disclosure by Cheney’s counsel, Shannen W. Coffin, came on the day that the Senate Judiciary Committee had set as a deadline for the Bush administration to turn over documents related to the wiretapping program, which allowed the National Security Agency to monitor communications between the United States and overseas without warrants.

White House counsel Fred F. Fielding has also declined to turn over any documents about the program, telling lawmakers last week that more time was needed to locate records that might be responsive to the panel’s subpoenas.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), said yesterday that he will pursue contempt proceedings against administration officials if the documents are not produced.

More at the Washington Post

Chris Matthews on Hardball. Video of Cheney interview where he gives reasons NOT to go into Iraq.

Don’t ya just hate his voice…….. he even sounds evil.