"Wrong Then, Wrong Now" - White House Video Rips Cheney

There are few American politicians who reach the threshold of being truly evil.  Most simply put self-advancement over the interests of their constituents and others.  However, Dick Cheney, in my opinion, meets the criteria to be deemed truly evil.  He advocated lying to the American public to take the nation to war in Iraq, he convinced his idiot superior, George W. Bush, to authorize the use of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and now he wants to take America to war against Iran.  The man is both evil and delusional.  Thousands of wasted American lives in Iraq and trillions of wasted dollars wasn't enough for Cheney.  Thankfully, in advance of Cheney's lying and disinformation speech against the Iran nuclear agreement, the White House has gone on the offensive against one of the foulest individuals in American history.  Talking Points Memo looks at the White House attack.  Here are highlights:

Timed to a speech given by former Vice President Dick Cheney slamming President Obama's Iran deal, the White House released a video highlighting Cheney's continual defense of the Iraq war.

The two-and-a-half-minute video titled "Former Vice President Dick Cheney: Wrong Then, Wrong Now" -- which was featured prominently on the White House homepage Tuesday -- spares no punches.

It begins with a Fox News host asking Cheney last week why anyone who believes Cheney was wrong on Iraq should listen to him about the Iran deal.

"Because I was right about Iraq," Cheney said.

It then segues into the abundant news clips from the run-up to Iraq War in which Cheney offers scores of claims first urging then defending military action -- from touting the presence of weapons of mass destruction to predicting that Iraqis would great American troops "as liberators."

No one benefited from the Iraq War except perhaps Halliburton.  Oh, and did I mention that Cheney has lots of Halliburton stock?  I guess he wants to make another fortune off the squandered lives of our military personnel and wasted taxpayer dollars.  The man is a war criminal and needs to be tried as such.  Would the death penalty be too much?  Not in my opinion.

George W. Bush Cancels Appearance at Swiss Charity Gala Over F of Arrested

While Barack Obama and the U.S. Justice Department appear prepared to ignore their obligations under international law to prosecute George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, et al, for war crimes and torture crimes, even dimwitted Chimperator Bush realizes that by leaving American territory, he risks arrest by nations who do not ignore their obligations international law.   Hence Bush's cancellation of his scheduled appearance at a Swiss charity event in Geneva in February.  The Daily Mail has details.  Here are highlights:

Former U.S. President George W. Bush has cancelled a visit to Switzerland over fears he could have been arrested on torture charges.

Mr Bush was due to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish charity gala in Geneva on February 12.
But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the country.

Criminal complaints against Mr Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials said.  Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against him in the Swiss city tomorrow for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay.

Reed Brody, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, said: 'He's [Bush] avoiding the handcuffs.'

The action in Switzerland showed Mr Bush had reason to fear legal complaints against him if he travelled to countries that have ratified an international treaty banning torture, he said.

Mr Brody is a U.S.-trained lawyer who specialises in pursuing war crimes, including Chile's late dictator Augusto Pinochet and Chad's ousted president Hissene Habre.

He said: 'President Bush has admitted ordering waterboarding which everyone considers to be a form of torture under international law.  'Under the Convention on Torture, authorities would have been obliged to open an investigation and either prosecute or extradite George Bush.'

Switzerland and the U.S. are among 147 countries that have ratified the 1987 treaty.

Of course, the one I truly want to see in handcuffs and standing trial is the entreatingly foul Dick Cheney.  Better yet, I would love the opportunity to see Cheney convicted as a war criminal and punished accordingly.  I will leave it to readers to surmise the punishment that would please me the most.

Cheney - Bush Knew About CIA Torture

Apparently wanting to make sure that, like himself, Chimperator George Bush can never again leave American territory, Emperor Palpatine Cheney is working hard to dispel the storyline of those who are trying to depict Bush as too clueless to have known about the CIA torture program and other war crime abuses being committed in the name of the American people.  MSN News reports on Cheney's effort to fully implicate George W. Bush.  Here are excerpts:

President George W Bush was fully aware and an "integral part" of the CIA's torture of terror suspects, his vice-president Dick Cheney said Wednesday. 

The long-awaited US Senate report released Tuesday on the program of harsh treatment and torture of detainees said Bush only learned details of it in 2006, four years after it started in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Speaking to Fox News, Cheney denied Bush was kept out of the loop. He said the then-president "was in fact an integral part of the program and he had to approve it."


Asked if Bush knew specific details of how specific interrogations were being conducted, Cheney was more vague, saying: "We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that."

Bush has yet to speak out publicly on the Senate report, which has drawn scathing criticism worldwide of what the CIA has called "enhanced interrogation techniques", amid calls for those involved to face trial.


"Such a gross violation of our liberal, democratic values must not happen again," German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, reflecting the embarrassment of Washington's European allies.
America's great power rival China -- often on the end of US censure for its rights record -- was equally unimpressed.

"We believe the US side should reflect upon itself, correct its ways and earnestly respect and abide by the rules of international conventions," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.

The United Nations said the program violated international law and basic human rights, and British-based advocacy group CAGE demanded criminal proceedings.

Around the world, human rights bodies demanded that current US President Barack Obama -- who halted the torture but has not gone after the perpetrators -- take legal action.

Bush and Cheney et al have done immense damage to America's ability to chide others on human rights abuses.  True, America has a very ugly history, if one knows accurate history, but the use of torture and war crimes makes it clear that nothing has really changed and America is plagued with hypocrisy.  People around the world are tired of being told by America to "do as we say and not as we do."

Here Come the War Crime Apologists

It's no surprise that many on the far right are falling all over themselves to defend the criminal use of torture revealed by the Senate torture report released yesterday.  I'm sure many of them, had they been in Nazi Germany in the period 1938 - 1945 would have found justification for the countless horrors the Nazi regime inflicted on millions.  The numbers of victims involved in the Bush/Cheney torture program may be smaller by far than what Hitler oversaw, but torturing smaller numbers doesn't somehow make it acceptable or any less criminal under international law.  As noted previously, it is no wonder Republicans did not want this report to see the light of day because through Bush and Cheney they own it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the efforts of the war crimes apologists.  Here are excerpts:

The publication today [yesterday] of a censored summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the use of torture at C.I.A. prisons has brought war-crime apologists out from under their rocks.

Chief among them is former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the all-time great prisoner abuse enthusiasts. Even before the report was issued, Mr. Cheney was telling The New York Times on Monday that torturing prisoners was absolutely the right thing to do and that everything the C.I.A. did was authorized.

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said releasing the report was a “terrible idea,” because it would put Americans in danger. “Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths,” he said, conveniently ignoring that it’s in the intelligence community’s interest to make such a prediction.

Mr. Rogers is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which has done absolutely nothing to shed light on this dismal chapter in American history. It’s specious to argue that transparency about torture, rather than torture itself, is to blame for any future retaliation.

Let’s be clear, the acts committed against the C.I.A.’s prisoners — no matter how murderous and awful some of those prisoners were — were disgusting and inexcusable. They violated all kinds of American and international laws against torture.

“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow,” he [John McCain] said. “The American people are entitled to it nonetheless. They must be able to make judgments about whether these policies and personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values.”

Rand Paul’s Michael Moore Moment

I'm not a fan of Senator Rand Paul, but occasionally he does get things right and as the lead up to the 2016 presidential contest heats up, one of the most true things Paul has said will hopefully get much more attention: he accusing Dick Cheney of pushing America to go into Iraq to help Halliburton, Cheney's former company in which he continued to hold a great deal of stock in a euphemistically described "blind trust." Halliburton made billions in Iraq and Cheney made out like a bandit by all estimations.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at Rand Paul's accusations and how Cheney's greed lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  Cheney is, in my view, nothing less than evil incarnate.  Here are article excerpts:

[I]n the current struggle for the soul of the Republican Party, few skirmishes offer better drama than the ongoing clash of the Cheney and Paul clans. Pick your permutation—Dick firing on Rand, Ron firing on Dick, Rand on Liz, Dick on Ron, Rand on Dick—this display of isolationist Hatfields vs. neocon McCoys . . . . 

[W]ith Rand gearing up for a run at the big chair in 2016, the feud promises to get even hotter as the ex-veep, prodded by fellow hawks, stews over the mere possibility of a Republican POTUS so intervention-averse that he’d make Barack Obama look like, well, Dick Cheney.

Case in point: On March 29, during Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas cattle call for 2016 contenders, Cheney took a slap at “an increasing strain of isolationism” in his party.  . . . . Cheney didn’t bother mentioning Rand’s name. I mean, really, why bother? Safe to say everyone in the audience knew precisely whom he meant by “some candidates.”

But in case anyone failed to make the connection, David Corn over at Mother Jones helpfully stirred the pot, using the ex-veep’s remarks as a hook upon which to hang a four-year-old video of Paul peddling a whopping good conspiracy theory about Cheney and the Iraq War. Specifically, shortly before entering the Senate race in 2009, at an April 7 address to college Republicans at Western Kentucky University, Paul posited that Cheney had pushed for the 2003 invasion of Iraq because it would fatten Halliburton’s bottom line.

As Paul apparently sees it, the timeline makes perfect sense: Back in 1995, Cheney was running around vigorously defending the first Bush administration’s decision not to invade Baghdad during the first Gulf War. But then, ka-boom! (Or rather, ka-ching!) “Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton,” Paul said in 2009. “Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he’s back in government and it’s a good idea to go into Iraq.”

Lest someone mistake Paul’s college talk as some sort of overly enthusiastic “one off,” Corn points to a second Paul speech, this one at a Montana rally during his dad’s 2008 presidential campaign, in which Rand got even more explicit about his view of Cheney’s conversion:

But, you know, a couple hundred million dollars later Dick Cheney earns from Halliburton, he comes back into government. Now Halliburton’s got a billion-dollar no-bid contract in Iraq. You know, you hate to be so cynical that you think some of these corporations are able to influence policy, but I think sometimes they are.

Forget “No blood for oil.” For Paul, America’s Iraq debacle was a mercenary swap of blood for several billion dollars in federal contracts to Cheney’s former company to do everything from put out oil field fires to provide housing for soldiers.

I enjoy watching Cheney get slapped around on the issue as much as the next gal. But it’s one thing to accuse the former veep of ideologically driven Machiavellianism; ’tis quite another to suggest that he did what he did out of loyalty to his Halliburton cronies. That is a far darker charge . . . 

As Paul moves closer and closer to the presidential trail, however, legions of journalists, oppo researchers, and even garden-variety voters will be rooting around in his past like hogs digging for truffles. These two speeches swiping at Cheney are unlikely to be the only colorful nuggets unearthed. Paul is a passionate, quirky pol who, until very recently, didn’t see much need to watch his tongue. Whatever else it’s doing to prep for 2016, Team Rand had better be bracing for Americans to learn about some of the senator’s fringier thoughts and theories.

Let the cat fight begin.  It should make for great sport and just maybe it will  cause the media to focus on Cheney's self-enrichment at the expense of thousands of Americans and Iraqi lives.  Iraq was a fool's errand and Cheney was Chimperator Bush's principal puppeteer.

Bush/Cheney and CIA Torture

Unrepentant War Criminals

Today's Washington Post has a piece noting that after years of being near political outcasts the Bush family is back in the lime light - sadly, the family that brought us the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan and threw away thousands of American lives and squandered countless billions of dollars is in the limelight for the wrong reason.  Does anyone really give a damn about the paintings by the cretinous George W?   If they do, it is a testament to just how fucked up many Americans' values have become.  The more important piece in the Washington Post looks at the CIA torture program launched by Bush/Cheney and the war crimes that are the true defining aspect of those eight dark years of America's history.  Worse yet, the American public was lied to by both the CIA and Bush Cheney.  I remain of the view that both Bush and Cheney need to be tried for war crimes and dealt with as the Allies dealt with German and Japanese officials following World War II.  Until that happens, America has no moral credibility in the world.  Here are article highlights:

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document. 

The 6,300-page report includes what officials described as damning new disclosures about a sprawling network of secret detention facilities, or “black sites,” that was dismantled by President Obama in 2009. 

Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to Obama for declassification. U.S. officials said it could be months before that section, which contains roughly 20 conclusions and spans about 400 pages, is released to the public.

The report’s release also could resurrect a long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, where many officials were dismayed by the agency’s use of methods that Obama and others later labeled torture.
  
The Senate report is by far the most comprehensive account to date of a highly classified program that was established within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a time of widespread concern that an additional wave of terrorist plots had already been set in motion.

Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The American public needs to be forced to realize that its government under Bush and Cheney engaged in conduct more akin to Nazi Germany than what those who wrap themselves in the American flag like to hold up as this nation's image.  Again, until those who ordered such barbarous practices are held accountable, America has no moral credibility.