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

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

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.

This would be your "discussion?" :)

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

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? :)

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.

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:

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:

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

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...... :thumbsup: 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.

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.

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.

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

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

http://www.lauraingrahamfanclub.com/...aham-Pic-1.jpg 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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

::waves hands wildly::

Party foul, on the threadjackers :D

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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. :rolleyes:

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.

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).

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.

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.

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, I sooooo needed that unreality check. :icare:

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

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).

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

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?

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.

:D

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.

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.

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:

I don't care for the article because I find it inaccurate and light on meaningful content. And there is no problem with linking Cheney to the Nixon Administration. But if you allow for that, you must also allow for comparisons to be drawn to the Clinton Administration, the Carter Administration, the Regan Administration, et al. You can't just cherry pick where you want to draw comparisions from if they are valid. But liberals like to opperate like Clinton (honestly, the only meaningful Dem pres since FDR) operated under some sort of separated from time bubble, where he should be immune to any negative associations. My only point is that if you want to make some comparisons, don't get angered when another equally valid but less flattering association is made.

Again, if actual discussion is wanted, I would be all for it. But this thread is the equivalent of asking "So, when did you quit beating your wife?". And when people came to say they aren't wife beaters, the were met with "So, you're a liar and a wifebeater now?". When the whole premise isn't to discuss Cheney, but for people to fling one-sided attacks, many who don't think Cheney some mix of Satan and Hitler might not bother trying to debate/discuss when they know any valid arguments will be disregarded anyway.

Again, it's about starting with a ridiculous/weighted premise, and expecting everyone to fall into line and stick with that view. It has nothing to do with ignoring anything, or denial. There was no desire for discussion, what was wanted was attack. And in that, this thread was a ringing success. And I personally find your claim that conservatives are narcissistic to be amusing and very ironic, especially when it is seen that liberals will rarely even concede that there can be another viewpoint on issues.

Is it great minds or weak minds that think alike? :D

I was going to post the same thing but I don't think the analogy isn't quite correct.

"So, when did you quit beating your wife?" is a loaded question while this was really a case of begging the question.

We were asked to concede that Cheney was some sort of evil powermonger bent on total power before we could answer the question posed. Without that concession the question was meaningless.

alansmithee:

i did not see anything so onesided in the article that it merits the kind of response from you--but then again i am not in a position where defending cheney is a matter of preserving my political identity---and since it is not de rigeur for me, i have no problem with considering fundamental critiques of his kind of politics.

the conservative set here could have handled this whole thing differently, you know: any one of you could easily have advanced counterarguments that refuted the op characterization of cheney--but you didnt.
you could have tried to point to other material that presented what you regard as a more balanced image of him and his politics--but you didnt.
you could have gone after the historical component of piece, and that from a number of angles--but you didnt.
you could even have tried to mount a defense of cheney---but you didnt.

instead, it was sophomoric idiocy time, food fight time blah blah blah.
it is strange that this kind of idiocy seems to pass for legitimate argument in conservativeland.

The "form" of discussion that attacks the source, and mysteriously devines the topic author's intentions is so old and overused that it seems unworthy of the time taken to respond to it.

My "intentions" are so foreign to Ustwo and Alansmithee that they must resort to projecting their own intentions. They have no inclination toward intellectual curiousity, and cannot conceive of the possibility that someone else would be so inclined. There must be some sort of comfort in protecting a very narrow world view.

You couldn't be further from the truth. My "political identity" isn't tied up in Cheney. I could name any number of things that I think he is wrong about, or has done wrong. What I don't see a purpose for is taking one-sided potshots and putting forth faulty arguements.

Again, it's because the whole thread and op-ed that started it wasn't worthy of a true rebuttal. I also wouldn't bother putting up a logical, well-thought out rebuttal if someone claimed the moon landing was fake, or that the earth is flat. To even bother to do so gives more credit than is warranted. There was no desire to debate the particular merits of Cheney or his politics, the point was for the liberals to pile on conservatives (yet again).

Sure, it was sophmoric. But it was intentional, as opposed to the unintentional humor and self-important idiocy of the op-ed piece and the OP. When serious discussion is warranted (or desired) I have no doubt that it can and will come about (as it has many times before by both the board's liberals and conservatives). But just like in this thread http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=97611 liberals totally were dismissive and mocking of the OP, because they felt it wasn't deserving of a real answer. This thread is nothing but the other side of the coin. And I don't see this as necessarily a bad thing-hopefully it leads to more actual debate instead of just wanting to pile on one side or the other.

What I find amazing is that the Right wing posters find fault and attack the work and the posters, yet never offer substance and complain about how the topic is soooooo boring or done to death or whatever.... yet they keep posting.

Which is it guys, if the posts aren't worthy then why post anything..... or are the posts worthy and you just can't seem to argue the points. If you have legitimate differing views air them. Instead we get attacks and told how stupid the article is, and subject changes...... hmmmmm why must they post if they can't add anything constructive?

I think Host's exposing Drudge is very worthy, yet there is silence......

Why? I'll tell you why.

The first time Bush = Hitler was issued we decimated that argument with facts.
The next time we did as well.
Same again.
Then again.
Then we'd see Bush and Hitler in the same sentence and we'd stop reading, cause we know everything they're going to say already.

Then yall pulled out stupid stuff, like how Bush sounds stupid speaking on his own and how he needs writers.
Then yall pulled out more stuff like how Bush wanted questions in advance so he doesnt sound stupid and needs to speak frankly.

Then it was Bush causes hurricanes and more crap.

Have you ever seen anyone on the Right start up threads about how Kerry = Hitler? No. We dont do it because it's stupid, indefensible, and it's a waste of time.

You want to know why we stop reading your posts all the way through? Because people post 18 different sources driving on about inane items.

Now dont take this wrong, it's not a personal attack on anyone. Host backs up his arguments completely. I respect him for taking the time, it's great for a debate, perfect for a thesis. However I'll pull out that same example, when he attacks someone for doing the exact same thing using polar arguments on how he's supposed to do the other... what's the point in reading it.

Whats the point in reading something from truthout? Do you read all of Coulter's last book? I didnt. Why not? The same reason I'll never pay to see a Moore film, 13 half truths dont make a full one.

I wouldn't know, but a narrow world view seems to do just fine for most liberals. And intellectual curiosity doesn't entail simply spreading your ideology. It usually starts without having your conclusions already drawn. But I guess it's only intellectual if a liberal says it, right :rolleyes:

Elphaba I find it sort of sad that you can't even see the mistake you made in your original post.

It is one of those dreaded 'logical fallacies'.

This was your question.

Well really none of us has a clue what Cheney 'learned' in the Nixon presidency. Thats way to hypothetical and speculative to even dream of answering, but luckily you provided us with a 'article' to lead us along.


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.

This is just speculation, and based on the tone of the article and the source, we can assume that objectivity was not high on the authors list. This isn’t a scholarly work, but a hit piece. Yes this is attacking the source but it is the source YOU gave as a starting point for discussion. You were begging the question, you gave us assumptions to accept to begin answering your question.

Do you SEE where you went wrong and why this thread is so utterly pointless?

What your “intentions” were is irrelevant, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and we can not know your intent any more than we can know what Cheney learned 30 odd years ago, we can only know what you gave us, and what you gave us was bankrupt of potential.

Yawn.... Show me a discussion other than your rubber stamp replies. Refute the article with another, do *anything* that takes a moment of effort to participate in a positive manner. I have not seen that yet from you, so I'm off to more important things. Ahh, yes! Time to clean the toilet.

Research does wonders for a truly curious mind.........
One thing you are right about, ustwo, is that there is much that we cannot know for certain. Bush and Cheney have worked O.T., to insure that!
[quote]
roachboy....how long do you predict that it will be until these folks adopt a policy of airbrushing out, the faces of people in official photos who have offended our "leaders"?

I fell in love with her when she told Lanny Davis on national TV that his defense of the Clinton administration was "the biggest pile of crap [she'd] ever heard."

But I'm certain the Dems are celebrating that she's been diagnosed with breast cancer.

I did not know that. :(

Elphaba despite what some people think, posting partisan links is not a discussion. Posting one in support of Cheney is no more valid than you posting yours. It doesn't change that you based this entire dicussion on an obvious logical fallacy and the apparent lack of understand of this on your part makes any discussion pointless. You have added nothing to your own discussion, you yourself did not answer your own question.

If you can show me where my analysis of your post was incorrect please do so, otherwise do not expect others to waste their time debating an illogical question.

Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell's former chief of staff) is in the news again, stepping up his attack on Cheney, essentially implying that Cheney is guilty of war crimes for authorizing the torture of prisoners held in the "war on terror."

Basically he's saying that Cheney used the power of his office to permit Rumsfield to create a directive that suspended the Geneva Conventions on torture for U.S. prisoners of war.

Stansfield Turner also attacked Cheney today for the same reason.

Not a good time to be Dick Cheney. Was there ever a good time?

Post 56, and there seems to be plenty of discussion.

Wilkerson made another comment that goes to Cheney's desire to enlarge the power of the presidency, an objective he also held during the Nixon administration:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/112905Z.shtml

Checks and balances are necessary and I can't imagine anyone arguing for an imperial presidency, but appears to be Cheney's goal. I found Wilkerson's comments regarding Bush's detachment from the details very interesting, too.
Cheney and Rumsfeld were allowed to do pretty much anything they pleased.

As I stated in the OP, I believe these two have brought great harm to the presidency. Sadly, Bush must share some of the blame for allowing it to happen.

Here's a transcript of the Wilkerson interview from the BBC's website.

I notice that not all the quotes in Elphaba's post above are in this transcript, so it must have left out some details. I underlined the interviewer's questions and comments in the quotes.

Note that in this interview Wilkerson points out that there were two separate decision-making processes that were independent of each other, and that the process that Cheney was in control of ultimately became policy. That is very similar to Blumenthal's description of the two intelligence teams, the real one and the propaganda one controlled by Cheney during the Nixon administration.

Also: note that Wilkerson was initially sceptical of the idea that Cheney (and of course Bush by default) used intelligence as propaganda in the runup to the Iraq war, but with subsequent revelations about how the intelligence was used and obtained, he seems to have shifted his position and now is concerned that intelligence was "cherry-picked" to support policy.

On torture: it was interesting to see that one of the pieces of information used to defend a connection between Iraq and 9/11 was a "forced" confession from an AQ member; i.e. a confession obtained using non-Geneva techniques, which by definition are torture. We don't know what those techniques were, however; those responsible apparently aren't telling.

That confession was later recanted. I think using torture to obtain information that you want to hear, to support going to war, and then treating that information as credible intelligence is just revolting, in my humble opinion.

Hot off the presses today, here's an interesting article right on target on the thread topic, in the London Financial Times by Catherine Daniel.

She doesn't focus as much as Blumenthal on the Nixon administration, but instead points to Cheney's experience in the Ford, Reagan, Bush I administrations, particularly his role as the minority chair of the Iran-contra committee. For Cheney, Iran-contra was simply a matter of the executive exercising its legitimate power against the illegitimate runaway power of Congress.

And his recent intransigence on the torture issue is very revealing in demonstrating his belief that the power of the president's office transcends international law and ethics.

I have bumped this thread with the hope of renewing discussion of Cheney's ideological influence upon presidents, past and present. Under the new rules of the politics forum, civil discussion may be possible.

I still believe that Cheney and Rumsfeld are the architects of this administration's policies. I also believe that their machinations are once again threatening the position of the executive. I find it so ironic the Cheney's continued pursuit of a universal presidency ultimately achieves the opposite result. Congress and the judiciary will reassert their roles, as they did under the Nixon administration.

In the Steve Colbert video thread, <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2055690&postcount=42">ubertuber wrote</a>:
so....we'll "fight" here....so we don't have to "fight" over there......

In addition to the lie that Cheney told Gloria Borger, documented in my preceding post, above.....concerning his earlier attempt to link 9/11 "mastermind", Mohammed Atta, with Iraq, there are the following:

and.....
The cardinal "sin" is the 9/11 hijacking "ringleader" met with Saddam's intelligence officer, just 5 months before 9/11...blah...blah...blah story that Cheney said, on television, was "pretty much confirmed"....when it wasn't...and he knew it wasn't.

The followup by the "lap dog" press, imprinting this story in the minds of the American people, only added to the travesty. Without Cheney's "pretty much confirmed", comment, this would not have been a "center piece" indictment of Saddam's complicity.

Cheney is obviously aware of this, and that is confirmed by the curious risk he took....denying his own, previous televised statement, in a more recent televised statement, when he responded to CNBC reporter Gloria Borger's question. If it wasn't damning to admit that he told Russert that it "was pretty much confirmed", why would he risk telling such a blatant lie, to Borger?

Host, thanks for sticking this is a different thread. I've got a couple of points and a couple of questions.

First, can you link the second, long quoted section? Thanks.

Now, you've posted many inches worth of material that amount to documentation of one comment by one official. At that, Cheney's comment was that the Czech government had confirmed a report (which at that point, they had, however haphazardly) and this was something he said in December of 2001. The invasion of Iraq began in March of 2003. Further, your own linked article indicates that Cheney was responding to this question from Russert: "Do you still believe there's no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?” Even the wording of the question asserts that Cheney had originally said there was no question - and this is further confirmed by your linked article. First, Russert reminded Cheney that on Sept. 16, “five days after the attack on our country, I asked you whether there was any evidence that Iraq was involved in the attack and you said no. Since that time, a couple articles have appeared which I want to get you to react to.” As long as we're in the way back machine, I think this is really worth highlighting - that Russert Cheney saying Iraq WASN'T involved in 9/11.

Heck, even if the Czech government had been right, a meeting isn't indicative of support, and I don't see here that Cheney claimed it was. If this meeting took place (and there's no reason to think it did) it could have been Atta asking the Iraqi government for support and getting told to go f*ck himself. Basically, I don't see this as a claim of a connection between Iraq and 9/11.

It seems to me that this instance you are citing (and particularly the articles you've quoted) are damning evidence of sloppy and leading reporting, not deceipt actively practiced by our administration. There must be more, given the prevalent meme that Bush and Cheney claimed that Iraq backed the 9/11 attacks.

I fixed the link to the counterpunch.org article....

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council
Posted Feb. 5, 2003
Out of the entire media, only one reporter from a major news outlet seriously questioned Powells' presentation to the UN, in a timely manner.....in that same week. Greg Miller's article did not develop any traction in the U.S., that I have found.....
A year later, along comes an MSNBC reporter, "revealing" the training camp story, as if it was "new" news.......
ubertuber, the preponderance of the evidence is that the administration lied about Iraq's connections to Al Qaeda, and planted false stories to play off the MSM as having verified it's false claims.....

<b>The administration has done enough, on it's own, from what I've read that has been exposed about their activities to twist the truth, and to manipulate an already compliant press into helping them do it, to diminish any semblance of credibility....how could anyone trust what they've said?</b>[quote]

Of course...there was more...this time, from the WSJ, 18 months after Powell's UN presentation, but.....in time to be examined just before the 2004 presidential election....
Defense Department spokesman Larry Di Rita seemed to confirm that the Zarqawi terrorist camp was simply a propaganda prop, left intentionally in place by the Bush administration so that they could direct Colin Powell to use it's existance as the main "evidence" to offer to a skeptical UN, that Saddam had terrorist ties to Al Qaeda. In fact, it actually demonstrates that the U.S. administration had no argument that the camp...or Zarqawi was actually a major terrorist threat that it actually took seriously itself.

What an interesting way to read that, I read it in a completely different way.

host,

I've read every word of each article you linked. There's a lot of stuff there. However, hardly any of it has to do with the question at hand: what form did the Bush administration's alleged claims of a tie between Iraq and 9/11 take? You posted lots of stuff about Zarqawi, and lots of stuff about broad ties between Iraq and terrorism in general, and ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda in particular. However, these don't answer the question we're examining here - which is Iraq and 9/11. I'd like to focus on this one particular aspect before moving to larger things. I, for one, don't think that a general coexistance of Iraq and Al Qaeda agents is equal to a link to the 9/11 attacks. We've thought from almost the beginning that those attacks were orchestrated and executed by a small number of people within the Qaeda organization.

In all that material, the argument that the Bush administration claimed Iraq was tied to 9/11 occupied approximately 9 lines, and came to 2 things. The first was a reiterated story about Cheney citing the Czech government's confirmation that Atta met with Iraqi officials in Prague. Certainly this was faulty intelligence. There's no reason now to believe that it happened.

The second thing in ALL of those articles is op-ed columnists stating that the Bush administration was trying hard to link Iraq to 9/11. None of them cites any specific instances of this effort other than Cheney's repeated mistaken reliance on the Czech report (which was thought for some time to be true).

Here's the crux of my question. If, in fact, the administration engaged in an devious attempt to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, there should be a broad and clear pattern of stating this in media outlets. Can you cite these? Or is this meme due to Cheney's mis-statements on one incident and the broadly pursued theme of Zarqawi?

Since I'm going to bother to read all of the links you provide, please do me (and other posters) the courtesy of ensuring that they are topical and organized in a way that supports whatever your contention may be.

I thought this was the Cheney/Rumsfeld "then and now" thread.

Elphaba, I apologize....but mitigating factors are....this thread is active again, and it seemed like the appropriate place to continue....because the last post on the first page is a prequel to what's happening here now....but that may have been a threadjack, too :icare: ....again....sorry!

ubertuber, I try to avoid op-ed pieces, unless they are rich in links to MSM news reports, or they add to, or provide background for actual news reporting.

Please point out any link that I've posted to an op-ed, in this discussion, that does not meet the standard that I described above. I appreciate receiving your attention and your challenge to me to make the best case that I can here.

I hope that you are not discounting the signifigance of Cheney's intimidation tactics used in an escape attempt from Gloria Borger's question. He decided to lie by adamantly denying that he had made his previously televised statement. His response was bullying, and extraordinary, given that it was about a matter so serious. Remember....Cheney "blew off" Gloria Borger in June, 2004. This report shows that it isn't possible that he just "didn't remember what he had said on Dec. 9, 2001. His reaction to Borger backs that up:
and....this was reported just a week after Cheney said that Atta's Prague meeting was "pretty well confirmed"....Cheney had to know about the doubts, but on Dec. 9, 2001....he said "confirmed", anyway, and he was still asserting that Atta traveled to "meetings" in Praque, nine months after the following reporting:
Please consider that I can only present the "tip" of the iceberg that floats mostly below the surface. I believe that Helen Thomas's accusatory question was legitimate, and the pattern of Bush-Cheney, et al, deception, is evident in Bush's reply to Helen; "Afghanistan, Taliban, terrorists, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11.....I determined that Iraq....blah blah blah".

The administrations "linkage" of Saddam to 9/11, was a deliberate, slick, and sometimes subtle, propaganda campaign. As often as Bush supporters erroneously maintain that the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or the Silberman Commission, investigated and reported on how the Bush admin. analyzed, prioritized, and conveyed pre-invasion intelligence on Iraq...to congress and to the American public, all three of the reports issued by those Commissions state that they specifically avoided looking into those administration/intelligence handling related issues, and thus, did not make determinations about them, in the three reports.

Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate-SCI, is now trying to split up the second half of his committee's report, which promised to address these issues in a timely manner....first in July, 2004, and then after a senate democrats' unanimous protest that the report was overdue....last November,
when 17 months had passed with no progress seen on finalizing the report's second phase. Now Roberts is trying to split the second half report into, two, to presumably further delay examining and issuing a report on the administration's handling of pre-Iraqi invasion, intelligence. The goal is transparent....the 2004 delay was to avoid disclosure before the November presidential election, and the new "split" proposal, is to delay issuing the report until after the November, 2006 mid-term election, and possibly beyond.

So....you can't "know" anything beyond a reasonable certainty. The rubber stamp, republican congress offers only it's track record of Sen. Pat Roberts' broken SSCI investigative "process" to bring the facts out for the American people to see. The democratic party is in the congressional minority. Democrats have no authority to convene a hearing, or to subpoena and the swear in any witness, without permission from republicans, who hold all committee and sub-committee chairs in both houses.

Of course, I think that the "evidence" that I offer you to examine, increases in stature and signifigance because the POTUS and his fellow federal elected party members have made such a thorough effort to avoid bi-partisan investigation of what the POTUS and the VP knew, by March 19, 2003, and when they knew it....vs what they told us, and what they did, not in spite of it. We now live in a climate where previously declassified material, some of it as old as forty to sixty years, is being rapidly, methodically, and secretly reclassified, and where something as simple as an FOIA request for the secret service white house logs of Abramoff's visits since 2001, was ignored, and only obtained after a judge's ruling in the lawsuit that followed:
Much of what I described above is detailed here....including document reclassification, and the fact that Cheney kept the details of his 2001 "Energy Task Force" secret...not disclosed, to this day:
So....now that I've painted the case that they are obsessively secretive...the Cheney Energy Task Force meetings took place before they could use the excuse of 9/11 as a shield....here is what I've got. For me....it's enough...because it's all we're gonna get for the time being....and these folks have acted in an alarmingly un-American manner. No respect for FOIA, accountability to the people, or even respect for the structure of the constitutional government, or for the law: (I thought it would help to post these in chronological order.)

The first Bush quote reminds me of a song:
<a href="http://www.lyricsdownload.com/sprung-monkey-coconut-lyrics.html">put the lime in the coconut and mix em both up</a>

Here's an article I remember reading when it was fresh:

I have some things to say about this topic, but I'm tired.

host,

I've snipped out the sections of your previous that have to do with the Bush administration (through its officials) asserting a link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. The first is what I characterized as an op-ed piece. This may not be a fair label, but I'm not sure what else to call it. It's merely Benjamin's claim that Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld (notable not Dick Cheney or even G.W. Bush) said things, without any quotations, context, or proof.

Holy Zarqawi
Why Bush let Iraq's top terrorist walk. By Daniel Benjamin
Cheney's Debate Misrepresentations on Iraq.

This one is a news report, but is not much more than a rehash of the one claim of Cheney's statement that Atta met Iraqi agents once in Prague. Once again, while this statement is now unproveable, it was for a short time confirmed by the Czech government. And yes, I know that their confirmation was sloppy, unwarrented, and bizarrely delayed and later retracted. I bolded Cheney's interesting and indignant claim that he never made that claim (other than the one thing, which he admitted saying in a very specific way).
Please note that this post concerns your posts 63 and 64, and your question about my characterization of some of their contents as op-ed. While I admit that I may have applied that label inappropriately, I'm not sure what to call the first of these snippets. The second is, as we both acknowledge, another report of one claim, which may have been made several times.

And please forgive me for harping on this, but it is striking that I could only pull 6 lines of directly relevant text out of your approximately 26 pages of linked text (all of which I read).

I'm currently reading through your more recent post, so I'll respond when I've finished. I promise I haven't forgotten or moved on.

This may be a moot point by now (and I'll find out soon), but I again want to emphasize that the question I asked was about the Bush administration alleging that Iraq was linked or responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I saw many people decrying those claims, but don't remember hearing administration officials making them (your incident with Cheney's favorite citation of a temporarily confirmed report aside). I'm thinking that if the Bush administration was really making that claim as a justification for invading Iraq, then we ought to be able to find out when and where they said it, not to mention just what was said. At this point, I think Wolfowitz is the most likely suspect, as he has always seemed the most hawkish of the bunch.

I should state outright that I don't think claims of co-existence or even cooperation between Iraq and Qaeda agents are enough to support an Iraq-9/11 connection. They are a claim that Iraq consorted with terrorists, but as we've noted, it is widely accepted that the 9/11 attacks were planned and perpetrated by a small number of people - it seems to be the only way they could have been kept secret. If your assertion that the Bush administration has claimed a link between Iraq and 9/11 is based on the Zarqawi stuff or non-aggression pacts between bin Laden and Hussein, I think we'll have to agree to disagree - I just don't think that is strong enough to justify the outrage over that claimed connection.

Again, I'm not necessarily arguing that you're wrong. I'd just like to see the administration's words from their own mouths. I've never understood where all that hoopla was coming from. I'd very much appreciate someone pointing it out to me more clearly. I'll get back to sorting through your most recent posts, so I apologize if you've already done so.

host,

You seriously just posted the same article for a second time without saying anything new about it. I'm referring to the msnbc.com article about the Vice Presidential debates.

Here I quote from your second article. New Clue Fails to Explain Iraq Role in Sept. 11 Attack
I'm skipping the Abramoff and classification stuff, but I'll comment there in the end of this post.
From the whitehouse.gov transcript of President Bush's interview with President Uribe of Colombia you might have done better to post this snippet (below). However, this STILL isn't a claim that Iraq was responsible for (or even aware of) the 9/11 attacks. He's saying that since we were shocked by those attacks we've learned that we have to proactively address threats to our national security (which they then tried to show Iraq was through the whole WMD debate). This is like me seeing a car accident and resolving to tell my mother I love her because she might die unexpectedly as well. That's not me saying that she'll die in a car accident - just that a lesson learned from one event can be proactively applied to similar situations.
I won't quote your information from the State of the Union speech - you've narrowed it down pretty well. However, once again this is not an assertion that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. It's a fear that next time could be worse, if Iraq DID assist terrorist organisations.

The radio address is probably the best link you used. It is an example of President Bush himself asserting that there have been past links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, these claims range over a decade and while specific, never mention the 9/11 attacks or even Osama bin Laden. Hang on to this for a second, because it'll be part of the end of this post.

Following that, you've got Bush's letter to Congress, which states that disarming Iraq is "consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organiza-tions, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. United States objectives also support a transition to democracy in Iraq, as contemplated by the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338)."

I'll admit. This is pretty darn close to what I was asking about. Here's the thing (and I know I sound like I'm splitting hairs - I'm sorry, please bear with me). This letter asserts that disarming Iraq is consistent with...including those nations... The words "consistent" and "including" are key, as they allow the interpretation that, once again, Iraq is similar to agents that prosecuted the 9/11 attacks without being those agents. You're right in that this instance is hard to take in other ways. However, this letter was written at the beginning of hostilities with Iraq, not during the time that the Bush administration was trying to drum up support for the war - so it can't be part of the public idea that the Bush administration claims that Iraq was linked to 9/11 in ways other than being a lesson to learn from.

Which brings me to your Christian Science Monitor article... This article explicitly makes the point that I'm suspecting. That the Bush administration DID NOT make claims that Iraq had any involvement with the WTC/Pentagon attacks of 9/11/2001. In fact, even in the transcripts and articles that you've posted, there are several explicit claims to the contrary. However, there are numerous (if not tons) of instances in which administration officials mention 9/11 and Iraq in close proximity to each other. That's hardly surprising since Bush and his administration seem to sincerely believe that after 9/11 we find ourselves in a new world. They link those attacks to virtually every issue in international and domestic politics. Further, there's a repeated idea that we should invade Iraq because 9/11 taught us to proactively engage these sorts of threats before it's too late. In abstract, this isn't such a bad lesson to have learned from September 11th. On the other hand, extrapolating that to Iraq and determining that Saddam Hussein represented the most significant threat to US interests seems to be quite a leap. Of course that's a topic for another thread.

So am I correct in concluding that there are not clear and repeated instances of Bush administration officials publicly claiming that Iraq had any involvement with the 9/11 attacks? I see a broad attempt to link the sense of danger we felt after 9/11 to Iraq. I remember many critics of this policy complaining that the Bush administration had made these claims - and I didn't remember hearing them. Of course (as you're probably realizing now), I'm an unusually literally-minded person. The list of quotes at the end of Smooth's article support my memory, and my literally minded interpretation.

Smooth's article probably states this more concisely than you or I could. (Thanks Smooth - I'd like to hear your thoughts when you're not too tired.)
Finally, and I'm trying to be gentle here... Once again, I had to wade through lots and lots of quoted and linked material that is unrelated to the topic at hand. I know Abramoff and Cheney are your pet issues, but there's nothing here related to Congress, classification, lobbying, energy commissions, or any of the other myriad links you included. Your points could have been made with about 3 links where you used more than a dozen. I'm assuming you provide such voluminous documentation because you want us to read it... That would be both more likely and more rewarding if these links were chosen more selectively. I know I'd appreciate it if you'd just think about this.

ubertuber, I'm curious if we could work through the following problem inductively: what is the explanation for the direct correlation between the rise in the population's belief of an Iraq-Sept. 11th link and the claims about justifications for the Iraq war?

A direct correlation, in this context, means that as claims for the war increased, so did belief in a link between the two concepts.

Linkage, in this context, is not necessarily physical collaboration between two entities. Links can also refer to mental association between two things. The language used by the administration when referring to Iraq or 9-11 seems intended to elicit mental linkages between the two concepts.

Let's deconstruct some portions of the discursive tactics the administration utilized:
I notice that Iraq is a Nation-State, while Sept 11th is a time.
Do you agree with me that when Iraq and Sept 11th are spoken of, the former is referred to as an agent while the latter is referred to as a time or event?

Referring to an attack as a time, rather than who is responsible for it, cues the listener to listen for, or think about, the action and fill in the actors responsible for it. In this case, according to polls over time, the actors became Iraqis andSaddam Hussein in the minds of a large majority of the population (whas it somewhere between 60 and 70%?).

I don't have direct quotes of explicit links between Iraq and the attack on Sept 11th. I would have been surprised if they had made some given that the hypothesis I'm working with is that the administration was unaware of or knew of no physical link between the two concepts but wanted to create a mental one regardless. If that is true, I would doubt they would use direct links that could, in the future, be disproven (thereby making them susceptable to charges that they actually/explicitly lied to the public).

I remember, however, that during the run-up to the war that I was constantly discussing with a handful of people during which I was correcting them about the lack of a physical link between Iraq and Sept 11th.

I'm not claiming that only leftists recognized their was no physical link between the two. If I'm remembering the polls correctly, 30-40% did not believe Iraq was responsible for the attack on 9-11. It stands to reason that you, as I, did not make that logical coupling. But the empirical evidence is that we are in the minority of the population.

As much as I dislike the use of an implicit concept to steer public opinion to support a war, I recognize another link that is far more problematic. Intentionally or not, the administration is creating a frame of reference to understand these contemporary events. This is one link you recognized and reiterated: a sense of fear.

The threats these events create to our nation's security create a ready-made perspective on other events. This frame gives us a set of linguistic tools to apply to new problems and constrains our thoughts in accordance with the language in play.

We could examine how this new frame (terrorism; national security) is being applied to drug offenders and illegal immigrants, for example. My main concern is that as this military action way of looking at and responding to our foreign threats is applied to domestic threats, we will see an increase in para-military reactions domestically. That is, I don't think it's an unreasonable concern that we might see an increase in centralization of police power and subsequent use of that force domestically.