Failing to Learn from History; the Neocon's are Back

[Elphaba]

When we fail to learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat it. I recently had the unpleasant realization that I am a prime example of that warning.

I was very apolitical in the '70's and only had a vague notion that Nixon was a bad guy and Viet Nam was a bad war. Dating and making a living were a great deal more important to me than national or world affairs.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were familiar names to me in 2000, when Bush formed his cabinet, but I really couldn't tell you why. If I had made the least bit of effort to follow the Nixon presidency, I never would have voted for a guy with Cheney on the ticket.

This is a well written (and very long) article concerning Cheney's political career and the birth of the neocon movement.

The discussion point that I would like to engage is whether or not you believe that Cheney has harmed the Bush presidency in perpetuating what he learned in the Nixon presidency?

I also see glaring intelligence failures in both administrations that I would like to discuss.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112505N.shtml

The Long March of Dick Cheney
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com

Thursday 24 November 2005

For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him - and he's not about to give it up.

The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.

Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" - as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it - wields control.

Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated.

The collapse of sections of the façade shielding Cheney from public view has not inhibited him. His former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, appears to be withholding information about the vice president's actions in the Plame affair from the special prosecutor. While Bush has declaimed, "We do not torture," Cheney lobbied the Senate to stop it from prohibiting torture.

At the same time, Cheney has taken the lead in defending the administration from charges that it twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war and misled the Congress even as new stories underscore the legitimacy of the charges.

Former Sen. Bob Graham has revealed, in a Nov. 20 article in the Washington Post, that the condensed version of the National Intelligence Estimate titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs" that was submitted to the Senate days before it voted on the Iraq war resolution "represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed [WMD], avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version." The condensed version also contained the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was seeking "weapons-grade fissile material from abroad."

The administration relied for key information in the NIE on an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball. According to a Nov. 20 report in the Los Angeles Times, it had learned from German intelligence beforehand that Curveball was completely untrustworthy and his claims fabricated. Yet Bush, Cheney and, most notably, Powell in his prewar performance before the United Nations, which he now calls the biggest "blot" on his record and about which he insists he was "deceived," touted Curveball's disinformation.

In two speeches over the past week Cheney has called congressional critics "dishonest," "shameless" and "reprehensible." He ridiculed their claim that they did not have the same intelligence as the administration. "These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence materials. They are known to have a high opinion of their own analytical capabilities." Lambasting them for historical "revisionism," he repeatedly invoked Sept. 11. "We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001 - and the terrorists hit us anyway," he said.

The day after Cheney's most recent speech, the National Journal reported that the president's daily briefing prepared by the CIA 10 days after Sept. 11, 2001, indicated that there was no connection between Saddam and the terrorist attacks. Of course, the 9/11 Commission had made the same point in its report.

Even though experts and pundits contradict his talking points, Cheney presents them with characteristic assurance. His rhetoric is like a paving truck that will flatten obstacles. Cheney remains undeterred; he has no recourse. He will not run for president in 2008. He is defending more than the Bush record; he is defending the culmination of his career. Cheney's alliances, ideas, antagonisms and tactics have accumulated for decades.

Cheney is a master bureaucrat, proficient in the White House, the agencies and departments, and Congress. The many offices Cheney has held add up to an extraordinary résumé. His competence and measured manner are often mistaken for moderation. Among those who have misjudged Cheney are military men - Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft and Wilkerson, who lacked a sense of him as a political man in full. As a result, they expressed surprise at their discovery of the ideological hard man. Scowcroft told the New Yorker recently that Cheney was not the Cheney he once knew. But Scowcroft and the other military men rose by working through regular channels; they were trained to respect established authority. They are at a disadvantage in internal political battles with those operating by different rules of warfare. Their realism does not account for radicalism within the US government.

Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal thwarted his designs for an unchecked imperial presidency. It was in that White House that Cheney gained his formative experience as the assistant to Nixon's counselor, Donald Rumsfeld. When Gerald Ford acceded to the presidency, he summoned Rumsfeld from his posting as NATO ambassador to become his chief of staff. Rumsfeld, in turn, brought back his former deputy, Cheney.

From Nixon, they learned the application of ruthlessness and the harsh lesson of failure. Under Ford, Rumsfeld designated Cheney as his surrogate on intelligence matters. During the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Congress investigated past CIA abuses, and the press was filled with revelations. In May 1975, Seymour Hersh reported in the New York Times on how the CIA had sought to recover a sunken Soviet submarine with a deep-sea mining vessel called the Glomar Explorer, built by Howard Hughes. When Hersh's article appeared, Cheney wrote memos laying out options ranging from indicting Hersh or getting a search warrant for Hersh's apartment to suing the Times and pressuring its owners "to discourage the NYT and other publications from similar action." "In the end," writes James Mann, in his indispensable book, "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," "Cheney and the White House decided to back off after the intelligence community decided its work had not been significantly damaged."

Rumsfeld and Cheney quickly gained control of the White House staff, edging out Ford's old aides. From this base, they waged bureaucratic war on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, a colossus of foreign policy, who occupied the posts of both secretary of state and national security advisor. Rumsfeld and Cheney were the right wing of the Ford administration, opposed to the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and they operated by stealthy internal maneuver. The Secret Service gave Cheney the code name "Backseat."

In 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney stage-managed a Cabinet purge called the "Halloween massacre" that made Rumsfeld secretary of defense and Cheney White House chief of staff. Kissinger, forced to surrender control of the National Security Council, angrily drafted a letter of resignation (which he never submitted). Rumsfeld and Cheney helped convince Ford, who faced a challenge for the Republican nomination from Ronald Reagan, that he needed to shore up his support on the right and that Rockefeller was a political liability. Rockefeller felt compelled to announce he would not be Ford's running mate. Upset at the end of his ambition, Rockefeller charged that Rumsfeld intended to become vice president himself. In fact, Rumsfeld had contemplated running for president in the future and undoubtedly would have accepted a vice presidential nod.

In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld undermined the negotiations for a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty being conducted by Kissinger. Fighting off Reagan's attacks during the Republican primaries, Ford was pressured by Cheney to adopt his foreign policy views, which amounted to a self-repudiation. At the Republican Party Convention, acting as Ford's representative, Cheney engineered the adoption of Reagan's foreign policy plank in the platform. By doing so he preempted an open debate and split. Privately, Ford, Kissinger and Rockefeller were infuriated.

As part of the Halloween massacre Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed out CIA director William Colby and replaced him with George H.W. Bush, then the US plenipotentiary to China. The CIA had been uncooperative with the Rumsfeld/Cheney anti-détente campaign. Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view, the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.

The new CIA director was prompted to authorize an alternative unit outside the CIA to challenge the agency's intelligence on Soviet intentions. Bush was more compliant in the political winds than his predecessor. Consisting of a host of conservatives, the unit was called Team B. A young aide from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, was selected to represent Rumsfeld's interest and served as coauthor of Team B's report. The report was single-minded in its conclusion about the Soviet buildup and cleansed of contrary intelligence. It was fundamentally a political tool in the struggle for control of the Republican Party, intended to destroy détente and aimed particularly at Kissinger. Both Ford and Kissinger took pains to dismiss Team B and its effort. (Later, Team B's report was revealed to be wildly off the mark about the scope and capability of the Soviet military.)

With Ford's defeat, Team B became the kernel of the Committee on the Present Danger, a conservative group that attacked President Carter for weakness on the Soviet threat. The growing strength of the right thwarted ratification of SALT II, setting the stage for Reagan's nomination and election.

Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Cheney became the Republican leader on the House Intelligence Committee, where he consistently fought congressional oversight and limits on presidential authority. When Congress investigated the Iran-Contra scandal (the creation of an illegal, privately funded, offshore US foreign policy initiative), Cheney was the crucial administration defender. At every turn, he blocked the Democrats and prevented them from questioning Vice President Bush. Under his leadership, not a single House Republican signed the special investigating committee's final report charging "secrecy, deception and disdain for law." Instead, the Republicans issued their own report claiming there had been no major wrongdoing.

The origin of Cheney's alliance with the neoconservatives goes back to his instrumental support for Team B. Upon being appointed secretary of defense by the elder Bush, he kept on Wolfowitz as undersecretary. And Wolfowitz kept on his deputy, his former student at the University of Chicago, Scooter Libby. Earlier, Wolfowitz and Libby had written a document expressing suspicion of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing perestroika and warning against making deals with him, a document that President Reagan ignored as he made an arms control agreement and proclaimed that the Cold War was ending.

During the Gulf War, Secretary of Defense Cheney clashed with Gen. Colin Powell. At one point, he admonished Powell, who had been Reagan's national security advisor, "Colin, you're chairman of the Joint Chiefs ... so stick to military matters." During the run-up to the war, Cheney set up a secret unit in the Pentagon to develop an alternative war plan, his own version of Team B. "Set up a team, and don't tell Powell or anybody else," Cheney ordered Wolfowitz. The plan was called Operation Scorpion. "While Powell was out of town, visiting Saudi Arabia, Cheney - again, without telling Powell - took the civilian-drafted plan, Operation Scorpion, to the White House and presented it to the president and the national security adviser," writes Mann in his book. Bush, however, rejected it as too risky. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was enraged at Cheney's presumption. "Put a civilian in charge of professional military men and before long he's no longer satisfied with setting policy but wants to outgeneral the generals," he wrote in his memoir. After Operation Scorpion was rejected, Cheney urged Bush to go to war without congressional approval, a notion the elder Bush dismissed.

After the Gulf War victory, in 1992, Cheney approved a new "Defense Planning Guidance" advocating US unilateralism in the post-Cold War, a document whose final draft was written by Libby. Cheney assumed Republican rule for the indefinite future.

One week after Bill Clinton's inauguration, on Jan. 27, 1993, Cheney appeared on "Larry King Live," where he declared his interest in running for the presidency. "Obviously," he said, "it's something I'll take a look at ... Obviously, I've worked for three presidents and watched two others up close, and so it is an idea that has occurred to me." For two years, he quietly campaigned in Republican circles, but discovered little enthusiasm. He was less well known than he imagined and less magnetic in person than his former titles suggested. On Aug. 10, 1995, he held a news conference at the headquarters of the Halliburton Co. in Dallas, announcing he would become its chief executive officer. "When I made the decision earlier this year not to run for president, not to seek the White House, that really was a decision to wrap up my political career and move on to other things," he said.

[Ustwo]

The discussion point that I would like to engage is whether or not you believe that Cheney has harmed the Bush presidency in perpetuating what he learned in the Nixon presidency?

What you have for a source is an op-ed I wouldn't trust as far as I could verify any of it.

When I first read your headline I had some eminem in my head....'Cheney's back, back again' but that was replaced with the Imperial March from Star Wars when I read the first line of the op-ed.

or his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him - and he's not about to give it up.

So what you need to ask yourself is your core feeling on Cheney. If you view him as this evil powermonger, twisting others to his will, then you can proceed with the question. If not the question is meaningless.

From Nixon, they learned the application of ruthlessness and the harsh lesson of failure.

The dark side if you will....dun dun dun..dundundun.

[Elphaba]

This would be your "discussion?"

[Seaver]

Does ANYTHING from truthout.org warrant a discussion? Carries as much neutral validitiy as a KKK member speaking on race relations IMO.

[Elphaba]

Seaver, I use the TO.org links because you don't have to buy a subscription to get to the original source. I don't often see you buying into the Ustwo non-argument of ridicule the source, then ridicule the poster.

Do you wish to contribute to the discussion, Seaver?

[loganmule]

I'm with Ustwo on this. You simply have assumed, as a given, that Cheney is "perpetuating what he learned in the Nixon presidency." Logic and my own life experience would suggest that Cheney has learned lots of other stuff in the 25 plus intervening years between the Nixon and Bush administrations, and has incorporated it into his conservative belief system. Without something authoritive to confirm that he's been in political stasis for the last quarter century, the issue you raise has a flawed premise, and doesn't make sense.

[roachboy]

nice to see conservatives already trying to swat this information away---but so far their arguments have been even more ridiculosu than usual.

the question of continuities between cheney under nixon and his role in bushworld is not uninteresting---it is not uninteresting to think about the neocons in terms of the history of thier engagements, the devolution of their authoritarian "thinking" in response to various---um----problems that this mode of political "thinking" has encountered.
it is not uninteresting to attempt to understand how the present sorry state of conservative ideology has developed.

it appears that even this--relatively begnin---move is enough to ruffle the feathers of conservatives who seem to enjoy the more authoritarian aspects of cheneythought. perhaps they too share his contempt for democracy, such as it is--perhaps they too see dissent as something necessarily "reprehensable"--perhaps they too dream of a day when dissent can be eliminated and the irrational policies of this administration or any other sufficient rightwing authoritarian administration can unfold without problems raised by or about them.

within this, you see one of the most classically authoritarian ticks in conservativeland's collective mindscape: that problems with policies are to be blamed on those who point them out--the principle of the hitlero-trotskyite wrecker from the lovely "short course of the history of the communist party of the soviet union" or the jew in its radical nationalist mirrorspace.

the correlate of the above is the focus particular to the conservative set on grouphate of certain information sources as inspiring the activities of the new "wreckers and saboteurs".....within this basically conspiratorial view of "the left" you get further delusions, like the unity of information sources, an imaginary cluster within which, apparently, truthout occupies a central role.


it seems disengenuous to pretend, as do the conservatives above, that truthout is the only source for information about this dimension of cheneyism--just as the "readings" of the article above are so amateurish as to almost not repay the effort in dismissing them.

that the writer of the article tries to connect aspects of cheneyism to the experience cheney et al had under nixon does not imply that he was kept cryogenically in the interim--it does not exclude the possibility of learning--it simply points to continuities.

with ustwo's post, there is nothing of comparably substance to be dismissed--he seems to have no fear of any degree of authoritarian politics so long as they come wrapped in the flag and with the imprimatur of conservative media. and there is no point even wishing for some criticism of the bush administration from him--it simply will not happen.

cheney does appear to have taken on the role of bad cop within the administration---policies connected to his office do have similarities between them, such as the total refusal to submit to anything approaching review, either by the legislative or the judiciary:

In Terror Cases, Administration Sets Own Rules
By ADAM LIPTAK

When Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced last week that Jose Padilla would be transferred to the federal justice system from military detention, he said almost nothing about the standards the administration used in deciding whether to charge terrorism suspects like Mr. Padilla with crimes or to hold them in military facilities as enemy combatants.

"We take each individual, each case, case by case," Mr. Gonzales said.

The upshot of that approach, underscored by the decision in Mr. Padilla's case, is that no one outside the administration knows just how the determination is made whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court.

Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions. The change in Mr. Padilla's status, just days before the government's legal papers were due in his appeal to the Supreme Court, suggested to many legal observers that the administration wanted to keep the court out of the case.

"The position of the executive branch," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, "is that it can be judge, jury and executioner."

The government says a secret and unilateral decision-making process is necessary because of the nature of the evidence it deals with. Officials described the approach as a practical one that weighs a mix of often-sensitive factors.

"Much thought goes into how and why various tools are used in these often complicated cases," Tasia Scolinos, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said on Friday. "The important thing is for someone not to come away thinking this whole process is arbitrary, which it is not."

Among the factors the government considers, Ms. Scolinos said, are "national security interests, the need to gather intelligence and the best and quickest way to obtain it, the concern about protecting intelligence sources and methods and ongoing information gathering, the ability to use information as evidence in a criminal proceeding, the circumstances of the manner in which the individual was detained, the applicable criminal charges, and classified-evidence issues."

Lawyers for people in terrorism investigations say a list of factors to be considered cannot substitute for bright-line standards announced in advance.

The courts have given the executive branch substantial but not total deference, often holding that the president has the authority to designate enemy combatants but allowing those detained to challenge the factual basis for the administration's determinations. Some courts have suggested that a detainee's citizenship, the place he was captured and whether he was fighting American troops should play a role in how aggressively the courts review enemy-combatant designations.

A look at the half-dozen most prominent terrorism detentions and prosecutions does little to illuminate the standards that have informed the government's decisions.

One American captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan was held in the United States as an enemy combatant. Another was prosecuted as a criminal. One foreigner seized in the United States as a suspected terrorist is being held as an enemy combatant without charges in a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. Others have been prosecuted for their crimes.

In three high-profile terrorism cases, the government obtained convictions in federal court. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen, pleaded guilty to taking part in the conspiracy that led to the Sept. 11 attacks and faces the death penalty. Richard C. Reid, who is British, pleaded guilty to trying to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic with bombs in his shoes and is serving a life term. And John Walker Lindh, the California man who pleaded guilty to aiding the Taliban, is serving 20 years.

In three other cases, the administration designated terrorism suspects as enemy combatants who may be detained by the military indefinitely without charge. One, Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen of Saudi descent, was released and sent to Saudi Arabia after the Supreme Court gave him the right to contest the government's claims. A second American, Mr. Padilla, was transferred to the custody of the Justice Department last week.

The only remaining enemy combatant known to be detained in the United States, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, traveled the same road as Mr. Padilla, but in the opposite direction. "Al-Marri is precisely the flipside of Padilla," said Lawrence S. Lustberg, one of Mr. Marri's lawyers.

After 16 months of criminal proceedings on fraud charges, and less than a month before Mr. Marri's trial was to start in July 2003, President Bush designated him an enemy combatant. Mr. Marri, a Qatari who had been working on a master's degree at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., was immediately transferred into military custody and moved to the Navy brig in Charleston.

John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said two issues tended to determine how the government proceeded.

"The main factors that will determine how you will be charged," Mr. Yoo said, "are, one, how strong your link to Al Qaeda is and, two, whether you have any actionable intelligence that will prevent an attack on the United States."

Jonathan M. Freiman, one of Mr. Padilla's lawyers, questioned that, saying the administration's decisions had often seemed to be reactions to actual and anticipated court decisions.

"The government continues to be more focused on protecting its strategies than allowing them to be subjected to legal review," Mr. Freiman said.

In the indictment unsealed Tuesday, Mr. Padilla was not charged with some of the most serious accusations against him, including plotting to explode a radioactive device, because the evidence needed to prove the case had been obtained through harsh questioning of two senior members of Al Qaeda, current and former government officials have said. The statements might not have been admissible in court and could have exposed classified information, the officials said.

The Moussaoui case was also complicated by his lawyers' demands that they be given access to potentially exculpatory evidence that the government said had to be kept secret for reasons of national security.

The mere possibility of being named an enemy combatant, coupled with the difficulty of divining the standards the administration uses in choosing whom to call one, can affect the decisions of defendants in criminal plea negotiations.

"In the case of John Walker Lindh," said his lawyer, James J. Brosnahan, "there was a suggestion that even if we got an acquittal that he could be declared an unlawful combatant, that he could be a Padilla."

Indeed, the plea agreement Mr. Lindh signed contains an unusual provision. "For the rest of the defendant's natural life," it says, "should the government determine that the defendant has engaged in" one of more than a score of crimes of terrorism, "the United States may immediately invoke any right it has at that time to capture and detain the defendant as an unlawful enemy combatant."

Mr. Freiman said he, too, had been told that the government reserved the right to detain Mr. Padilla again should he be acquitted.

Arguably, it may sometimes be preferable for a defendant to be held as an enemy combatant rather than being prosecuted. Mr. Lindh's case, for instance, is at least superficially similar to that of Mr. Hamdi, another American captured in Afghanistan. But Mr. Hamdi is free after three years of confinement, though he had to relinquish his American citizenship. Mr. Lindh is in the early part of his 20-year sentence.

The government has not offered an explanation for the disparate treatment of the cases.

Mr. Marri's detention, on the other hand, is potentially lifelong. Though he has not been convicted of a crime, said Jonathan Hafetz, one of his lawyers, the conditions in the Charleston brig are as bad or worse than those in the toughest high-security prisons.

"He has been in solitary confinement for two and a half years," Mr. Hafetz said of Mr. Marri. "He hasn't spoken to or seen his wife and five children since he was designated an enemy combatant" in June 2003. "There's no news, no books, nothing."

This year, the same South Carolina federal judge heard challenges from Mr. Padilla and Mr. Marri. In July, the judge, Henry F. Floyd, ruled that the administration was authorized to detain Mr. Marri. Four months earlier, the judge had reached the opposite conclusion in Mr. Padilla's case.

The difference, he said, was that Mr. Padilla was an American citizen.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., reversed the ruling in the Padilla case. The administration's decision last week to charge Mr. Padilla and try to moot his appeal of the Fourth Circuit's decision to the Supreme Court may have been driven by its desire to maintain a helpful precedent in the circuit where it brings many of its terrorism cases.

"They are seeking to keep their options open," said David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown, "by avoiding Supreme Court review in the Padilla case. It lets them keep standing the Fourth Circuit decision."

In Mr. Hamdi's Supreme Court case last year, the four justices who joined Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's controlling opinion used a narrow definition of "enemy combatant," saying, at least for purposes of that case, that it meant someone "carrying a weapon against American troops on a foreign battlefield."

The government has proposed a much broader definition.

"The term 'enemy combatant,' " according to a Defense Department order last year, includes anyone "part of or supporting Taliban or Al Qaeda forces or associated forces."

In a hearing in December in a case brought by detainees imprisoned in the naval facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a judge questioned a Justice Department official about the limits of that definition. The official, Brian D. Boyle, said the hostilities in question were global and might continue for generations.

The judge, Joyce Hens Green of the Federal District Court in Washington, asked a series of hypothetical questions about who might be detained as an enemy combatant under the government's definition.

What about "a little old lady in Switzerland who writes checks to what she thinks is a charitable organization that helps orphans in Afghanistan but really is a front to finance Al Qaeda activities?" she asked.

And what about a resident of Dublin "who teaches English to the son of a person the C.I.A. knows to be a member of Al Qaeda?"

And "what about a Wall Street Journal reporter, working in Afghanistan, who knows the exact location of Osama bin Laden but does not reveal it to the United States government in order to protect her source?"

Mr. Boyle said the military had the power to detain all three people as enemy combatants.

In January, Judge Green allowed the detainees' court challenges to their confinement to proceed. Another judge on her court reached the opposite conclusion, and an appeal from the two decisions is pending.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/na...rtner=homepage

to which one could easily append a long list of such moves, each of which has similar contempt for review processes.

it is interesting to note that among the many many problems raised by this type of authoritarian policy is that they do not work.
o sure, it is the case that "suspects" are tortured (suspect in quotes because they are not granted the right to defend themselves, not granted the right to trial, not assumed to have any legal rights--therefore the question of guilt is moot--"suspects" are simply hoovered up into the system, maybe sent for a lovely torture-filled vacation in poland or kosovo or egypt or somewhere else and then are abused roundly, under the assumption of guilt--for the right, there is apparently something appealing about the idea that the Law is drawn to the Guilty--which is a fundamentally infantile relationship to the Law--which is like Dad---which perhaps explains something of the right's affection for bad cop cheney, as the severe Dad)--but the policies within which this shameful practices are framed are not functional.

here is a good index of how they operate, if the right can fashion adequately obscuranist media coverage and behind that can feel as though it can do as it likes, using the military as an instrument:

Abuse worse than under Saddam, says Iraqi leader

· Allawi in damning indictment of new regime
· Bush prepares way for US troop pull-out

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday November 27, 2005
The Observer


Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country's first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam's regime.

'People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse,' Ayad Allawi told The Observer. 'It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.'

In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.

Allawi, who was a strong ally of the US-led coalition forces and was prime minister until this April, made his remarks as further hints emerged yesterday that President George Bush is planning to withdraw up to 40,000 US troops from the country next year, when Iraqi forces will be capable of taking over.

Allawi's bleak assessment is likely to undermine any attempt to suggest that conditions in Iraq are markedly improving.

'We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,' he added. 'A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.'

He said that immediate action was needed to dismantle militias that continue to operate with impunity. If nothing is done, 'the disease infecting [the Ministry of the Interior] will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq's government', he said.

In a chilling warning to the West over the danger of leaving behind a disintegrating Iraq, Allawi added: 'Iraq is the centrepiece of this region. If things go wrong, neither Europe nor the US will be safe.'

His uncompromising comments came on the eve of Saddam's latest court appearance on charges of crimes against humanity. They seem certain to fuel the growing sense of crisis over Iraq, both in the country itself and in the US, where political support for the occupation continues to plummet.

Allawi was selected to serve as prime minister of the first interim government, before last January's first national elections. Admired in both Downing Street and the White House as a non-sectarian politician committed to strong centralised government representing all Iraqis, Allawi's supporters struggled in last January's elections, where they were eclipsed by Shia religious parties, some of which have been implicated in the violence.

Recently, however, his reputation has enjoyed a resurgence as he has tried to build alliances with Sunni political groups ahead of next month's national elections.

His comments come as a blow to those hoping that Iraq was moving towards normalisation under the new government. In a speech on Wednesday, Bush is expected to hail the improved readiness of Iraqi troops, which he has identified as the key condition for withdrawing US forces.

But the proximity of the latest round of elections appears to have only intensified political murders and intimidations, including members of Allawi's own list, who have been killed and attacked by political rivals.

Despite denials of wrongdoing by the Ministry of the Interior, which has been implicated in much of the abuse, a series of damaging disclosures, including the discovery of a secret detention centre run by the ministry, has heaped embarrassment on the Iraqi government and its foreign supporters.

The intervention by one of Iraq's most prominent political figures promises to turn human rights abuses into a key election issue.

Allawi's scathing assessment of the collapse of human rights in Iraq under the country's first democratically elected government came amid an angry denunciation of the involvement of the Iraq government's institutions in widespread disappearances, torture and assassinations.

He added that he now had so little faith in the rule of law that he had instructed his own bodyguards to fire on any police car that attempted to approach his headquarters without prior notice, following the implication of police units in many of the abuses.

Allawi saved his strongest condemnation for the Ministry of the Interior, whose personnel have been accused of being behind much of the abuse: 'The Ministry of the Interior is at the heart of the matter. I am not blaming the minister [Bayan Jabr] himself, but the rank and file are behind the secret dungeons and some of the executions that are taking place.'

Responding to the former prime minister's comments, Sir Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, said: 'It is inconceivable in the higher reaches of the command of the multinational forces that there was not an awareness of what is being done by some Iraqis to their own countrymen.

'The assertions by Mr Allawi simply underline the catastrophic failure to have a proper strategy in place for the post-war period in Iraq.'

source: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/inter...651789,00.html

[dksuddeth]

it amazes me that the dems and libs constantly seem to forget that they also were spouting the hussein/WMD connection as far back as 98, before bush was ever in office.

[pan6467]

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

it amazes me that the dems and libs constantly seem to forget that they also were spouting the hussein/WMD connection as far back as 98, before bush was ever in office.

And this has to do with the topic of this thread HOW?????

I believe Elphaba is discussing and wants to debate the history of Dick Cheney and his politics.

Therefore HOW is your post relevant? Or are you trying to change the subject to fight a battle already waged in so many other threads?

Call me the topic police...... Watching Neocons try to change the topic and fight the same battles in thread after thread is getting old.

No offense but stay on topic...... you want to battle the WMDs find one of the many other threads...... This thread Elphaba started is a totally different subject.

[Marvelous Marv]

When we fail to learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat it. I recently had the unpleasant realization that I am a prime example of that warning.

...[limp toward Cheney rant]

The reason you aren't getting better responses is that anyone who doesn't agree with you doesn't seem to be allowed to put Cheney in perspective, i.e. compare his behavior to others. That would be veering "off topic." A better title for the thread you're starting would be "Cheney is an asshole/criminal/etc.", which we've all seen before. I'm sure Host could fill several screens with one. Oh, and he's a coward, too, because he was taken to the proverbial "undisclosed location" during 9/11.

If you indeed want a discussion about "learning from history," some of the Democratic party philosophies have been ruining countries since Rome fell. Others were warned against by the founding fathers. More recently, Gore was caught red-handed in a fund-raising crime (with hard evidence of more that were swept under the rug) and nothing happened. So if Cheney is acting improperly, I'd say he DEFINITELY learned from history.

The limitation I mentioned is why this thread is a non-starter for me, and as far as I can tell, others feel the same. I'm sure you can get a few others on the board to chime in, but it's not going to resemble a "discussion" very much.

[Seaver]

I don't often see you buying into the Ustwo non-argument of ridicule the source, then ridicule the poster.

I didnt redicule the poster, I rediculed the post. I'm sure if I dragged Coulter here to make a point you'd do the same in return.

Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country's first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam's regime.

I stopped reading right there. This was simply him trying to give himself more political clout by seeming to separate himself from the stigma of US puppet.

Abuses as bad? So standing naked while a girl looks at you is as bad as being bathed in acid? As bad as your wife being kidnapped.. raped for 14 days.. then returned in shoeboxes?

/ignore

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by Seaver

I didnt redicule the poster, I rediculed the post. I'm sure if I dragged Coulter here to make a point you'd do the same in return.

You know I'd love to bring Coulter in here, shes always been on my 'to do' list, but then I saw her.....

And it was move over Coulter.

Also Seaver damn you for quoting roachy as it makes me wish to respond, but I think you did handle it nicely, roachy missed the point in that the issue is not the poster, but the question itself.

[roachboy]

the article that gave seaver an excuse to shut off the thread was about a statement made by allawi, folks--you know, the former pm of iraq under the american occupation. i suspect that he might have a better idea of conditions on the ground than you have from watching pooled press reports on television. just saying.

if this was the only such story, i could maybe even see the conservative dismissal--but it is far from the only such story. i know that conservative folk have more trouble than most addressing information they do not like, and that it is asking alot to request that they try to engage seriously with something they would prefer pretend is not there....

strange what the folk from the right would think this something i would simply put up or say myself--but i suppose it is asking alot to expect conservatives to actually read and not distort what they encounter.

the point i was making by posting the allawi material is simply that the cheney-rumsfeld policies, when implemented without the friction of opposition, do not work.
they fare little better in the context of a situation with friction.
they simply are not functional--this despite their aesthetic appeal for the right, which i assume follows from their authoritarian character.

i would hope that something approaching a substantive discussion would be possible with folk from the right on this--but i dont see it happening.... again.
and it seems par for the course--and no more--that the rightwingers above would try to blame thier inability to engage in serious conversation on the post that began the thread, and not look to their own limited/limiting ways of coping with dissonance and perhaps see in that a big part of the problem not only with this exchange, but with all debate in this space.

edit: btw i dont buy the santayana thing---those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it--but i do think that there is no reason not to look at the history of the necon movement, to understand its origins, its development, its modes of operation, and to use that history to inform how the contemporary follies are unfolding.

[pan6467]

Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv

The reason you aren't getting better responses is that anyone who doesn't agree with you doesn't seem to be allowed to put Cheney in perspective, i.e. compare his behavior to others. That would be veering "off topic." A better title for the thread you're starting would be "Cheney is an asshole/criminal/etc.", which we've all seen before. I'm sure Host could fill several screens with one. Oh, and he's a coward, too, because he was taken to the proverbial "undisclosed location" during 9/11.

If you indeed want a discussion about "learning from history," some of the Democratic party philosophies have been ruining countries since Rome fell. Others were warned against by the founding fathers. More recently, Gore was caught red-handed in a fund-raising crime (with hard evidence of more that were swept under the rug) and nothing happened. So if Cheney is acting improperly, I'd say he DEFINITELY learned from history.

The limitation I mentioned is why this thread is a non-starter for me, and as far as I can tell, others feel the same. I'm sure you can get a few others on the board to chime in, but it's not going to resemble a "discussion" very much.

You make good points, but if it is not worthy of the Right's discussion then why post anything? Why not move on if you feel like not discussing this topic?
Why were the first replies attacks and then just way out there with WMDs? To me, from experience, that is a defense from the Right because they can not answer the questions put forth.


Why not go deeper into your second paragraph I would like to know what Gore did, as I haven't heard.

Personally, I think Cheney is a great puppet master that George the 1st could control but George the 2nd either can't or doesn't want to. I can see from Elphaba's OP that there are some warnings from cheney's past that should be explored and talked about. That perhaps, he hungers for the power and control. I also wonder when the time comes in '08 for him to step aside if he tries to stay with Rice or the GOP nominee or if he steps down. I think Rice would be easily manipulated by him, McCain wouldn't and that is one reason the Neocons attack McCain, or anyone in the party that Cheney can not easily manipulate.

[raveneye]

Thanks for the post, Elphaba. I notice that nobody yet has made any attempt to refute any of the statements of fact in Blumenthal's article



His description drives home the point that the Bush presidency has many points of similarity to a religious cult. We have:

--a central authority figure who requires total, unquestioning loyalty; those who publicly question that authority are outed or vilified (e.g. you're either with us or you're with the terrorists);

--a set of assertions/beliefs that in turn are presented as absolute truth and are not subject to any debate whatsoever, regardless of the evidence against them and regardless of the possibility that they are empty of meaning (e.g. "we'll stay in Iraq until we get the job done", the two alternative sets of intelligence information maintained by Cheney; the use of intelligence as propaganda in the Iraq war runup, esp. in regard to the Iraq/AQ "connection");

--an attitude of existing and operating above any accountability, the idea that "we have Right on our side" therefore we are to be implicitly trusted in everything we do, we have no need to explain ourselves except in the most general terms; decisions are made largely in secret without essential input (e.g. the Harriet Miers nomination, many other examples).

Blumenthal's excellent article points out that the Nixon administration also showed many of these cult-like similarities (he could have included the quote "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal"), and many of these similarities were initiated or furthered by Cheney.

I think most Americans would view these attributes as negatives, as essentially un-American, as in conflict with the ideal of a democratic society thriving under free, open debate. I think we're finally reaching the "tipping point" as more folks become aware of these things, as indicated by the recent Republican vote to finally hold bush accountable for what is happening in Iraq.

As Winston Churchill said, "America can always be counted on to do the right thing -- after exhausting all the alternatives."

[Elphaba]

I remember reading a criticism of the CIA not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The alarming question was how could they have gotten it so wrong on the state of the Soviet economy?

As Blumenthal points out, Cheney had fully circumvented CIA intelligence and produced and promoted his view through the same "group think" methodology that he used in selling the Iraq war. Please think about this. In Cheney's world, his foreign policy goals produce the intelligence necessary to support them. Intelligence needs to inform policy, not the other way around.

My personal belief is that Cheney is a dangerous ideologue.

[roachboy]

conservative discourse is built around a kind of statement the features of which raveneye outlines quite well above. i think that the cult analogy is a bit overstated, but i can see where it comes from.

a different spin on parallel considerations:

for the faithful, there must be something reassuring about a politics made up almost entirely of transcendent propositions, particularly that type of transcendent statement which purports to describe the world but never in any particularity--you can see it everywhere in conservative politics, from the assumptions about markets through their kind of flinstone realpolitik---for example, the various policies/problems associated with cheney.

the reassuring character follows from the non-falsifability of the statements. it is also the feature that enables you to see conservative politics in general as a kind of neurotic flight from contemporary reality, from globalization for example....cheney is in this regard but an extreme example of what can happen if folk in a position to generate actual policy elaborate their sense of the world, and themselves in the world, across this discourse.

conservative discourse in its contemporary american form is primarily an oppostional frame of reference that does not translate well at all into power--partly because the discourse itself is an incoherent hodge-podge of often conflicting assumptions/images---partly because it tends to reproduce the worst features of the conservative obsession with its own victimization (the history of the united states since vietnam is the sourceof this----and so in this as in so many regards, conservativeland is not understandable without recourse to the contexts that it responded to/came out of)---the sense of being victimized translates into an absolute opposition to every and all critics of the ideology, who are crushed into a fantasy of the left and understood as a bloc as enemies whose main function is to repeat the process of being-victimized itself (that is to threaten conservatives with a repetition of the history of the states since the vietnam era, a history that much conservative "thinking" is set up to erase)---you can see this playing out in cheneythought at almost every turn---removed from its oppositional situation, conservative discourse almost immediately become authoritarian--but it is a kind of accidental authoritarianism in that i doubt that even dick cheney fully recognizes the extent to which his positions fall squarely into the old radical nationalist political tradition....and i also wonder if these tendencies that you see growing out of applied conservative discourse would be as they are if the folk who espouse them were capable of seeing their politics in a longer-term historical framework.

it is this ignorance of history that in a sense makes conservative ideology as dangerous as it is in the hands of someone like cheney.

the sense of being-victimized certainly resonates with the history of the nixon administration, like it or not.

at the same time, it is clear that cheney is playing the administration's bad cop. i do not believe that george w bush is so wholly out of it that the kind of policies now associated with cheney and rumsfeld could be developed and implemented without his knowledge. bush is presented as the affable dunce--cheney/rumsfeld as the darkside--but i think that is mostly rovespin geared toward preventing the president from being held politically to account for the debacles his administration has foisted on the rest of us.

[Marvelous Marv]

Originally Posted by pan6467

Why not go deeper into your second paragraph I would like to know what Gore did, as I haven't heard.

That would be a threadjack, but not difficult. Monks, fundraising, illegal aliens, Loral, Charlie Trie, Johnny Huang, missile technology, China, and other topics (in conjunction with Gore) are all Google-worthy.

I'm trying not to be rude when I say this, so please don't interpret it that way, but when I see people ignore all of the above and then call Cheney a "puppet master" like that was a crime, I lose interest.

Personally, I think Cheney is a great puppet master that George the 1st could control but George the 2nd either can't or doesn't want to. I can see from Elphaba's OP that there are some warnings from cheney's past that should be explored and talked about. That perhaps, he hungers for the power and control. I also wonder when the time comes in '08 for him to step aside if he tries to stay with Rice or the GOP nominee or if he steps down. I think Rice would be easily manipulated by him, McCain wouldn't and that is one reason the Neocons attack McCain, or anyone in the party that Cheney can not easily manipulate.

While I disagree with some of McCain's positions (i'm actually more of a fan of Joe Lieberman), it isn't a hard choice if the next election is McCain vs. Hillary.

McCain will have MASSIVE Republican support in that scenario.

[Elphaba]

Roachboy: at the same time, it is clear that cheney is playing the administration's bad cop. i do not believe that george w bush is so wholly out of it that the kind of policies now associated with cheney and rumsfeld could be developed and implemented without his knowledge. bush is presented as the affable dunce--cheney/rumsfeld as the darkside--but i think that is mostly rovespin geared toward preventing the president from being held politically to account for the debacles his administration has foisted on the rest of us.

I agree that there has been an effort to afford Bush "plausible deniabilty" should things go badly. Cheney may even be willing to resign, or better, allow Bush to fire him to promote that belief among the public. But what would the public be left to think of Bush at that turn of events? He would become the dupe that many have always believed him to be and that would become the legacy of his presidency.

Another prospect may face him now that his daily intelligence briefs are being leaked.

[ajpresto]

McCain is a very personable man. It's very painful to see him stand behind the Bushies party line.

But if it's Clinton versus anybody, then it's clearly Clinton. Just look at the differences between 8 years of record growth versus 8 years of record deficits.

(Wait for it... wait for it...)

[Elphaba]

::waves hands wildly::

Party foul, on the threadjackers

[ajpresto]

Originally Posted by Elphaba

::waves hands wildly::

Party foul, on the threadjackers

Ack! I didn't mean to threadjack.

::takes the timeout... or what do you get for threadjacking these days?::

[Elphaba]

Originally Posted by ajpresto

Ack! I didn't mean to threadjack.

::takes the timeout... or what do you get for threadjacking these days?::

It depends on the offended party. I can be mollified with a glass of white wine.

[ajpresto]

Wow. That's cheap. I can do that.

BTW, daily intelligence briefings are being leaked? Where can I find information from them? That would be fascinating reading.

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv

While I disagree with some of McCain's positions (i'm actually more of a fan of Joe Lieberman), it isn't a hard choice if the next election is McCain vs. Hillary.

McCain will have MASSIVE Republican support in that scenario.

Ironicly I'm more of a Lieberman than McCain fan as well. McCain is far to much of a media whore for my tastes, but I'd rush to vote for him over Hilary.

[ajpresto]

He's not a media whore... I really respect him as a person. He's funny, articulate, willing to poke fun at himself... Just an all around good guy. Too bad he's a Republican. Maybe we can get him to switch sides like they were talking about in 2004 and 2000.

[Elphaba]

Just wait until I start on Rumsfeld. Y'all will *really* need to threadjack to keep that discussion off track. But nice going, so far.

[alansmithee]

Originally Posted by raveneye

Thanks for the post, Elphaba. I notice that nobody yet has made any attempt to refute any of the statements of fact in Blumenthal's article



His description drives home the point that the Bush presidency has many points of similarity to a religious cult. We have:

--a central authority figure who requires total, unquestioning loyalty; those who publicly question that authority are outed or vilified (e.g. you're either with us or you're with the terrorists);

--a set of assertions/beliefs that in turn are presented as absolute truth and are not subject to any debate whatsoever, regardless of the evidence against them and regardless of the possibility that they are empty of meaning (e.g. "we'll stay in Iraq until we get the job done", the two alternative sets of intelligence information maintained by Cheney; the use of intelligence as propaganda in the Iraq war runup, esp. in regard to the Iraq/AQ "connection");

--an attitude of existing and operating above any accountability, the idea that "we have Right on our side" therefore we are to be implicitly trusted in everything we do, we have no need to explain ourselves except in the most general terms; decisions are made largely in secret without essential input (e.g. the Harriet Miers nomination, many other examples).

I'd just like to point out that all of those ideas could equally be applied to the Clinton administration. That article was little more than an attack piece by a bitter person. There's no "statements of fact" present in that article outside of the name of the author.

[alansmithee]

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Ironicly I'm more of a Lieberman than McCain fan as well. McCain is far to much of a media whore for my tastes, but I'd rush to vote for him over Hilary.

I'd add my support to Lieberman over McCain as well. I agree, McCain might have been nice in 2000, but now he'll do anything to keep up his maverick image and to get tv time. He's bought into his own hype. But unfortunately Lieberman will never get the chance to run as the Dems will most likely lead Hillary to slaughter (unless they pick some southern dem).

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by Elphaba

Just wait until I start on Rumsfeld. Y'all will *really* need to threadjack to keep that discussion off track. But nice going, so far.

I'm sorry Elphaba but for reasons pointed out there never was a thread to start with.

If you start 'on Rumsfeld' with the same type of opening the result will be the same. In the future I'd not recomend anything from truthout as starting material.

P.S. Laura Ingram is a hottie.

Originally Posted by alansmithee

I'd add my support to Lieberman over McCain as well. I agree, McCain might have been nice in 2000, but now he'll do anything to keep up his maverick image and to get tv time. He's bought into his own hype. But unfortunately Lieberman will never get the chance to run as the Dems will most likely lead Hillary to slaughter (unless they pick some southern dem).

Saddly you are correct in that Lieberman would never have a prayer getting the democratic nomination. Outside of his backflips when he was with Gore, Liberman has been a stand up guy and would be better suited as an independent. I do differ in one aspect. McCain was a media whore in 2000 too.

[host]

Zzzzzzzz......roachboy, yer posts are toooo long....
ustwo.....nice lookin' babe....who is she ???
Elphaba...truthout = guerilla op-ed...so... everything from that site.....(did I mention "toooo long?) from Maureen Dowd to Ray McGovern is not worthy of even a fact check. Maybe...if an article that you post is still linked to the premium site where it first appeared, and where only subscribers can see it.... instead of being linked to truthout, where you get it.....it might be worth reading.....but then I couldn't read it....cuz I don't subscribe.....but once it's linked from truthout....it's lost all credibility....so we'll never seriously consider it...once it comes from truthout...it's ruined <b>!</b>

roachboy.....'member you posted something about "tiny"??? That was a good one...and it was short, too!

In edit.....Laura Ingram, huh ? She's hot <b>!</b>

ustwo...whaddya think a recap of yer last dozen posts in these threads would look like? Same as always......<b>?</b>

[Elphaba]

Host, I sooooo needed that unreality check.

[smooth]

Originally Posted by host

Zzzzzzzz......roachboy, yer posts are toooo long....
ustwo.....nice lookin' babe....who is she ???
Elphaba...truthout = guerilla op-ed...so... everything from that site.....(did I mention "toooo long?) from Maureen Dowd to Ray McGovern is not worthy of even a fact check. Maybe...if an article that you post is still linked to the premium site where it first appeared, and where only subscribers can see it.... instead of being linked to truthout, where you get it.....it might be worth reading.....but then I couldn't read it....cuz I don't subscribe.....but once it's linked from truthout....it's lost all credibility....so we'll never seriously consider it...once it comes from truthout...it's ruined <b>!</b>

roachboy.....'member you posted something about "tiny"??? That was a good one...and it was short, too!

In edit.....Laura Ingram, huh ? She's hot <b>!</b>

ustwo...whaddya think a recap of yer last dozen posts in these threads would look like? Same as always......<b>?</b>

host, damn if that wasn't your shortest post!
and fuckall it made a lot of sense, but I can't respond right now because I'm preoccupied with this blonde from the titty board...

/off to the shower

[Seaver]

Roachboy. You think we dont read the articles. We do... we also READ PAST them.

This was Allawi simply attempting to distance himself from the stigma of being a puppet.

Just like when the Egyptian Government denounces us left and right about how evil we are, yet turn around and buy as much stuff from us as they can.

Just like when the Jordanian King denounced Israel for their prosecution of the Palestinians, yet pleaded them to come into his borders to get rid of the PLO.

Just like when the Marionite Christians pleaded for US intervention in the Lebanese Civil War... yet the one who funded the Barracks bombing turned out to be a Marionite.

These things are NOT uncommon in this area. For him to have any future power he needs to denounce us. This doesnt mean he believes what he says. Only a retarded monkey would truly think we're as bad as Hussain (we got a lot of those in the world apparently).

[smooth]

Did you claim you stopped reading at the first line of the article?

Originally Posted by Seaver

I stopped reading right there.

emphasis added

So it would appear that, by your own statement, you didn't read the article.
Why are you now arguing against roachboy for thinking you didn't read the article?

[raveneye]

Originally Posted by Elphaba

As Blumenthal points out, Cheney had fully circumvented CIA intelligence and produced and promoted his view through the same "group think" methodology that he used in selling the Iraq war. Please think about this. In Cheney's world, his foreign policy goals produce the intelligence necessary to support them. Intelligence needs to inform policy, not the other way around.

My personal belief is that Cheney is a dangerous ideologue.

And we might as well lay out the key ideologies, which in my opinion are:

1. a blind faith in trickle-down Reaganomics, tax reductions for the upper income brackets, corporate tax rate reductions, government subsidies, deregulation; what Bush's dad referred to as "voodoo economics" and which no respected economist has ever advocated, including conservative economists;

2. a blind faith in the power of the U.S. military to force the will of the U.S. on other nations, through threat of war or outright invasion, war, and nation-building if necessary. And "will" is usually defined in terms of (1) above, namely in terms of U.S. corporate interests, whose well-being is equated to the well-being of the U.S. as a whole (and Bush probably needed to be re-educated in this area, reluctant as he has been in the past to endorse the value of nation-building);

3. this foreign policy ideology is accompanied by the unquestioned view that 2005 = 1939, i.e. the threats of islamofascism, China, and Iran are equated with the threats of Hitler and Japan pre WWII, and anybody who disagrees and advocates diplomacy is an "appeaser" (again Bush himself in the past has had trouble getting the message -- during the China spy plane incident he was respectful and apologetic, which probably infuriated Cheney);

4. complete intellectual inflexibility, to the point that all of these beliefs have become matters of unfalsifiable faith, leading to an "ends justify the means" ethic that has resulted in an attitude of civil war between the Administration and the CIA, when the CIA has often refused to provide Cheney with the propaganda necessary to rationalize an aggressive foreign policy stance.


I think that about covers it. And it's worth pointing out that Nixon was not anywhere near as extreme as Cheney when it came to foreign policy; Nixon in fact tended to prefer diplomacy and containment; if Nixon were president in 2000 he probably would have continued to contain Saddam.

[raveneye]

Originally Posted by host

Zzzzzzzz......

One thing you forgot to mention, host, is the inevitable "well Clinton did it too!" post that always eventually comes up in these threads.

I think we need a new law to cover this, analogous to Godwin's Law. We can call it Godwin's Corollary, and here it is: If an internet discussion of conservative shortcomings continues sufficiently long, there inevitably will pop up the "Well, Clinton did it too!" rationalization. In this thread it took 8 posts, with a nice followup in post 28.

Just one of the warm comforts of the familiar in the post-Clinton U.S.A.

[alansmithee]

Originally Posted by raveneye

One thing you forgot to mention, host, is the inevitable "well Clinton did it too!" post that always eventually comes up in these threads.

I think we need a new law to cover this, analogous to Godwin's Law. We can call it Godwin's Corollary, and here it is: If an internet discussion of conservative shortcomings continues sufficiently long, there inevitably will pop up the "Well, Clinton did it too!" rationalization. In this thread it took 8 posts, with a nice followup in post 28.

Just one of the warm comforts of the familiar in the post-Clinton U.S.A.

The reason I pointed that out is because often liberals like to trot out Clinton as some sort of messiah-like figure, who was crucified by the evil *cue villianous music* NEO-CONS!!!. It seems to liberals the only former politician that you can draw comparisons from is Hitler, and that's only valid when discussing Bush. So I hope that if the Dems ever get someone back into the presidency they won't try to draw comparisons between Bush and that person, when that person inevitably does something questionable. But they seem to not want to discuss there own parties many shortcomings. They trot out obviously biased op-ed pieces as if they are scientific certainties, and when called on it want people to "debate the facts and not the source" There's no facts involved whatsoever, it's all bitterness and sour grapes over not winning the presidency. What "facts" are trotted out are totally tangential to any supposed conclusion drawn by the liberal hatemongers.

And as for "these threads", "these threads" are little more than thinly veiled attacks based on personal opinion. Liberals are just as blinded by ideology and irrationality as the bible-thumpinest, tax-cuttinest, flag-wavinest conservative. Nothing new or important ever is found in threads like this, it's merely another excuse for liberals to trot out the reasons they think "rEpUbLiKKKaNs aRe TeH sUxX0RZ!!1!!!!". That's why there's so much disdain from opposing viewpoints-there's no notable content to discuss here. Anyone thinking rationally and with even the smallest hint of objectivity would see that these attacks deserve no more respect or logical rebuttal than a homeless guy on a corner who ran out of schizophenia medicine.

[roachboy]

on what possible basis do you say that, alansmithee?
because you do not like the article?
because you object for some reason to truthout as a source for anything?
because you object to its content?
because you object a priori to sydney blumenthal?
where is the problem with linking cheney in bushworld to cheney under nixon?
what is the problem with looking at the history of the neoconservative movement in general?
on what possible basis could you object to viewing contemporary tendencies in neocon politics/ideology in a historical context?

if there is an analytic argument to be made about cheney's particular views within the neocon movement in general that links them to potentially authoritarian outcomes, on what basis could you possible object to the fact of that argument?

if you disagree, then fire away--but you are not simply disagreeing--you, like ustwo and the other sorry examples of conservative denial you see on this sad sad thread--are trying to make the argument go away as such.
what are your motives?
i do not see anything coherent in your accusation about ad hominem...i do not see anything considered in your attempts to dismiss concerns that folk who disagree with you politically might have about cheney or any other far right ideologue....all i see is yet another attempt to deal with dissonance by looking to erase it.

and if there is something pathological in this thread, it can be found in this refusal to engage on the part of conservatives, this refusal to think about dissonant information, this refusal to even consider that the right might not have a monopoly on framing legitimate questions, legitimate ways of interpreting information, legitimate politics in general.

this is a recurrent feature of "interactions" with conservatives on topics they do not like and/or cannot control across this forum.

once again, for folk who talk about personal responsibility, it seems that most conservatives have a really hard time with applying the idea to themselves, not to mention actually taking personal responsibility, even discursively---in this case,it is pretty bloody obvious that the problem with this thread lay in the right's reaction to it, which is simply a part of the general pattern of conservative refusal of serious discussion except in those situation where the frame of reference matches with thier own. this pattern reeks of narcissism, frankly---which follows from its basically infantile motivations. a closed world in which only conservatives get to talk. anything that strays too far gets shouted down--a tactic that assume the cumulative weight of many flinstone voices outweighs the total lack of content of each individual voice.

[host]

Originally Posted by alansmithee

.......And as for "these threads", "these threads" are little more than thinly veiled attacks based on personal opinion. Liberals are just as blinded by ideology and irrationality as the bible-thumpinest, tax-cuttinest, flag-wavinest conservative. Nothing new or important ever is found in threads like this, it's merely another excuse for liberals to trot out the reasons they think "rEpUbLiKKKaNs aRe TeH sUxX0RZ!!1!!!!". That's why there's so much disdain from opposing viewpoints-there's no notable content to discuss here. Anyone thinking rationally and with even the smallest hint of objectivity would see that these attacks deserve no more respect or logical rebuttal than a homeless guy on a corner who ran out of schizophenia medicine.

No...the thread is about Cheney. There is every reason to discuss him....to examine his past.....and his agenda. The piece that Elphaba posted is a good starting point, if there was anyone here willing to defend him. Your post, and half the others on the thread, indicate that there is no will, interest, or means to defend him. The man who Cheney picked to be his COS and NS advisor has been indicted for misleading a federal prosecutor in a high profile case that resulted form a CIA complaint that one of it's case officer's name and work responsibilities were given to reporters.

The man who the president picked to be his running mate, twice....and who has been given more power and responsibility than any prior vice-president, seems to answer to the VP, and cedes authority to make and carry out foreign and military policy, to him. I'm not saying this...the assistant to former secretary of state Colin Powell, Larry Wilkerson, after serving Powell for 16 years, is the one saying it.

And....are you saying that Cheney is not a liar? The big lie....the one that was the basis of a propaganda campaign designed to convince us to support an invasion of Iraq...can be found displayed right on the white house website. Isn't that a sign that something is very wrong?
Shouldn't you be disturbed about these things? I'm disturbed that you don't want to talk about it. Shooting the messenger ain't gonna get you by, this time.....

The lie that exposes the big lie is found in an obscure place....Drudge's news archive. Why are you all trying to stifle discussion. Are these not essential issues to soldiers and their families who may still have to face risks of physical harm in Iraq? Are you writing to your federal representatives to urge them to hold open investigations of Cheney and Bush?...or are you working to discourage discussion, while attempting to make those who want to discuss these disturbing matters, look foolish? Is that how you support the troops?
Is that how you want to treat fellow Americans who cherish and honest and open government as much as you say you do?

If he's not a liar....did Drudge alter the item in his archive, did I? please explain:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20011209.html
December 9, 2001

The Vice President Appears on NBC's Meet the Press (Scroll down to middle of page)

RUSSERT: Let me turn to Iraq. When you were last on this program, September 16, five days after the attack on our country, I asked you whether there was <b>any evidence that Iraq was involved in the attack and you said no.</b>

Since that time, a couple of articles have appeared which <b>I want to get you to react to.</b> The first: The Czech interior minister said today that <b>an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 terrorists attacks on the United States, just five months before the synchronized hijackings and mass killings were carried out.</b>

And this from James Woolsey, former CIA director: ``We know that at Salman Pak, in the southern edge of Baghdad, five different eye witnesses--three Iraqi defectors and two American U.N. inspectors--have said, and now there are aerial photographs to show it, a Boeing 707 that was used for training of hijackers, including non-Iraqi hijackers, trained very secretly to take over airplanes with knives.''

And we have photographs. As you can see that little white speck, and there it is.

<b>RUSSERT: The plane on the ground in Iraq used to train non-Iraqi hijackers.

Do you still believe there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?

CHENEY: Well, </b>what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's <h2>been pretty well confirmed,</h2> that he 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 attack.

Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point. But that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/meet.htm

With Tim Russert, on September 8th, 2002:

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the one hand, and the al-Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohamed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn't he there, again, it's the intelligence business.

Mr. RUSSERT: What does the CIA say about that? Is it credible?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: It's credible. But, you know, I think a way to put it would be it's unconfirmed at this point. We've got...

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...mountain&hl=en
On the separate issue, on the 9/11 question, we've never had confirmation one way or another. We did have reporting that was public, that came out shortly after the 9/11 attack, provided by the Czech government, suggesting there had been a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and a man named al-Ani (Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani), who was an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, at the embassy there, in April of '01, prior to the 9/11 attacks. It has never been -- we've never been able to collect any more information on that. That was the one that possibly tied the two together to 9/11.

http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/...404_flash3.htm
CHENEY: CLEAR LINKS BETWEEN SADDAM, AL-QAEDA; CALLS NY TIMES ARTICLE 'OUTRAGEOUS'
Thu Jun 17 2004 19:00:33 ET

In an EXCLUSIVE interview with CNBC's 'Capital Report':

....<b>BORGER: Well, let's get to Mohammad Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."</b>

<h3>Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, I never said that.</h3>

BORGER: OK.

<h3>Vice Pres. CHENEY: Never said that.</h3>

BORGER: I think that is...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down.

BORGER: Well, now this report says it didn't happen.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No. This report says they haven't found any evidence.

BORGER: That it happened.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Right.

BORGER: But you haven't found the evidence that it happened either, have you?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No. All we have is that one report from the Czechs. We just don't know.

BORGER: So does this put it to rest for you or not on Atta?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: It doesn't add anything from my perspective. I mean, I still am a skeptic. I can't refute the Czech plan. I can't prove the Czech plan. It's ...(unintelligible) the nature of the intelligence (unintelligible).

BORGER: OK, but let's...