When Will Dick Cheney's Tower of Lies Finally Come Tumbling Down on Him?
Dick Cheney's statement to Greta van Susteren that "On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that" is being widely portrayed as an admission.
But it's less an admission than a PR move. Cheney has spent the better part of the last seven years doing everything in his power to convince the American people of the very connection he now says there was "never any evidence" of.
In 2004, even after the 9/11 commission found "no credible evidence" of Iraqi involvement in 9/11, Cheney was still claiming the evidence that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was "overwhelming."
When he was asked in '04 if Iraq was involved in 9/11, he said, "We don't know." Three years after the attack -- and he still didn't know? Even after they had tried every trick in the black book -- including torture -- to find a link?
And while Cheney's gotten more careful with his words over the years, he's never really stopped insinuating that there was a connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq.
Indeed, as recently as two weeks ago in his big speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney was still banging the drum about Saddam's "known ties to Mideast terrorists" as part of his rationale for invading Iraq and using torture.
Cheney's ongoing Forget Everything I Ever Told You Tour is historical revisionism at its most despicable.
And we are clearly watching a master manipulator at work. I've always felt that his best -- and by that I mean worst -- work was going on "Meet the Press" in 2002 to tell us about those ominous aluminum tubes and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq... or his repeated designed-to-terrify-voters warnings about nuclear attacks on US soil. But this ranks right up there.
In his interview with van Susteren, Cheney also backed away from his claim that the documents he wants the CIA to declassify would prove that torture was effective -- saying instead that they would offer a good summary of "what we learned" not just from waterboarding but the detainee interrogation program as a whole.
So, he gets all the media value and spin by originally making the claim that the intel documents would prove the value of torture - if only Obama would let the truth come out. Then he backs away from the claim, using weasel-words to give him sufficient wiggle room to say that what he really meant was that the overall interrogation program provided useful information -- not that waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation techniques did.
Perhaps it suddenly dawned on the former VP that he doesn't have the power to keep those documents classified any more -- and that he could be proven to be a liar (yet again) with the stroke of President Obama's pen. Hence the verbal tap-dancing.
But eventually the pile of lies may get so high that it will tumble down on him. For instance, it's not a very smart idea to go around saying that Richard Clarke missed the warning signs on bin Laden and 9/11 when there is email after email after email from the spring and summer of 2001 showing that it was actually Cheney and Bush who ignored the warning signs on bin Laden.
You know what they say about people living in glass houses? Well, people with a paper trail that proves they ignored the looming threat of al-Qaeda, sanctioned torture, and used lies and manipulated intelligence to get us into a war, shouldn't be so fast to throw stones either.
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i am sooo anticipatijng this investigation trial and prosecution, as soo as we pass healthcare and rnew regulations. then prosecute,
the dems can win on an cheney and rummy prosecution in 2012 definitley and if we stars around this time next year, we can sew up some more senate seats in 2010
Because he is Cheney the antichrist as I've called him for years.
Please tell Cheney to go sit down, he had 8 years to talk, now he is talking and saying nothing, he can talk to all the Military family's who have lost a loved one.
We know they have WMD's and we know where they are..... there is no way out of that statement and an unprovoked attack on an unarmed country undertaken on the behalf of our country and all of us...
nor is there any way out of having ignored 9/11 warnings and not even TRYING to do something with the incredibly vast intelligence and enforcement agencies which we contribute vast amounts of our tax money to have on hand for such possible eventualities. Because they were just too busy with the important job of dreaming up and forging reasons to attack Iraq!!!
Then they had the audacity to say they have protected us from additional attacks when we actually were getting some 5000 new casualties in our military adventures, who knows how many injuries and how much PTSD and other psychological damages and incalculable damage to the innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. While trumpeting our innocents lost ad nauseum to the rest of the world.
Forgeting that we helped lure Russia into a proxy war in Afghanistan and in so doing plunged that country into 30 yrs or pure hell not freedom fighting but caught in between us and Russia with no place to run and hide..
Bill Clinton's 1999 State of the Union Address
For nearly a decade, Iraq has defied its obligations to destroy its weapons of terror and the missiles to deliver them. America will continue to contain Saddam, and we will work for the day when Iraq has a government worthy of its people.
Now, last month, in our action over Iraq, our troops were superb. Their mission was so flawlessly executed, that we risk taking for granted the bravery and the skill it required
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/01/19/sotu.transcript/
Sorry but this was the reason why we were sending in inspectors to verify this claim. And guess what ??? They concluded that no such weapons of a mass destruction existed.
HMMMM...
"When Pelosi and Reid grow a backbone,
appoint a special prosecutor and address the criminal behavior of Bush & Cheney."
Sooooo Lets Push 'em To Do IT !
SIGN THE PETITION To Prosecute Them For Torture
http://ANGRYVOTERS.ORG
Over 250,000 have signed
Join them and call yourself a Patriot
.
Nothing is coming tumbling down on Dick Cheney. He has been in government for many years and is very knowledgeable.
Not to worry, Cheney is trying valiantly to prop up the reputation of his administration in which he was so aptly supported by G. W. Bush that he has no time for even the barest honesty. He is hell-bent on making out that the Bush Cheney cabal actually did things openly and honestly that poor thing no doubt has lied to himself for so long he no longer knows truth from fiction. But alas, even Republicans like me are ready to just ingnore him as a terrible embarrassment to our party. Without Cheney, there is an off chance that Bush may have had a decent administration. However, the entire history of the G. W. Bush administration is full of lies, deception and horrors that place our country in jeoprody every day. No moral authority when Obama arrived on the scene and it will take many months before he will restore world confidence in the truth of American statements.
VP Cheney says that EIT resulted in the revealation of a plot against LA, and that it was thwarted. OK, where are the bodies?
We have the bodies of the knuckle head Haitians, from Florida, who wanted to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago. We have the bodies of the Virginia paintballers, the pizza delivery guy from New Jersey, and the soccer players from Upstae New York. Where are the freakin' bodies of the LA plotters? When was their trial? The others plotters were thwarted, and we got to see their trials.
And, this is the last is my last thought, or question. All these other plots were thwarted without EIT.
What the Fox?
Proof positive of thwarted plots using police work. Many.
Proof positive of thwarted plots using EIT. Zero.
VP Cheney being asked and answering these questions. Priceless.
well Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and it was a huge mistake to invade and occupy that country imo.
however, Sadaam did most certainly have ties with ME extremists or "terrorists". One could also say that he was a "terrorist" himself. Ask Bill Clinton.
"Sadaam [sic] did most certainly have ties with ME extremists or "terrorists"."
see, some folks actually believe lies if you tell 'em enough.
I dont believe anything but the information ive researched and the facts that ive found myself. Yes his regime was secular. However, to deny that Sadaam Hussein had ties with extremists and/or "jihadists" or "terrorists" is to deny facts.
here is one of many examples:
“President Saddam Hussein has recently told the head of the Palestinian political office, Faroq al-Kaddoumi, his decision to raise the sum granted to each family of the martyrs of the Palestinian uprising to $25,000 instead of $10,000,” Aziz, announced at a Baghdad meeting of Arab politicians and businessmen on March 11, 2002, Reuters reported the next day.
then you have organizations the Baathists supported like Hamas, Abu Nidel organization, Ansar al-Islam, Arab Liberation Front, Kurdistan Workers Party, Mujahedin-e-Khalq, Palestine Liberation Front, etc., Some might consider those "extremist".
the Baathists were tied to "terrorists", but they clearly were not tied to 9/11. Iraq was "a war of choice" and the US made the wrong choice imo. It was a huge mistake to invade, for many reasons, not the least being that Iraq gave us a buffer against Iran....and we made the problem with "extremists" and "jihadists" WORST by going into Iraq imho. Im of the opinion that we should stay out of the ME all together, but I guess we are too far gone for that.
Your title question is probably rhetorical. In the long run, the verdict of history will certainly be against BushCheney, but who cares? In the long run, we'll all be dead, as, I think, Galbraith once said. Unless some brave prosecutor here or abroad has the nerve to actually bring charges against these maniacs, the question is moot.
If his ratings are higher than Pelosi's, what does that tell us?
Not much.
While Cheney is one of the best at selective dementia, he is only one among the many presidents, and hundreds of elected practioners of the art of "Forgotten Everything". As for "historical revisionism", while they are dispicable, it's academia and mainsteam media that hold first place. Unless one reads jounalists like Edwin Black and historians like Howard Zinn, the truth will never be known. Remember, the state holds the power to LIE to protect its self, and usually the media and academia are its Amen corner.
The tower will come down when the networks acknowledge the war was a co-production of the White House and their owners, defense contractors GE and Westinghouse who owned NBC and CBS.
Despite HuffPo leading web-based reporting and bookstores brimming with evidence, the story hasn't been absorbed by the US because it's whitewashed on the networks.
For me, the lid was undeniably blown off years ago by Lt. Col. Wilkerson on PBS, but no network picked up the report and no one in the Bush administration denied any of it. The #2 at the State Dept. confirmed the war was a hoax and the evidence of fabrications, illegal torture and much more has all been leaked long ago. But the networks won't touch it.
We need a law providing protection to reporters to break their non-disclosure agreements in order to testify about illicit interference with the public's right to know about this war. This will bring the house of cards down.
When? As soon as we pull our collective heads out of the sand, demand that the rule of law we say we hold so precious be upheld and start behaving like intelligent, civilized human beings instead of fearmongered monkey babies.
When will Dick Cheney's tower of lies come crashing down? It depends on how long America goes without a terrorist attack on the United States.
Right now nobody on the planet stands more to gain from a terrorist attack on the United States than Dick Cheney. I do not regard that as hyperbole. Currently Cheney has more to gain from a terrorist attack on the US than Osama Bin Laden. He and the neocons consolidated power behind the fear created by 9/11 and their forces, both in Washington and in the media, are now completely poised and positioned to proclaim 'Dick Cheney was right! Obama has made us less safe! and rocket right back into power. A few 'mistakes' will be forgiven, certainly among the right-of-center. In the persuit of 'keeping america safe' everything was glossed over the first time and will likely again be.
Which is perhaps the most fundamental thing that the US has been changed by the neocons. It is this notion, now commony accepted anf repeated, that keeping us physically safe is the principal job of the president and the government. Our country was founded behind an attitude of 'give me freedom or give me death' and 'live free or die' and not 'the goverment should do anything it wants if it keeps me safe'.
since Cheney's torture increased the likelihood of an attack, maybe people would react differently than you think.
DRaymond- I don't think the government should do anything it wants if it keeps me safe.
I think the federal government's ONLY role should be to keep the country safe.
I think MOST government should be local government.
If we had a flat tax, it would take "social engineering," like supporting or not supporting
gay marriage, off the table. Marriage woud truly be a religious ceremony, not a tax
decision.
Property taxes should pay for local schools.
Taxes on gasoline should pay for infrastructure.
Dick Cheney as always tried to tie Iraq and Al-Qaeda. That is far different than a tie between Iraq and the 9-11 attacks. I've always heard him try to link Saddam and Al-Qaeda operatives or other mideast terrorists. It's mainly been the media that assumes when he says "Al-Qaeda" he means the 9-11 attackers. If anything, I've heard him deny an Iraq/9-11 link.
No, sorry, you are engaging in the same disingenuous revisionism as Cheney.
The one bone Cheney would never give up, no matter how thoroughly it had been debunked, was Cheney's belief in the report of -MOHAMED ATTA- having met with IRAQI INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS in Prague.
There is NO WAY ON EARTH that making that connection, implying that link, and insisting in it's veracity even after every intel service and every other nation had debunked it- WAS ANYTHING OTHER THAN IMPLYING IRAQ PLAYED A ROLE IN 9/11.
It is the biggest bit of propaganda that Russert grilled Cheney on. It was the single bit of propaganda The Daily Show ridiculed Cheney over the most for years.
Atta was dead after 9/11. Aside from being a member of Al Quaida and being trained by them, there has never been an accusation that Atta held a greater role in the organization, or ever planned any operation or attack besides 9/11. INVOKING HIS NAME AND IDENTITY INVOKES 9/11 AND 9/11 ALONE, NOT A SINGLE OTHER THING.
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