Tag: Dick Cheney

Crossposted from Antemedius

The other day, after Barack Obama’s speech at the National Archives Building in Washington, the New York Times printed a “news analysis” piece that was one of the most offensive pieces of manipulation I think I’ve ever read, in it’s oh so reasonable sounding efforts (probably successful with the vast majority who read it) to marginalize and equate with neanderthals and the far right wing anyone who is not interested in becoming terrorists to fight invented terrorism, with it’s interpretation of Obama’s statements in his speech:

He must convince the country that it is in safe hands despite warnings to the contrary from the right, and at the same time persuade the skeptical left that it is enough to amend his predecessor’s approach rather than abandon it.

In the reductionist debate in Washington, either any sacrifice must be made to win a pitiless war against radicals, or terrorism does not justify any compromise with cherished American values.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama seems to be in complete agreement with the NYT’s manipulations of public opinion:

“Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right,” Mr. Obama said. “The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems. They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty and care and a dose of common sense.”

Today, Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, talks with Real News Network CEO Paul Jay with his own analysis of Obama’s speech and his determination to “legalize” the Military Commissions set up under George Bush with the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA).

     According to DoD records made over $150 million dollars building Guantanamo bay’s detainee holding facilities, or, as other’s have come to call them, torture chambers.

    KBR, of course is one of Dick Cheney’s special interests friends.

    Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

~snip~

    With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor.

bostonglobe.com March 6, 2008

    The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.

bostonglobe.com March 6 ,2008

The Presumption of Innocence, and other Quaint Ideals

Presumption of Innocence

(Innocent until proven guilty)

A principle that requires the government to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant and relieves the defendant of any burden to prove his or her innocence.

The presumption of innocence, an ancient tenet of Criminal Law, is actually a misnomer. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the presumption of the innocence of a criminal defendant is best described as an assumption of innocence that is indulged in the absence of contrary evidence

[…]

the presumption of innocence is essential to the criminal process. The mere mention of the phrase presumed innocent keeps judges and juries focused on the ultimate issue at hand in a criminal case: whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the alleged acts. The people of the United States have rejected the alternative to a presumption of innocence-a presumption of guilt-as being inquisitorial and contrary to the principles of a free society.

http://legal-dictionary.thefre…

One of the president’s most basic duties is to uphold the laws of the land, laws that include those codified in international treaties to which the United States is signatory. Upholding and enforcing the laws requires investigating those suspected of crimes, indicting them if evidence warrants, and punishing them if found guilty in a fair courtroom.

Those who tortured – from the planning to the approval to the implementation – violated the law. Laws, and by extension the rights our laws both represent and protect, are only as good as their enforcement.

While the President has thus far done much to reverse the policies and precedents of his predecessor, and while in his speech today he perhaps for the first time gave some encouraging signs, he has not thus far made enforcing the law a priority in the case of torture, which is a war crime. Any failure to prosecute war criminals undermines the rights we all enjoy.

It would be somewhat of a falsehood to say that Dick Cheney has now gone rogue with a national media tour during which he not only defends torture but also undermines the new regime of Barack Obama… Cheney has always been rogue. From even before the day that he as the head of George W. Bush’s vice presidential selection committee chose himself as the best possible candidate this has been a dark and amoral ascent from the bowels of the shadow government to the most powerful man on the planet. The man with the golden Rolodex, chock full of operatives throughout the military industrial complex and a lingering hard on to set things right after the godless commie liberals took down Richard M. Nixon was running the greatest war machine in human history out of the office of the Vice President until a few short months ago. Now, with the onslaught of vicious attacks on the new sitting President and the apparent influence on the policies of the new administration it is obvious and terrifying that Richard B. Cheney has absolutely no intention of going into the good night. He has made it a lifelong mission to betray, destabilize and destroy the United States from within and it is just too close to fruition for him to stop now.

Hot, Hot, Hot…

Okay so the Dog has not been around this week (if you care he has been at Caterpillar Production System for Dealers training, which is a 6 Sigma Lean methodology for transforming value streams instead of single processes. Everyone’s eyes glazed over yet?) so of course it is likely that most of the hot topics have been blogged to death, but cut a hound some slack as he sits at O’Hare waiting for his flight home, eh?  

This is very simple. It’s so simple I can’t believe I missed it all this time. We’ve been looking too closely at this story. I remember at the time there was speculation that she was outed in part because she worked on counterproliferation in places like Iran. And other reasons. But after taking another look it’s obvious to me that the Bush administration wasn’t interested in debate on the issue.

They wanted a link. Any evidence there wasn’t a link was met with harsh criticism and outing of CIA agents.

Joe Wilson was sent by the CIA to investigate claims of Iraq trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Africa:

Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division (CPD) — not by his wife — largely because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate committee report.

Cheney had asked for more information on an intelligence report earlier on the same day questioning the link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In response to his request, the CIA sent Wilson to Africa, and an aide to Cheney testified that he had no idea his request would result in that trip.

So, he wanted information but didn’t think they’d send someone to get information?

The DIA in question had some very interesting and useful information. You’re definitely going to want to read this:

WASHINGTON — A government document raises doubts about claims that Al Qaeda members received training for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, as Senate Democrats yesterday defended their push for a report on how the Bush administration handled prewar intelligence.

[…]

The document from February 2002 showed that the agency questioned the reliability of Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training took place, the report said.

The agency concluded that al-Libi probably misled the interrogators deliberately, and he recanted the statements in January, according to the document made public by Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Here are Levin’s statements on the report.

Got that? Dick Cheney found out about a DIA saying the links between Iraq and al Qaeda were suspect, and that al Libi was probably making stuff up also about the link.

Al Libi was tortured.

There is always the need, when one is looking at something complex and sprawling, to have a skeleton key, a filter that brings the overall arch of the story into focus whenever you get lost in the myriad details. For the last 8 years we have not had enough information about the actions of the Bush administration to develop such a skeleton key, this, however, has now changed. It turns out there is a single unifying factor which runs from August 2001 to January 20th 2009; fear.  

Reminder more or less that May 1 is the International Worker’s Day and early American labor rights protesters initiated it. It’s an American tradition – not a Communist tradition. And it’s a pagan tradition from the dawn of time.

I hope you all had a great May Day. As I post this it’s still May 1 from the CDT zone westward. For those who saw the original post, you can just skip it or get refreshed. For those who haven’t seen it, it has some interesting background on the history of the day.

Herewith, a recycled essay:

May 1.

A lot of Americans have apparently been brainwashed during their formative years. Especially the crowd over at the site that shall not be named. The vast majority associate the first day of the month of May as a Soviet Communist celebration day. Then again a sizable number of Uhmericans think Saddam Hussein was complicit in the 9/11 atrocities. Oh, and the wiretapping started after 9/11 and not like late February or early March of 2001.

May first was a holiday before there was a May. It’s a cross-quarter day. That means it falls about halfway between a solstice and an equinox. Back before keyboards, laser mice and high-speed internet connections people used to notice these things. The only thing that emitted light, besides fire, was in the sky. You can check out the sky anytime. Just click here. Cool, huh? And you didn’t have to let go of your mouse to do it.

So back in the days of stone knives and bearskins, and I’m not talking about the Star Trek episode where Spock and McCoy have to build a time-machine thingie with 1930s tech, or even the dark ages of eight bit processors, RAM limits of 65536 bytes and machine code, I’m talking real stone and real bear. Hell, sabre-tooth tiger and wooly mammoth times. Back when chipped flint was high-tech. In the time of neo-pagans (not to be confused with the neopaganists of today).

Together with the solstices and equinoxes (Yule, Ostara, Midsummer, and Mabon), these form the eight solar holidays in the neopagan wheel of the year. They are often celebrated on the evening before the listed date, since traditionally the new day was considered to begin at sunset rather than at midnight.

Festival name Date Sun’s Position

Samhain 1 Nov (alt. 5-10 Nov) ? 15° ?

Imbolc 2 Feb (alt. 2-7 Feb) ? 15° ?

Beltane 1 May (alt. 4-10 May) ? 15° ?

Lughnasadh 1 Aug (alt. 3-10 Aug) ? 15° ?

There are Christian and secular holidays that correspond roughly with each of these four, and some argue that historically they originated as adaptations of the pagan holidays, although the matter is not agreed upon. The corresponding holidays are:

   * St.Brigids Day (1 Feb), Groundhog Day (2 Feb), and Candlemas (2 or 15 Feb)

   * Walpurgis Night (30 Apr) and May Day (1 May)

   * Lammas (1 Aug)

   * Halloween (31 Oct), All Saints (1 Nov), and All Souls’ Day (2 Nov)

Groundhog Day is celebrated in North America. It is said that if a groundhog comes out of his hole on 2 February and sees his shadow (that is, if the weather is good), there will be six more weeks of winter. February 2nd marks the end of the short days of winter. Because average temperatures lag behind day length by several weeks, it is (hopefully) the beginning of the end of winter cold.

It’s been Groundhog Day in Iraq for five seven years now. But who’s counting?

UPDATE: we’ve been lobbing explosives into Afghanistan since Clinton’s time. The definition of insanity is repeating the same act and expecting a different result. Our MIC PWOT is insane – but it keeps their funding flowing while we lose our jobs and homes.

It’s 2010 now and nothing has really changed that much, has it? I hope you enjoyed this May Day. It’s a day for Working Class Heroes.

There’s more: