Cheney Not Merely Evil, He's A Confessed War Criminal

Now that Christmas is over, so is my brief spirit of holiday forgiveness. Some things are unforgivable. "Vice President" Dick Cheney is one of those things.

It's obscene that this man isn't in prison by now, let alone that he's still in office. It's not a mystery, though. The abilities of, and inclination for, investigation of the executive branch for high crimes and misdemeanors have been greatly diminished.

Cheney has essentially admitted that he lied the U.S. into the Iraq invasion, which resulted in over a million deaths. So he's now a confessed mass murderer.

Here's video of Keith Olbermann on this subject, plus the vicious beating of the shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist. (So much for nation-building.)



In this second video, also from Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC, constitutional law Professor Jonathan Turley indicates that not only Cheney, but Il Doofus himself, could perhaps be vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes in their authorization of waterboarding. Cheney has just about flatly confessed:



I'll be blunt. I understand it's going to be hard to get a lot of people excited about bringing this rogues gallery to justice in coming years. Memories are short. Also, the vast majority of people who were victims of these policy decisions were brown-skinned and not Americans.

But, to quote Professor Turley, what has been undermined in the past eight years has to do with who we are, as Americans. The Obama administration should put prosecutions of this kind on a burner, even if it has to be a back one.

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935 Administration Lies = 3931 Dead Americans

A recently-concluded study by two independent, non-profit journalism organizations, The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, has pinpointed 935 specific instances of the president and members of his administration lying to advance the narrative pushing for a war with Iraq. the study concluded that the lies peddled were "an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

On at least 532 occasions, administration officials stated adamantly and unequivocally that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida. (emphasis added)

The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.

"The cumulative effect of these false statements - amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts - was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war," the study concluded.

So - four Americans who stepped up to serve have died for every lie these feckless bastards told. So far.

Yet Nancy the Nattering Nabob still insists that impeachment is off the table.

[Thats all, folks...]

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Can we impeach Cheney now?

So - the administration has known for a year that all sixteen intelligence agencies have determined that Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, but that little bit of inconvenient truth did not deter Cheney from not only advocating for another illegal war, one that would possibly (probably) use nuclear weapons, but he didn't stop there - he also attempted to stifle the report and tried to get the parts they didn't agree with stricken.

Remember how, a couple of months ago, the meme changed? Resident Evil said that the Iranians couldn't be allowed to have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon. In October, aWol gave a dire warning about WW III if Iran obtained a nuclear weapon, and the warmongering old prick vowed "serious consequences" if the Iranians didn't (re)abandon their nuclear program. (It's all very cartoonish, in a tragic way. Remember your Looney Tunes? Bugs: "Batten down the hatches!" Buster:"I did! I did batten 'em down!" Bugs: "Well batten 'em down again. We'll teach those hatches!")

[Keep reading...]

Gareth Porter pointed out a month ago that the NIE was being held up. (h/t Kevin Drum)

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

Cheney got his knickers in a twist over more than the nuclear part of the NIE. He was also furious that there was no conclusive evidence that the Iranians were meddling in Iraq and arming Shiite militias.

So, congresscritters, especially you, Nancy Pelosi, read the god-damned NIE for yourselves, and then riddle me this:

Is it enough yet? Can we please make with impeaching the warmongering, pathological old prick? We can't risk another year with this psychotic madman at the levers.

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Welcome to America, 2.0

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”

Sometimes you have to hang back. You become aware of something, and you go charging hell-bent-for-leather into the topic. And by god – you are preachin’ the gospel. That is what I was doing when I first read the Seymour Hersch article on Saturday evening.

And then it hit me. The reason I was so fucking mad is because what I was writing about is the invalidation of my entire life, spent in service to the Constitution of this nation.

That is the net effect of what is revealed in Seymour Hersch’s article in The New Yorker. Everything my life has stood for up to now is null and void. I’ve suspected for quite some time, but now I know for sure. I feel stateless. You might as well revoke my god-damned citizenship, because I am a woman without a country.

The perfidy of the Bush administration, well documented and so vast as to be overwhelming, has undermined the Honor Code and the confidence of – and in – the officer corps.

At this point, I don’t have to rehash the article. Everyone has read it who is going to. But I am going to excerpt the passage that made me livid and enraged me:

When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

(Let me answer that for you, General. You stand the fuck up for the ideals that your uniform represent, and you stand up for what is right because you are a god damned General, and by definition a leader of men, and when you act like a punk you are a disgrace. You stand the fuck up and you aren’t too chickenshit to even look at some god-damned photographs.)

Here is how I see it. We have destroyed the military and trashed the Honor Code, and as far as I can tell, the chain of command is as quaint as the Geneva Conventions, the Great Writ, and the Constitutional guarantee of Due Process (rooted in the Great Writ “Set forth in the Meadow Runnyemead”) – all of which have been sacrificed on the altar of the “Global War On Terror™”

Rumsfeld lied to Congress – under oath. He needs to face the consequences of that action. Plausible deniability my ass. Common sense needs to trump weasel-words in this instance.

If these bastards get away with this – then the American experiment is over. It is that simple, and that much is at stake.

Constituents, what say you?

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