Cheney and/or Palin in 2012? Ridiculous.

I have read that there are people proposing a run for President by Sarah Palin and possibly a run by a Cheney/Palin ticket. While nothing is impossible, the likelihood of such a ticket is - let's just say extremely limited. Here's my reasoning.

Palin has a truly fervent support group, but it's probably not as large by itself as Huckabee's was in 2008. She's a Dominionist with the belief that government should be controlled by evangelicals (like herself) who rule with the Bible as the ultimate source of law. That's the identical belief held by the Ayatollah in Iran and by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That belief leads to that same philosophy and structure of government as in current Iran, except with a different book. Since Palin is an evangelical herself, she has the support of those like her who vote identity politics. They'll never dominate America, although they certainly do dominate much of the South, Texas and some of the Midwest. But they are a minority even there, who only get political dominance because of the fervency of their beliefs.

Then there is the fact that Palin has always quit her state-wide offices before the end of the term when she could not do the job successfully and began to fail. She can't deliver what she promises her supporters. She is an inherent outsider. She is not competent to perform as someone who is an insider and who has to be depended on. That's simply beyond her.

Palin only got state-wide jobs in the first place because Alaska is such a small and insular state and because she represents the small but fervent evangelical political group who votes identity politics. She'll never stand up to real competition. Her incompetence is now clear, her actual record of performance is too checkered, and her sick evangelical dominionist religious beliefs will scare off too many voters. She'll wither like a snowflake in front of a blast furnace. Which, of course, is why she resigned from the previous council she was on as well as resigning as governor. When I was in the artillery I would have described enemy on a battleground like that as a target-rich environment.

Then there's Dick Cheney. With Cheney's heart troubles, he isn't going to run for President, assuming he lives that long, and that's not very likely. He's on borrowed time right now. The stress of running would kill him, and if that didn't happen, he wouldn't last a single term. And he knows it himself. Don't expect him to run or to be open to an invitation to run. He'd rather live longer and influence the debates.

Cheney for President in 2012? He is not likely to live that long.

Neither person is any more likely to get the Republican nomination than Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee was in 2008. Plan on it. It ain't going to happen, folks.

Cheny still obsessive about the threats America faces

Even after leaving public office and while suffering from weak heart, Dick Cheney is as obsessive as ever about correcting the many mistakes American politicians are making.

Cheney passes most of his days at the top of the garage at his new house in McLean, where he built an office under the dormered roof and filled it with books and binders of his vice presidential papers. He kept copies of the unclassified ones and consults the rest on visits to the National Archives. He took detailed notes in the White House, head bobbing up and down as he wrote and sometimes disappearing from the screen in videoconferences. Those notes, according to one person who has discussed them with Cheney, will form the core of his account of the Bush years.

"What impressed me was his continuing zeal," said an associate who discussed the book with Cheney. "He hadn't stepped back a bit from the positions he took in office to a more relaxed, Olympian view. He was still very much in the fray. He's not going to soften anything or accommodate shifts of conscience. There was no sense in which he looked back and said, 'I wish I'd done something differently.' Rather, there was a sense that they hadn't gone far enough. If he'd been equipped with a group of people as ideologically rigorous as he was, they'd have been able to push further."

Barton Gellman, author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency the biography on Cheney, continues to tell the story of Mr. Cheney in his retirement.

History will determine which has been more destructive to the unique American Democratic Republic - the threats that Cheney perceives or Dick Cheney himself.

The Bush/Cheney attack on Iran would have stopped the current Iranian revolution

Do you realize where the young people in Iran would have been today if we or the Israelis had attacked Iran? Iran would have been on a war footing, just as America was after December 7, 1941 and Ahmahdinejad would have been reelected with no questions asked.Those same young people who are today demonstrating in the streets would instead be volunteering to attack the enemies who attacked Iran.

Think not? Bernard Avishai provides the in-depth analysis.

Think war brings peace? Ask the Palestinians in Gaza. The Israelis did not secure peace, or secure their borders, or secure the the long term existence of Israel by attacking Gaza. Nor did the Gazans obtain peace and stability by shooting rockets into Israel. Nor did the Iranian hardliners secure Iran by shipping rockets and weapons to the Palestinians. All the hardliners of all the nations have to offer is a perpetual cycle of more war and killing and starvation for their people.

War does not bring peace and social stability. War begats more war.

Peace and stability require a political solution - along with careful and appropriate policing to deal with individual crazies and bandits.

Cheney's AEI speech today: "it's Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks. "

Josh Marshall comments on Dick Cheney's upcoming well-announced speech at the American Enterprise Institute today.

"This is someone who not only organized and seemingly directed a policy of state-sponsored torture. He did it in large part to get people to admit to crankish conspiracy theories he got taken in by by a crew of think-tank jockeys in DC whose theories most even half way sensible people treated as punch lines of jokes. So it's Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks.

This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure -- and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain't Shakespearean."

If you disagree with this analysis, then you haven't read Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman>

The great Republican defender of torture as American government policy is, in fact, scared to death that he will be blamed for using torture to get fake confessions to support is ridiculous belief that Sadam Hussein and al Qaeda were working together, when in fact they were deadly enemies. But in particular is is now quite clear that Ahmed Chalabi, probably working as an agent of Iranian Intelligence, ran an operation to get Cheney and other top Republicans to commit to attacking Iran's deadly enemy, Iraq. It worked.

Sinceso much of the media was extremely complicit in supporting Cheney's idiocy, it is no surprise that the media is now hyping the sick, cranky old man's idiotic statements with great publicity.

Waldman asks the right questions about Cheney's torture efforts

David Waldman properly describes the torture effort directed by Dick Cheney. This is based on the recent revelations from McClatchy News and from Lawrence Wilkerson.




We now know that the so-called "ticking time-bomb" scenario did not occur. What did occur is that Dick Cheney used his position as Vice President to direct the invasion of Iraq, a nation which was no real threat to the U.S. and which had no capability to threaten the U.S. Cheney's real reasons for directing the invasion of Iraq are not known, unless perhaps it was a symptom of his paranoia.

Cheney could do this because he was the Vice President in a White House in which the person occupying the office of President permitted him to run anything he wanted in the federal government without oversight. He collected many of his acolytes onto the White House staff and ran the White House Iraq Group, pushing the propaganda effort that worked to justify the invasion of Iraq.

It is well known that Bush had no knowledge of national security matters and deferred to Cheney's widely acknowledged greater expertise. Bush himself concealed his lack of knowledge of government operations and his total lack of interest in them behind a wall of supposedly setting goals and then delegating their achievement to subordinates. Apparently no one ever got it through to him as he was handed his Harvard MBA (based on who is father was) that the manager who delegates in that manner has to set goals and hold the subordinates to their achievement with close oversight. Bush certainly never did that. He let Cheney run wild. For that failure, Bush is a failed President.

But for his successful efforts to invade an non-threatening country and then to try to direct the torture of prisoners to obtain confessions to justify that illegal invasion, Dick Cheney is a war criminal.

---

Addendum 10:45am
How do we know that the torture was used to justify the war crime after the fact? Dick Cheney knows or should know the truth about torture, which Bob Cesca states very clearly:

"According to multiple accounts and experts, the efficacy of torture is limited to ascertaining what the torturer wants to hear -- rather than information that's actually true. "

Given that fact, the only possible reason for torturing prisoners is to obtain false confessions to justify the idiocy of invading Iraq when the real enemy was al Qaeda, an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

---

Addendum II 12:45 pm
Batocchio has written an extremely good analysis of the torture situation and provides links to many good resources.

Re: Pelosi torture briefing - so what?

There's been a lot of talk, primarily by right-wingers who want to defend their support of the use of torture on captives, that then minority leader Nancy Pelosi was somehow briefed that the CIA was using maybe planned to use enhanced questioning techniques to get Intelligence about terrorists and proposed terrorism acts.

Vicki Divoll [*], in an OpEd published in the New York Times, points out that there is no legally constituted body called "The Gang of Four" to begin with. Even assuming that the CIA did actually honestly brief Rep. Pelosi about the proposed use of waterboarding (it's not at all certain that they did) she was restricted from telling any of her colleagues about it. What was she supposed to do with the information if it was actually given to her?

The Constitution gives "...aggregate, not individual, powers to the legislative branch." The minority leader is relatively powerless in the first place. With the restrictions placed on communicating any information actually provided to any other member of Congress, there was nothing she could have done.

I'd also point out that there is no way of showing that the CIA actually told her anything. The so-called memo does not have any credibility since the CIA does not present the person who wrote it and placed it in the files. That could easily have been done last week, and with the CIA very invested in deflecting blame from themselves and also with the CIA populated by people whose normal job description includes large measures lying to the various publics to manipulate political responses, they are innately under suspicion. The fact that Sen. Mel Martinez also says he was not briefed on the use of actual torture techniques adds credibility to Rep. Nancy Pelosi's denial that she was briefed.

But the while the fact that Nancy Pelosi was briefed in a timely manner on the use of torture techniques by the CIA is very much in doubt, that doesn't matter. With the restrictions on her communication to other in Congress even if she was briefed, there was nothing she had any power to do with the information. The whole issue is right-wing deflection of blame from anyone who actually is responsible to someone else who could not have been responsible.

The real question is whether there was a crime committed (almost certain) and if so, who might be prosecuted for such a crime (less certain.)

A second and perhaps even more important question, as become whether Dick Cheney and his evil twin, David Addington, were actually attempting to justify the then proposed invasion of Iraq by torturing false confessions that purported to prove a link between Sadaam Hussein and al Qaeda. It is now well-known that torture does not elicit useful Intelligence. It instead forces the victim of torture to say whatever the torturer wants to hear just to make the torture stop. So while torture is effectively useless as an Intelligence-gathering tool, it is excellent for creating false confessions that can be used to justify actions the torturer wants the public to support.

It now appears that Dick Cheney's defense of torture as a way of gathering Intelligence is actually a cover-up of his office's pressure to torture confessions that justified Cheney's belief that Sadaam was allied with al Qaeda and had nuclear weapons. That makes the torture of prisoners at his clear direction the equivalent of the discredited "Italian Letter" that purported to show that Iraq was getting Yellow cake unranium to build nukes. In fact, the next question that should be revived was whether Ahmed Chalibi was the point-man who the Iranians used to run a highly successful Intelligence scam on Dick Cheney and his right-wing allies like the columnists/propagandists Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.

Compared to all these real questions, the idea that because Nancy Pelosi might have been briefed on the CIA's use of torture techniques is nothing more than an irrelevant distraction. It is pure right-wing propaganda designed and pushed to prevent the real criminals from being identified and punished.

[*] Vicki Divoli is former CIA CTC deputy general counsel. She knows what she is talking about.

---

Laura Rozen has a very good analysis of all the events that have led to the current attacks on Nancy Pelosi and to her spirited pushback. The entire briefing process and its misuse and the lies apparently told by the CIA go back to the office of the Vice President and Dick Cheney.

Wilkerson shoots down Cheney's lies

Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson was listening as Dick Cheney shot off his mouth lying about how successful the Cheney-Bush administration was in protecting American lives during seven-and-on-half years after they stupidly allowed the 9-11 terrorists to kill over 3000 Americans. So Col. Wilkerson has written his response. Here it is, along with a short video of Cheney's on-TV statement which prompted it.

---

Addendum 5/15/2009 8:48pm
Joe Conason writes about how torture was used to justify the war in Iraq. It was not used to warn of upcoming terrorist activities. I was used to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

Obama is right to be reluctant to investigate Bush admin officials and the torture issue

I am a strong proponent of the Rule of Law as a basic element of the American nation, since without the Rule of Law the Constitution itself, the basis of all American law, is nothing by a fanciful piece of fiction. So I strongly support investigation of the high government officials and prosecution when necessary. No one is above the law. Ever. That is an absolute necessity in America if America is to continue to exist as a democratic form of nation.

That said, Harry Truman considered the need for national health care to be critical back in 1948. It was seriously discussed when Social Security was passed in the 30's. It's been two generations now, and the need has only gotten much worse in the intervening years of conservative obstruction and delay. I also see what appears to me to be a concerted effort by Obama and his administration to clear the decks of anything and everything that would interfere with passing universal national health care in some form this year.

Obama is gathering allies and neutralizing opponents at every step of his administration, and I'd guess that even includes the sacrifice of some things he otherwise considers very, very important. To me that appears a likely explanation for many of the decisions, actions and statements that Obama has been making which have infuriated Progressives. One of those items is, I think, Obama's reluctance to be seen supporting investigation and the potential prosecution of Bush/Cheney officials for their crimes in office. I think that every action, decision and statement out of the Obama administration has to be considered in the light of the question of how it will effect Obama's effort to pass universal health care by October of this year.

My guess is that the Obama effort to avoid a divisive battle over investigating and possible prosecution of Bush/Cheney administration officials is one of the otherwise extremely important things that is being sacrificed to get the health care bill passed. Any such prosecutions will unavoidably be highly divisive and will completely consume the media, sucking wind out of the health care issue. Prosecutions of ex-government officials is "sexy" and easy reporting to the media, just as dead blond girls or the J.R. murder trial are. Health care legislation is not similarly easy to cover. Obama has a unique opportunity to pass health care at long last, and the investigation/prosecution issue threatens that greatly.

That's the kind of balancing act that Presidents must perform. There are two absolutely critical issues that have to be dealt with, and to deal with either means sacrificing the other. If I'm right, then Obama's choice of putting all his effort into the health care fight is, I'd say, the correct decision. Not one I like and not a pretty choice, but certainly the one that I think needs to be made for the long term good of America.

Blundered Katrina reaction ended the Bush administration

It was the government's poor reaction to the Katrina disaster that ended their ability to get anything done. The Associated Press reports on an upcoming Vanity Fair article that reports part of an oral history on the bush administration due to be distributed nationally January 6.

Staff AP News Dec 29, 2008 21:41 EST

Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster.

"Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin." [Snip]

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs. When Bush first came into office, he was surrounded by experienced advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell, who Wilkerson said ended up playing damage control for the president.

"It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president — because, let's face it, that's what he was — was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," Wilkerson said, adding that he considered Cheney probably the "most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur" he'd ever met.

"He became vice president well before George Bush picked him," Wilkerson said of Cheney. "And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."

Wilkerson's comment on Cheney confirms what was written about Cheney in Barton Gellman's excellent book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

But it was the Bush administration's blundered reaction to the Katrina disaster that exposed its incompetence and passiveness in the similarly passive media. Once it became clear in the media that the government handling of Katrina was incompetent, it reflected back on their failure to prevent 9/11 as well as their failed occupation of Iraq and the unacknowledged rise of the Iraqi insurgency. The Bush administration's current passiveness and failed reactions to the economic crisis simply demonstrate that the problem is inherent in the Bush administration and not a one time screw up.

---

Addendum 10:57 am CST
Kevin Drum thinks that Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett missed part of the story about the public reaction the Bush's handling of Katrina.

I think this is only half right. I've long believed that what really killed Bush was the contrast between his handling of Katrina and his handling of the Terri Schiavo case, which had come only a few months earlier. It was just too stark. What the American public saw was that when the religious right was up in arms, the president and the Republican Party acted. Bill Frist performed his famous long-distance diagnosis; Tom DeLay fulminated on the floor of the House; Republicans tried to subpoena both Terri and Michael Schiavo; and President Bush interrupted his vacation and made his famous midnight flight to Washington DC to sign a bill transferring the case to federal court. It was both a whirlwind and a political circus.

And it showed that Bush could be moved to action if the right constituency was at risk. It wasn't just that Bush was mostly MIA during the early stages of Katrina, but that he was plainly capable of being engaged in an emergency if it was the right kind of emergency. But apparently New Orleans wasn't it. And that was the final nail in the coffin of his presidency.

So it wasn't just Bush's clearly bad handling of Katrina. It was also the fact that Katrina made it very clear the Bush was ready to support the religious right, but not the American people. So the American people turned on him.

That makes sense. Bush was able to conceal his failure to prevent 9/11 by good public relations and by acting like he was doing stuff about it afterwards. Maybe he really couldn't have prevented 9/11. But he really could have done a lot more about Katrina, and he could have at least acted like he cared. He did neither.

But I think there is yet another element to be considered. The media has operated on a stampede effect since about 1990, possibly starting with the Persian Gulf War. When 9/11 occurred, America was attacked in the biggest surprise attack since Pearl Harbor, and the media was ready to rally around the President no matter what. Bush was good at keeping the media on the subjects he wanted covered and was an expert at painting anyone who objected to his actions as being supporters of the 9/11 attackers. The problem with Katrina is that it was a well-anticipated problem with no enemy attacker behind it, and the 9/11 - terrorist - War on Terror media narrative did not work. Then the Bush administration so very clearly did nothing right during Katrina (after being handed the best FEMA ever by Bill Clinton) and also simply did nothing at all afterwards. Katrina created its own media narrative, and that narrative was far from kind to the Bush administration. For once the members of the media got out and actually reported, and a large part of the news was Bush's lackadaisical lethargic actions and frequent missteps.

Even Bush's loss of control of the media narrative showed clearly that Bush, as President, had no interest in the welfare of the American people in general. This is where Kevin's contrast to the earlier Terry Schiavo events comes in. Bush and the Republican clearly did not lose control of the media narrative during the Terry Schiavo mess. Why? Because they cared about what the religious right wanted. so the contrast between Schiavo and Katrina very heavily influenced American public opinion.

How Dick Cheney created the key policies of the eight-year Bush administration

Dick Cheney is known to be far and away the most powerful Vice President America has ever had. There is not even any debate on this subject. The obvious question is “How did he become so powerful?” It's not a new question.

This question is generally answered briefly, and pretty much everyone who knows about the issue answers it much the same way. The first response is to point to his experience in government. They will always point to Cheney’s experience in the White House as Ford’s chief of staff, his time in Congress during which he was Republican Whip, then his time as Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush. The second thing normally mentioned is George W. Bush’s dislike of the mechanics of governance, usually associated with a brief statement that as the first MBA President, “W” delegates his work to his subordinates. Both facts are true, but “W” has brought a lot of experienced people into government and delegated work to them. No one else has ever placed their own agenda into action in the way that defines the Bush Presidency. What has made Dick Cheney such a unique individual in “W’s” White House?

At last Barton Gellman explains how Cheney accomplished his task of setting so very much of the White House agenda in his excellent book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. There is a lot in the book, but what has not been clear until now has been what tools Cheney has used to manipulate government and set it to the tasks that forwarded his agenda. His agenda included the economic issues, the security issues and the energy issues.

Cheney was brought in as a defense – foreign policy expert to educate then Governor George W. Bush as he prepared to run for election as President. His broad experience in the federal government and his wide network of personal contacts made him a logical person to task with finding a Vice Presidential candidate to join with Bush. Cheney’s control of that process provided him with the background on potential candidates and at the same time to frame what characteristics the Vice President should have. Cheney defined the requirements such that he himself was the best candidate, convinced Bush that he met the requirements for Vice President, and with his knowledge of the other candidates’ deepest secrets he was able to present them to W in such a way that they were not selected. In the end, candidate George W. Bush was presented with a single clear candidate who met the requirements Cheney had established – Cheney himself.

Cheney was not selected the assist in electing Bush. He was selected in part because he would not run for President himself, so he would not become an opponent within the White House fighting Bush’s policies. So Cheney was chosen to assist Bush govern when he was elected without becoming a threat to Bush.

Cheney started organizing the executive office even as the battle for the Florida votes was being fought by Jim Baker. At that point Cheney took over the staffing of the federal government for the incoming administration. He asked Bush for the role and Bush gave it to him. He knew what positions needed to be filled, what individuals in those positions could do for him or to him, and he had his wide network of contacts and friends available to fill those jobs. He also had a Republican Senate to work with, so that his appointees could be quickly confirmed.

The network that Cheney set up is quit interesting. First he brought “Scooter” Libby and David Addington into his own office. These were people he had long worked with. He then arranged for everything in the White House to run through his office. In addition, he had Libby assigned as Assistant to the President, the highest rank in the White House so that he outranked almost everyone in Bush’s office. Several other members of Cheney’s staff also held the same rank as individuals doing the same job for the President. Mary Matalin, Cheney’s Counselor, shared rank and office space with Karen Hughes who was Counselor for Bush. In previous White Houses the members of the Vice Presidents’ office held rank one level below that of the equivalent person on the President’s staff.

Then Cheney chose individuals for the policy positions. Cheney placed Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor (she had previously worked for him) and backed her up with Steven J. Hadley who had also worked for Cheney at the Department of Defense. Then he placed Colin Powell, who he had previously promoted to Chief of Staff when he was Secretary of Defense, at Secretary of State . Donald Rumsfeld, who went to Secretary of Defense, had been Cheney’s mentor and closest friend since they worked together under Nixon. Paul O’Neil, who went to Secretary of Treasury, had worked closely with Cheney when Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff. Cheney chose John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Ashcroft had embarrassingly just lost a Senate race to a man who had died three weeks before the election, and was grateful to Cheney for the position.

Cheney was not working just to get control of the top of the major departments. He also knew that a lot of issues that came to the top for decisions had been selected and framed by individuals at levels below Department Secretary, so he suggested that trusted acolytes be appointed positions at lower levels in the bureaucracy. One example is John Bolton who went to the State Department to keep Colin Powell from going off Cheney’s defined reservation. These appointments gave Cheney control or awareness of new issues as they moved up the bureaucracy and gave him a major advantage over other players of bureaucratic politics since he was generally prepared for new issues before they were.

The foreign policy team consists of The Attorney General, The central intelligence director and the secretaries of state, defense and treasury. When the Foreign policy team meets, it is called the Principals Committee, except when the President is attending. Then it is called the National Security Council. The normal job of the National Security Adviser is to chair meetings of the Principals Committee. Chairing the committee means to set the agenda and to coordinate activities the committee directs. Cheney chose to join the committee, making him the highest ranking member when the President was absent. Richard Haas, director of policy planning in the State Department, later described Cheney’s role as getting “Three bites at the apple,” on every decision. Cheney got his information from the deputies, then from the Principal’s committee, and then had his influence on Bush when the two of them were alone.

This wasn’t all that Cheney was involved in. As Vice President he had an office with the Senate. He also had regular meetings with Senator Arlen Specter and a few other senior Republican Senators. He also went to his old friend Bill Thomas, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and asked for an office in the House. He got one right off the floor. This was important because all tax bills originate in the House.

With this structure in the executive branch and congress as well as his web of contacts throughout the government Cheney was in position to be aware of and able to influence major issues from their inception to the point at which George W. Bush finally decided what to do with them. This was possible because Bush himself was disinterested in most of what Cheney was doing .

It appears to me that the hard right-wing turn of the Bush administration in Bush’s first term was largely dictated by Cheney’s agenda. It was permitted by Bush because he trusted Cheney. Cheney immediately followed any direction given by Bush and so kept that trust, but in many cases Bush simply did not make a decision, letting issues grow and fester in the bureaucracy. In those cases Cheney felt free to use his own power to implement the elements of his own agenda.

Barton Gellman describes this process in much greater depth and carries it on well past its initiation. The book is worth buying and reading.

Dick Cheney - The most dangerous man in America

Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman has published his book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, describing Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President America has ever suffered. Much of what Gellman has written is new information for the public.

The story that becomes clear is that Dick Cheney arranged to have himself chosen Vice President by George W. Bush, and from that position has spent the last seven-and-a-half years working to create a Monarchical role of"Commander in Chief" for the American President in which the President is the supreme decision-maker with almost no limitations by any other institution including Congress and the Courts. Except for earlier reports by Gellman this story has also completely escaped the notice of the American media.

The following is an except from the review of "Angler" by Steve Clemons.

Richard Cheney has sculpted the vice presidency in a way never seen before. He revolutionized an office that has turned many of its occupants into obscure eccentrics—one that Benjamin Franklin referred to as “Your Superfluous Excellency.” Cheney refused to do state funerals. Instead, he rerouted the in- and outboxes of power in the White House and turned himself into the nation’s most consequential political force. Whether George W. Bush approved or not, his VP animated most of the controversial policies that will define for decades the Bush II presidency. [Snip]

Cheney was put in charge of finding Bush’s VP, and he positioned himself for selection. He uncovered, through an exhaustive questionnaire process, the most private and intimate details of the lives of the other candidates. No one vetted Cheney, though, so nobody had anything on him. He had the goods on everyone else, and he got the nod from Bush.

The curious way in which Cheney maneuvered himself onto Bush’s ticket is one of many disturbing stories in this new and brilliantly researched account of Cheney’s adventures as Bush’s “No. 2.” Barton Gellman, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist, examines the nuts and bolts of Cheney’s power apparatus. He shows how a mere vice president engineered a massive expansion of presidential power, knocked back the constitutional authority of Congress and the judiciary, helped launch an illegitimate war, developed a system for spying on America’s citizens, oversaw White House-sanctioned torture, and pushed official secrecy to unprecedented levels. We see how Cheney punctured America’s mystique as a benign and respected nation—how he shattered the moral, economic, and military pillars of American power. [Snip]

Gellman ... records previously unknown anecdotes about the inner workings of the administration and Cheney’s take-no-prisoners approach to winning policy battles. While Bush and members of his inner circle like Karl Rove seemed to be obsessed with the political machinations of their work, Cheney had a deeper purpose behind his crusades. For him politics and political gamesmanship, seduction, and intimidation were all about changing the nation’s policy course—all about principle. Cheney['s]... heart and soul were invested in the most important and controversial aspects of the Bush presidency, the policy areas he cared about most—terrorism, intelligence, national security, energy, environmental policy, tax and budget issues.[Snip]

Cheney and his abrasive lawyer David Addington wanted to bring on governmental crises and tensions with Congress in order to demonstrate the dominance and infallibility of presidential power, which they defined as the “unitary executive.” In Gellman’s framing, Cheney saw 9/11, discussions with energy lobbyists, and even torture policy as mere vehicles for asserting his vision of a near monarchical presidency.

Angler leads its readers to think that, even without 9/11, Cheney would have found triggers to justify his imperial expansion of presidential powers and official secrecy, his pugnacious disregard for international law, the huge defense spending increases, the war against Iraq—or whatever nation would show that America was an irresistible force—and the massive tax cuts. Gellman argues that Cheney was never an apostle of neoconservatism. He didn’t have a burning desire to establish democracy in Iraq. For Cheney, John Bolton, Addington, and others, Iraq was but a means to an end—a tool to expand presidential prerogatives. The same does not necessarily apply to Scooter Libby, a leading neoconservative thinker who strongly favored the invasion for ideological reasons.

This book is simply one of the scariest stories ever written about contemporary America. Cheney and Addington essentially hijacked the bureaucracy of national security and put themselves in the cockpit of government. In chapter after chapter, we read how Cheney set about constructing a secretive system of government and policymaking in which he was accountable to almost no one. We see, for instance, how Cheney pushed through the second round of tax cuts—a move that made even Bush uncomfortable—and how he undermined Christine Todd Whitman, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, over laws regarding air quality. [Snip]

Cheney’s maneuvers, his angling inside the wide berth that Bush gave him, eventually created so much blowback from colleagues inside the administration and Congress that his office began to slide off its rails. Gellman relates a telling incident involving this reviewer and the vice president on the subject of North Korea, when it appeared that Cheney was unaware of President Bush’s intention to ask Congress to remove North Korea from the terrorist watch list. (I was not the source of this information: the New York Times reported the encounter between Cheney and me on its front page.) At an off-the-record forum, I asked Cheney about the possible change toward North Korea. The question was simple, but Cheney froze, staring at me for an awkwardly long time. He refused to answer, then left the stage. Gellman suggests that Cheney, who for years had been wired into every key national-security decision and able to paralyze nearly all policies with which he disagreed, had been left out—“not read in,” according to the lingo—of the policy-making process, the very tactic his team had so often used against their rivals.

Cheney was also frustrated on the Iran front, increasingly convinced that his team was losing in the interagency process to State Department officials R. Nicholas Burns, Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Gates. He felt his hawkish, more militarily focused strategy was being undermined by advocates of diplomacy. In a Salon article on Sept. 19, 2007, “Why Bush Won’t Attack Iran,” I disclosed that a senior member of Cheney’s team had said that the vice president was considering ways to “tie the president’s hands” and outflank those delaying a confrontation with Tehran—a policy that Cheney felt amounted to appeasement. Clearly, the Angler’s influence was declining. Some sources suggest that Cheney still wields great power and has of late been winning his battles again against Rice, Bellinger, Gates, and others. But he is certainly a long way from his halcyon first years in office, when he had virtually nothing stopping him.

[highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

This looks like a book that explains a great deal of the inner workings - especially the series of blunders - of the Bush White House since January 2001.

Here's a question this review triggers. A great many people have anticipated that Bush will create some form of "October Surprise" between now and the Presidential election in order to get McCain elected President. But if Cheney has been the primary motivator of so many of the White House activities, is Cheney either interested or in a position to cause some kind of international incident in the next two weeks? What is the relationship between McCain and Cheney?

I have written a great deal about the Reagan Revolution, its underlying conservative ideology, and the manner in which the Reagan Revolution has led directly to the present credit crisis and Recession. Gellman's book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, suggests that behind the scenes of - and perhaps even mostly unrelated to - the current economic crises there has been a very different mechanism for many of the disasters that have been created by the Bush administration. I suspect that this book will be the basis for a lot of the defenses created by conservatives to avoid blame for the disastrous state that America has been brought down to. It won't wash. Dick Cheney and his acolytes have been a key element of Republican dominance for the last three decades and especially so since 2001. The Conservatives who will be wanting to distance themselves from him are the same ones who linked arms and supported his actions in lockstep, just as the social conservatives have. Conservatives are driven as much be social cronyism as they are by their myth of ideology. They just don't like to look at that aspect of being a conservative.

A Review of a book is supposed to sell people on the idea of buying and reading it. Steve Clemon's review has succeeded.

Putin accuses US of fomenting crisis in Georgia to get one Presidential candidate elected.

From CNN Europe:

From CNN's Matthew Chance

SOCHI, Russia (CNN) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the United States of orchestrating the conflict in Georgia to benefit one of its presidential election candidates.
Russian PM Vladimir Putin has accused the U.S. of orchestrating the conflict in Georgia.

In an exclusive interview with CNN's Matthew Chance in the Black Sea city of Sochi on Thursday, Putin said the U.S. had encouraged Georgia to attack the autonomous region of South Ossetia.

Putin said his defense officials had told him it was done to benefit a presidential candidate -- Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are competing to succeed George W. Bush -- although he presented no evidence to back it up.

"U.S. citizens were indeed in the area in conflict," Putin said. "They were acting in implementing those orders doing as they were ordered, and the only one who can give such orders is their leader."

Gee. Why he would think that? And which candidate do you think he is talking about, the one that belongs to the party in the White House or the one who belongs to the party outside the White House without the power to induce Saakishvili to attack South Ossetia?

Considering the history of the Bush/Cheney administration there is no accusation that can be made that is too extreme to be considered within the realm of reasonable possibility, is there?

Cheney's top top National Security aide was in Geogia just before Saakishvili attacked South Ossetia

Does anyone seriously believe that Joseph R. Wood, Cheney's deputy assistant for national security affairs was in Georgia just before Saakishvili attacked into South Ossetia and didn't discuss (and encourage?) the attack?

Read the LA Times short article Why was Cheney's guy in Georgia before the war?, then go read Pat Buchanan's description of what happened in South Ossetia at Pat Buchanan on what happened in South Ossetia.

Dick Cheney is, of course, the leader of the Neocon ProWar efforts trying to demonize Iran, North Korea, Syria, the Palestinians, and others. Every international problem calls for another war or application of military force. Wood's presence in Georgia just before the hotheaded Saakishvili invaded South Ossetia is unlikely to be a mere coincidence. That so many Georgians reported believing that the U.S. would come to their support if the Russians counterattacked suggests that Wood had reinforced the apparent American support for Georgia in its conflict with Russia over the breakaway provinces.

Did Wood encourage Saakishvili to "Bait the Bear" as Dick Cheney's representative? Was Cheney beating they could bluff Putin? Some reporters think so. Now that the effort has failed, we'll probably never get any answer from the Office of the Vice President. Maybe, once the Bush administration is gone, the Georgians will tell what happened. Of course, since the direct responsibility for the disaster falls on Saakishvili, it'll have to come from someone other than him.

It's another disaster mystery out of the Bush administration that the historians are going to need to dig into.

Cheney's plausible deniability explains Bush's incompetence as President

In the excerpts of Ron Suskind’s new book Mike Allen at Politico quotes a very interesting observation by Suskind, one that explains much of the incoherence and poor management that has characterized the Bush White House since day one. Allen quotes Suskind as saying about Dick Cheney:

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

--Suskind is acidly derisive of Bush, saying that he initially lost his “nerve” on 9/11, regaining it when he grabbed the Ground Zero bullhorn. Suskind says Bush’s 9 p.m. Oval Office address on the fifth anniversary was “well along in petulance, seasoned by a touch of self-defensiveness.”

Bush has frequently seemed lost and out of touch with reality. An excellent example was his videotaped reaction on 9/11 as he was notified that the second hijacked aircraft hit the World Trade Center.

Anyone who has watched that video of Bush reading "My Pet Goat" to school children when he was notified is aware the Bush lost his nerve. It was all over his face. He was also very confused. He didn’t know which way to turn.

Upon leaving the school Bush retreated to his plane to fly to some safe location. According to an essay posted on History Commons:

"A journalist who said Bush was “flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother’s bed after having a nightmare” and another who said Bush “skedaddled” were fired. [Washington Post, 9/29/01 (B)]"

The almost random flight out of Florida headed anywhere besides Washington, D.C. confirms those characterizations. They were threatening to the White House exactly because they were such accurate characterizations of Bush's indecisive behavior.

Bush left Sarasota, FL and headed first for Louisiana, then Nebraska as they tried to find the safest place for him to hide out. He had not only lost his nerve, he couldn't make a coherent decision regarding where to go or what to do. That indecisiveness is not surprising for a Chief Executive who is being protected from accountability by being kept in ignorance.

If Cheney was making the decisions and protecting Bush to give him "plausible deniability" it would mean that Bush wouldn’t dare to make a decision because the process of plausible deniability would mean Cheney was holding holding back critical relevant information from Bush. Bush would never know enough to make decisions! If Bush were to make an independent decision on his own, he could never be sure he wasn’t screwing up plans Cheney hadn’t told him about. The result is that only Dick Cheney could make decisions for Bush and for the nation.

So plausible deniability would protect Bush from accountability for the actions of his administration, but it would also mean that Bush himself would never have enough information about what was being done in his name to create a coherent administration policy.

Each of Bush’s subordinates would be left to operate on their own without the guidance and coordination that an overall strategy conducted by a knowledgeable and accountable strategic manager should have provided. Instead of focusing on their assigned jobs, each subordinate finds it necessary to build his own base of power and protect it from those around him. Only after establishing his individual base of power will Bush’s subordinates be in a position to try to accomplish his task.

While the idea of plausible deniability to protect the chief executive from being held accountable for the criminal actions of his subordinates sounds neat to someone with a Machiavellian attitude (like Cheney or Rumsfeld), withholding critical information from the chief executive means the CEO is not competent to perform his job. Instead of managing, Bush merely presides over a fiefdom of independent Barons in which each has his own base of power and has to fight with the others to protect or extend his personal power.

Another severe weakness of giving the Chief Executive plausible deniability is that it guts the separation of powers in the Constitution and shreds the Rule of Law.

This is not something that was done to Bush. It is something he has approved of. Bush clearly wants to imagine that by holding the office of President he is automatically a leader and can conduct his leadership by delegating the work to subordinates, it means he cannot hold subordinates responsible for what they each individually decide to do. Bush has never liked the hard work of administration and has no interest in it. So Cheney's plan to protect him through plausible deniability met a willing figurehead leader who was happy to cooperate.

Suskind's description of Cheney's decision to protect Bush from impeachment by "plausible deniability" really explains one major mechanism that has created the utterly incompetent Bush administration. It has happened because a lazy President chose a paranoid Machiavellian Vice President to guide him and to direct the functioning of the Federal Government while protecting Bush from accountability.

White House ordered CIA to forge letter to justify the Iraq invasion

Ron Suskind has a new book out in which according to Mike Allen at Politico he states

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush [Saddam's Intelligence Chief] to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.” [Snip]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

Another thing that Suskind reports refers to whether the Bush White House knew there were WMD's in Iraq.

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.

“They secretly resettled him in Jordan, paid him $5 million – which one could argue was hush money – and then used his captive status to help deceive the world about one of the era’s most crushing truths: that America had gone to war under false pretenses,” the book says.

Allen also reports other revelations reported by Suskind in the new book.

Among the 415-page book’s other highlights:

--John Maguire, one of two men who oversaw the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group, was frustrated by what Suskind describes as the “tendency of the White House to ignore advice it didn’t want to hear – advice that contradicted its willed certainty, political judgments, or rigid message strategies.”

And Suskind writes that the administration “did not want to hear the word insurgency.” [Snip]

--Suskind contends Cheney established “deniability” for Bush as part of the vice president’s “complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president.”

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

--Suskind is acidly derisive of Bush, saying that he initially lost his “nerve” on 9/11, regaining it when he grabbed the Ground Zero bullhorn. Suskind says Bush’s 9 p.m. Oval Office address on the fifth anniversary was “well along in petulance, seasoned by a touch of self-defensiveness.”

Suskind's book looks like it is well worth reading.

Recipe for diplomatic success - 1. First remove Cheney from process

Digby nailed this story.

Not even Fourthbranch, the Barnacle himself, could outmaneuver the State Department on this one, and he's not happy:

WASHINGTON — Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

Mr. Cheney froze, according to four participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been taking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution. Finally, he spoke:

“I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” the other participants recalled Mr. Cheney saying, pointing at himself. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.” He then declared that he was done taking questions, and left the room.

The Barnacle froze because it's one of the few things that could be considered a foreign policy triumph in the history of the Bush Administration, and it happened because mindless warhawks like him were finally sidelined. Bush's North Korea policy began with a series of mishaps and belligerence, just as the neocons wished, and it led to Kim Jong-Il getting the bomb. Precisely when the State Department started guiding the policy and Christopher Hill was given leeway to negotiate in the six-party talks, the situation changes, leading to today's destruction of their nuclear facility at Yongbon. The world is still a more dangerous place because of all of the delays, and the DPRK still has about a dozen poorly-designed nuclear weapons as a result.

War Crimes trials for Bush and Cheney? An interesting discussion

How likely is it that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will face war crimes trials in the future? The revelations from the Senate Hearings the last few days make it appear somewhat more likely. Here is what Scott Horton has to say in The New Republic today.

Tuesday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing provided the latest evidence that top Bush administration officials directed the use of torture techniques on detained suspected terrorists. Three panels of witnesses traced the use of highly coercive techniques back to the high echelons of the administration. The day ended with the grilling of William J. Haynes II, the former general counsel of the Department of Defense and a protégé of Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, who is now widely viewed as the "station master" of the administration's torture policy. And in April, ABC News reported that officials including Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld had held a series of meetings to discuss the use of specific torture techniques on detained suspect terrorists. The ABC report amplified earlier stories which said the decision to destroy videotapes of interrogations of suspects in CIA captivity involved four senior White House lawyers and other senior figures.

At the same time, Philippe Sands's new book The Torture Team reveals the falsity of White House claims that the push to introduce torture techniques came from interrogators in the field. Sands demonstrates that the decision to use techniques like waterboarding came from the top, and tracks the elaborate scheme to make it appear that the practices began with a request from Guantánamo.

These disclosures and others have put the issue of war crimes on the front burner. Major General Antonio Taguba just released this statement in the forward to a report just out by Physicians for Human Rights: "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba says. "The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account." In a House Judiciary hearing on June 5 looking into the rendition of Canadian software engineer Maher Arar, for instance, members pressed to know if sufficient evidence had been presented to warrant a criminal investigation into the conduct of administration officials; all three witnesses (including the author) answered affirmatively. In other hearings, witnesses have treaded lightly and experienced frequent failures of recollection, perhaps driven by a concern over self-incrimination. And, indeed, in what may be a sign of things to come, 26 American civil servants are being tried in absentia by an Italian court in Milan for their involvement in the rendition of a radical Muslim cleric to Egypt. So, is it really feasible for Bush administration officials to be tried for war crimes?

So the conclusion is that - Yes, War Crimes were committed, and Yes, they were instigated and organized out of the White House by at least five top administration attorneys who acted on the guidance of the President and the Vice President.

Mark Kleiman, discussing a conference held at Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, adds his analysis to the issue:

"Here's their case, as I understand it, with my reactions to each item in italics following that item.

1. The United States has inflicted torture on captives in the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both directly and by the use of foreign intelligence services as proxies. [Certainly true. BushCo officials have admitted waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, and sleep deprivation.]

2. Torture is forbidden by domestic and international law. [True.]

3. The relevant domestic statute provides the death penalty if the victim dies. [True.]

4. Liability under that law isn't limited to those actually turning the rack; those who give the orders are also vulnerable. [True, though again the issues of proof are complex.]

5. George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and other senior officials ordered that torture be carried out, both as a matter of general policy and in specific instances. [Seems likely, but establishing beyond reasonable doubt exactly what orders were given, by whom, with what knowledge of how those orders would be carried out would be a nightmare at trial.]

6. The law provides no exemption for officials, or for wartime actions. [True, though no doubt John Yoo will write a brief arguing that the President's Commander-in-Chief power makes him constitutionally invulnerable to criminal liability for issuing such orders.]

So the case that Bush, Cheney, and a cabal of a few of their inside supporters committed war crimes has ceased to be in much doubt. The question remains whether they will ever be tried for their crimes.

The general conclusion seems to be that they will not be tried in the United States, but that other countries may well arrest and try them if they visit the wrong nation after leaving office. A recent precedent was the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in Great Britain on a Spanish warrant. Age and ill health allowed Pinochet to avoid being tried. It is very unlikely that Bush could use a similar excuse.

Bush better enjoy his current trip to Europe as Chief of State. Once he leaves office, any trip back there will involve exactly the risk of arrest that Pinochet suffered. Certainly there are many in Europe who would be happy to see Bush or Cheney suffer such a fate.

Bush may well need his rumored Paraguayan land near Brazil and Bolivia.

The Pope Spoke

Jay Leno points out that the Pope today addressed those at the Mass. He spoke out against Evil.

Then Dick Cheney stood up to present the rebuttal.

Is Dick Cheney mentally ill?

There is no doubt that the foreign policy of the Bush administration has been an utter failure. Larry Johnson asks

George Bush has shown us that a weak, not-too-bright leader, can really cock things up on the foreign policy front even when surrounded by senior folks with scads of foreign policy experience. (How can a team comprised of Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney mess things up so badly?)

Good question, so let's look at what has happened to foreign policy under Bush 43.

The key foreign policy person in the Bush administration as been Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was the organizer of the incoming Bush administration in 2000 - 2001. He was personally responsible for choosing the political appointees to be placed throughout the top ranks of the Executive Branch. Cheney placed his acolytes throughout the government. By doing that, he gained the loyalty of those to whom he gave jobs, which gave him more power than anyone in the Executive branch outside of Bush himself.

The other event that was important was based on Bush's well-known ignorance of foreign policy when he was first elected. In preparation for his 2000 election campaign he had brought Dick Cheney in to tutor him on foreign policy - a job which Bush expanded to asking Cheney to find a candidate for Vice President. Cheney found himself. With that history and Bush's well-known distaste for the grubby details of management and policy, it is not any surprise that Bush abdicated foreign policy to Dick Cheney. Cheney then isolated and effectively neutered the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and let Rumsfeld play with the organization of the Pentagon and the military toys it would use. No surprise there. Rumsfeld's military experience was as an aviator. Hardware and organization are more important than foreign policy. It is a truism that winning wars is first logistics, and only after that strategy and tactics matter. With the Department of State left out of policy-making Cheney was left to make conduct the actual foreign policy through the Pentagon.

So America's foreign policy has been the direct responsibility of Vice President Dick Cheney since 2001.

Dick himself has, I think, become extremely paranoid at least in part as a result of his heart trouble. This is one occasional side effect of heart trouble. In addition, he was attracted to the NeoCons who explained to him the views of the Israelis in the Middle East (Dick trusts the Israelis a lot more than the CIA. They certainly have experience in the Middle East which the CIA, focusing on the USSR, has never had.) Combine that with Cheney's impatience with bureaucracy in general (a characteristic of conservatism is that only results matter, and the process gets in the way of the anticipated and therefore right results - a very different attitude from that of good Intelligence analysts) and his belief that the CIA especially as well as most of the non-military Intelligence community was out to get him personally (see Paranoia above), and this gives us the results we have seen during the Bush administration.

Is there a good reason to believe that Cheney is likely to be paranoid? Consider his medical history.

CNN provided a summary of Dick Cheney's heart problems up to July 2001.

• 1978 - first heart attack.
• 1984 - another heart attack.
• 1988 - third heart attack before age 48 resulting in quadruple bypass surgery. This was considered to have stabilized him, so that he had no follow ups after 1994.
• November 22, 2000 - "a very slight heart attack" which led doctors to insert "a coronary stent to prop open a narrowed artery".
• March 5, 2001 - new chest pain and discomfort which leads to an "urgent" procedure to re-open the blocked heart artery treated in November.
• June 29, 2001 - Doctors inserted a pacemaker that includes a defibrillator.

The New York Times article entitled “Mental Decline Is Linked To Heart Bypass Surgery” points to the likelihood that open heart surgery causes brain damage because of interrupted blood flow to the brain. From the New York Times article

Five years after heart bypass surgery, 42 percent of patients show a significant decline on tests of mental ability, probably from brain damage caused by the surgery, doctors from Duke University say in a new study.

Older patients and those with a drop in test scores soon after surgery were most likely to show declines five years later.

With Cheney's history of heart problems that almost certainly themselves reduced blood flow to the brain, he would be a strong candidate to be among the 42 percent of patients who showed decline of mental ability.

Ten weeks after the surgery to insert the pacemaker with defibrillator was September 11, 2001. It would be very reasonable to assume that Dick Cheney's reaction to the threat represented by the 9/11 events would call forth a highly paranoid reaction.

As an unsupervised elected official, there is no one with the power to evaluate or control Dick Cheney outside of George Bush. It is obvious that Bush does not exert such control.

This is not to say that the clearly paranoid nature of the Bush administration foreign policy can be blamed on Dick Cheney's heart trouble. Cheney has always been one of the most extreme conservatives in the Republican Party. Conservatives are described in Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians. They base election campaigns on fear that is intended to drive voters to the security offered by those with the image of a strong, certain leader. Such leaders prefer the military model to the diplomatic model because the entire process of diplomacy is murky and uncertain. But I really think that Cheney's paranoia contributes to the right-wing extremism of this administration.

Is Cheney mentally ill? I can't say for certain, but I think it is highly likely.

The American Republic is dead. Does anyone care enough to hold a funeral?

Former CIA analyst and Presidential briefer Ray McDaniel says that Bush and Cheney knew clearly that there were no WMD's in Iraq and Knew that there was no active Iranian nuclear weapons program as early 2005. They were lying to the American public in order to start a war with Iraq, then more recently were lying to start a war with Iran. Here is Ray McDaniel's article:

Former CIA analyst says evidence abounds for impeachment

PORTSMOUTH — The evidence for impeachment of the president and vice president is overwhelming, former CIA analyst and daily presidential briefer Ray McGovern told a room full of people at the Portsmouth Public Library Monday night.

McGovern, who provided daily briefings for former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as other high ranking officials during his 27 year CIA career, said he has witnessed a "prostitution of his profession" as the Bush administration lied to the American people about the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"Don't let anyone tell you the President was deceived by false intelligence ... they knew," McGovern said.

For the next 40 minutes, he relayed a series of events leading up to 9/11 which illustrate the President's desire to go to war with Iraq well before 9-11, that reliable CIA evidence showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was presented to the administration and the "facts were fixed" in order to legitimize the invasion.

"The estimate which said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was prepared to the terms of reference laid down by Dick Cheney in a speech on Aug. 26, 2002. It was the worst estimate of intelligence and came to the wrong conclusions, but it was designed to do that," McGovern said.

McGovern has been an outspoken commentator on intelligence-related issues since the late 1990s and since 2002 has been publicly critical of Bush's use of government intelligence in the lead-up to the war.

The recent report detailing Iran's stopping its nuclear weapons program four years ago, is an example of how the administration knows it can no longer hide such "incontrovertible evidence" from the American people in the fallout from the misinformation they received on the Iraq War, McGovern said. He added that he had almost given up on believing their were people still working at the top with a conscious and enough people at the top willing to let analysts do their job and accept independent analysis.

In late 2005, Congress requested an estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities.
"My former colleagues got really good, incontrovertible evidence that the program, such as it was, has been ordered stopped since 2003. The evidence was such that not even Dick Cheney could deny it. That's why the report was not produced until three weeks ago," McGovern said, adding that the Bush administration has been putting "spin" on their rhetoric ever since.

McGovern also addressed the reasoning he believes is behind the threat of war with Iran. He said he believes Israel thinks they have a pledge from the White House to deal with Iran before Bush leaves office and relayed the story of the U.S.S. Liberty, which was attacked by the Israelis in 1967 and covered up by the United States. Thirty-four U.S soldiers were killed and about 170 were seriously injured.

"It seems to me, that on June, 8, 1967, Israel realized it could literally get away with murder," McGovern said.

McGovern said he also believes Congress will be of little help. Recently House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted to learning about torture and illegal eavesdropping in briefings, but said it was her understanding when briefed, that she will not share the information with anyone else, including other members of the House Intelligence Committee.

McGovern called Pelosi out on violating her oath to uphold the Constitution "against enemies, foreign or domestic" by allowing acts in violation of the Constitution to continue by not saying "diddly."

He added that although an impeachment bill currently in Congress is gaining more support, Democrats are shying away because of the influence of lobbies and political analysts telling them to "wait it out" until the election.

Charges in the impeachment bill sponsored by Dennis Kucinich, are very detailed and "as good as any," McGovern said, and referenced the illegal eavesdropping of American citizens. He added that the President has "admitted" to this "demonstrably impeachable offense."

"The argument for impeachment is overwhelming," Randy Kezar of Kingston said after the event. "Impeachment is constitutionally required."

McGovern's visit was co-sponsored by NH Codepink, Seacoast Peace Response, NH Peace Action, NH American Friends Service Committee, Seacoast 9-11 Questions Group, NH Veterans for Peace and Witness for Peace-N.E.
[Highlighting mine - Editor]

Bush has been a rogue madman in office, and the evidence keeps growing. Yet no leader in government - including the Democrats - has stood up to expose this criminal cabal. Anyone who fails to understand that America's government has failed America completely is either bought off by them, corrupt, or simply stupid.

The Democrats are almost as bad as the Republicans, doing anything to avoid conflict and get their personal graft. Then there is the media which seems seems to be more interested in the entertainment values of the war than in the deaths and financial cost. Oh, and the corruption of getting the government to allow it to consolidate. That's not for profit. It's for power. The media now elects our Presidents.

I wonder how many Romans realized that their Republic had died when it became the militarized Empire? Those of us alive in America today have seen a very similar destruction of the Constitutional government that created our Republic, and everyone seems to be moving on, fat, dumb and happy, whistling past the corpse of the the American Republic and the Constitution which was its core lying dead in the street at their feet.

Will anyone police up the corpse, or will it just be left to lie there and rot?