Joan Didion on Dick Cheney
[I read Joan Didion's article and found her writing style almost too turgid and convoluted to read. But I grabbed what I think are some excellent titbits from this scathing diatribe against Dick Cheney - PW]:
It was the Vice President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S. Addington, that supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the Geneva Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA between 1977 and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for torture," it was the Vice President's office that issued this characteristically nonresponsive statement: "Our country is at war and our government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us." ...
The very survival of the executive species, then, was seen by Cheney and his people as dependent on its brute ability to claim absolute power and resist all attempts to share it. Given this imperative, the steps to our current situation had a leaden inevitability: if the executive branch needed a war to justify its claim to absolute power, then Iraq, Rumsfeld would be remembered to have said on September 12, 2001, had the targets. If the executive branch needed a story point to sell its war, then the Vice President would resurrect the aluminum tubes that not even the US Department of Energy believed to be meant for a centrifuge: "It's now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire...the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge." The Vice President would dismiss Joseph Wilson's report that he had found no yellowcake in Niger: "Did his wife send him on a junket?" ...
The Vice President would override as irrelevant the facts that Hans Blix and his UN monitoring team were prepared to resume such inspections and in fact did resume them, conducting seven hundred inspections of five hundred sites, finding nothing but stopping only when the war intervened. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," he would declare in the same speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. ...
If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." ...
The Vice President would not then or later tolerate any suggestion that the story he was building might rest on cooked evidence. In a single speech at the American Enterprise Institute in November 2005 he used the following adjectives to describe those members of Congress who had raised such a question: "corrupt," "shameless," "dishonest," "reprehensible," "irresponsible," "insidious," and "utterly false." ...
His votes in the House during 1988, the last year he served there, gave him an American Conservative Union rating of 100. ...
"I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose between 'commercial' interests and other interests that the United States might have in a particular country or region around the world," he said at the Cato Institute in 1998, during the period he was CEO of Halliburton, after he had pursued one war against Iraq and before he would pursue the second. He was arguing against the imposition by the United States of unilateral economic sanctions on such countries as Libya and Iran, two countries, although he did not mention this, in which Halliburton subsidiaries had been doing business. Nor did he mention, when he said in the same speech that he thought multilateral sanctions "appropriate" in the case of Iraq, that Iraq was a third country in which a Halliburton subsidiary would by the year's end be doing business. ...
Since November 1, 2001, under this administration's Executive Order 13233, which limits access to all presidential and vice-presidential papers, Cheney has been the first vice-president in American history entitled to executive privilege, a claim to co-presidency reinforced in March 2003 by Executive Order 13292, giving him the same power to classify information as the president has.
He runs an office so disinclined to communicate that it routinely refuses to disclose who works there, even for updates to the Federal Directory, which lists names and contact addresses for government officials. ...
In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous experience was running the governor's office for Bush in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired Michael D. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job") Brown. In December 2002, Allbaugh announced that he was resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge while he himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company," according to its Web site, "that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq."
This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet begun ...
Private firms in Iraq have done more than build bases and bridges and prisons. They have done more than handle meals and laundry and transportation. They train Iraqi forces. They manage security. They interrogate prisoners. Contract interrogators from two firms, CACI International (according to its Web site "a world leader in providing timely solutions to the intelligence community") and Titan ("a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and services for National Security"), were accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib, where almost half of all interrogators and analysts were CACI employees. They operate free of oversight. They distance the process of interrogation from the citizens in whose name, or in whose "defense," or to ensure whose "security," the interrogation is being conducted. They offer "timely solutions."...
In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq ...
(See also Phillip Adams, 'Coalition of the Stupid'.)
Tagged: cheney, usa, bush, torture, iraq
It was the Vice President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S. Addington, that supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the Geneva Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA between 1977 and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for torture," it was the Vice President's office that issued this characteristically nonresponsive statement: "Our country is at war and our government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us." ...
The very survival of the executive species, then, was seen by Cheney and his people as dependent on its brute ability to claim absolute power and resist all attempts to share it. Given this imperative, the steps to our current situation had a leaden inevitability: if the executive branch needed a war to justify its claim to absolute power, then Iraq, Rumsfeld would be remembered to have said on September 12, 2001, had the targets. If the executive branch needed a story point to sell its war, then the Vice President would resurrect the aluminum tubes that not even the US Department of Energy believed to be meant for a centrifuge: "It's now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire...the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge." The Vice President would dismiss Joseph Wilson's report that he had found no yellowcake in Niger: "Did his wife send him on a junket?" ...
The Vice President would override as irrelevant the facts that Hans Blix and his UN monitoring team were prepared to resume such inspections and in fact did resume them, conducting seven hundred inspections of five hundred sites, finding nothing but stopping only when the war intervened. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," he would declare in the same speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. ...
If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." ...
The Vice President would not then or later tolerate any suggestion that the story he was building might rest on cooked evidence. In a single speech at the American Enterprise Institute in November 2005 he used the following adjectives to describe those members of Congress who had raised such a question: "corrupt," "shameless," "dishonest," "reprehensible," "irresponsible," "insidious," and "utterly false." ...
His votes in the House during 1988, the last year he served there, gave him an American Conservative Union rating of 100. ...
"I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose between 'commercial' interests and other interests that the United States might have in a particular country or region around the world," he said at the Cato Institute in 1998, during the period he was CEO of Halliburton, after he had pursued one war against Iraq and before he would pursue the second. He was arguing against the imposition by the United States of unilateral economic sanctions on such countries as Libya and Iran, two countries, although he did not mention this, in which Halliburton subsidiaries had been doing business. Nor did he mention, when he said in the same speech that he thought multilateral sanctions "appropriate" in the case of Iraq, that Iraq was a third country in which a Halliburton subsidiary would by the year's end be doing business. ...
Since November 1, 2001, under this administration's Executive Order 13233, which limits access to all presidential and vice-presidential papers, Cheney has been the first vice-president in American history entitled to executive privilege, a claim to co-presidency reinforced in March 2003 by Executive Order 13292, giving him the same power to classify information as the president has.
He runs an office so disinclined to communicate that it routinely refuses to disclose who works there, even for updates to the Federal Directory, which lists names and contact addresses for government officials. ...
In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous experience was running the governor's office for Bush in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired Michael D. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job") Brown. In December 2002, Allbaugh announced that he was resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge while he himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company," according to its Web site, "that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq."
This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet begun ...
Private firms in Iraq have done more than build bases and bridges and prisons. They have done more than handle meals and laundry and transportation. They train Iraqi forces. They manage security. They interrogate prisoners. Contract interrogators from two firms, CACI International (according to its Web site "a world leader in providing timely solutions to the intelligence community") and Titan ("a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and services for National Security"), were accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib, where almost half of all interrogators and analysts were CACI employees. They operate free of oversight. They distance the process of interrogation from the citizens in whose name, or in whose "defense," or to ensure whose "security," the interrogation is being conducted. They offer "timely solutions."...
In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq ...
(See also Phillip Adams, 'Coalition of the Stupid'.)
Tagged: cheney, usa, bush, torture, iraq
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