Tag: cheney

In 2005, the Bush CIA actually closed its unit whose mission had been to hunt Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants. We don‘t know where Osama bin Laden was until 2005. But we do know that the home, that he was found in, was built for him in 2005. That same year that the CIA closed the unit that was hunting bin Laden.

Somehow that year, bin Laden got the feeling that he could settle down comfortably in a walled fortress in a Pakistan suburb.

Lawrence O’Donnell

So Bush really did lay the foundation for bin Laden’s eventual capture…

(via squee-gee)

I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.

George W. Bush, speaking on March 13, 2002, whose policies are precisely why it took 10 years to track bin Laden down.
That Obama noted making this Job One for the CIA was no coincidence. He presumably mentioned this request so specifically because this was job 4,234,450 the day before he took office; Bush said as much. To Bush/Cheney, 9/11 was never anything other than a chance to pull some particularly exciting binders down off of Cheney’s darkside shelf.

We can only hope that their shortsighted and foolish “bogeyman approach” to bin Laden now nucleates into a national desire to put an end to everything that was rolled out in his name. Then, and only then, will this be a “victory” of any kind for America.

Otherwise you’re just changing the name and picture at the top of Our Forever-War Commemorative Playing Card Set.

Blue Sky

unsolicitedanalysis:

Did Reagan give the incompetent, corrupt motherfuckers in the Interior the gifts, lunches, or sport tickets?  His ghost must have turned their computers to porn.  And he personally instructed them to allow the drilling companies to fill out their inspection reports themselves.

[…]

What you’re doing instead is trying to pin the blame on a minority party for dubiously-documented “systematic weakening” based on a nebulous “anti-government right” with no cited paper trail of cause-inducing failure.

What color is the sky in your world? Two seconds worth of cursory googling:

And, in this instance, Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches for blowout preventers would be an undue burden on the industry:

In secret meetings with the oil company officials in 2001, incoming Vice President Cheney set the foundation for a permissive, welcome mat with the oil industry.

After stocking the Federal government’s Material Management Service with his cronies, this agency reversed an earlier 2000 decision requiring a mandatory accusatorial regulator, allowing BP and others not to install a $500,000 acoustic switch to automatically shut down oil gushers.

Reversed the decision that would have prevented this accident. But, yeah, the take-home lesson here is that sensible regulatory agencies just won’t work. Ever. Nothing whatsoever can be done about it. The market will do all the regulating anyone could ever want. Best thing to do is pretend that no empirical data on the capability of regulation to sensibly manage industry exists and that nothing useful could be drawn from such information anyway. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.

Oil’s Darkside

It was not a mistake. The response to Katrina was not a mistake, and neither was the lack of an acoustic switch on the wellhead that could have shut down the flow when the platform was lost:

Cheney’s energy task force – the secretive one that he wouldn’t say much about publicly – that decided that the [acoustic] switches, which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry

$500,000 was “too much of a burden” on an industry receiving $36.5 BILLION in government subsidies over and above any historic profits they just might be reaping. BILLION. With a “B”. Versus $500 THOUSAND. I’m willing to bet that Halliburton’s compensation committee gives bonuses in excess of the cost of said acoustic switch that wasn’t there to stop the oil spill that occured when they fucked up the bore cementing job they were down there doing. Poorly, in all likelihood.
In 2009, Halliburton’s CEO received $12.4M, a stunning reduction of 20%. One wonders how he gets by. The no-doubt struggling compensation committee awarded him, him, as in just him ALONE, a bonus of $8.1M. By my count, that’s 16.2 acoustic switches without even touching his regular pay. This, however, is an unsustainable burden on the oil industry, which Halliburton isn’t even directly involved with (in terms of directing exploration, drilling, and refining).
Worth noting that there are, as of April 2010 56 licensed and operating oil platforms that the US has purview over. FIFTY SIX. It would cost $2.8M to outfit THEM ALL. $36.5 BILLION in direct government subsidies to the oil industry before any profits are even estimated, but, according to Dick Cheney, $2.8M is too great a price to pay.

By all means, blame it on Obama. His fault all the way.

The Fucks Don’t Matter

You need simple proof that the facts don’t matter? Doesn’t get much more simple than this.

Dick Cheney, on the floor of the Senate tells the cheerfully collegial Pat Leahy “Go fuck yourself.” Here’s how Cheney described this incident yesterday:

“You’d be surprised how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.”

Bill Kristol says:

“[telling Leahy to go fuck himself is] a beautiful statement, really, of justice. […] Dick Cheney is going out [and] defending justice in the end.”

Joe Biden, on the other hand, says “This is a big fucking deal” with glee, not with malevolence or personal animus, in regard to the signing-into-law of health care reform.
Bill Kristol says:

“This is one of the most despicable moments in American politics in our lifetimes.”

Repeat after me: The FACTS DO NOT MATTER.

Cheneyism’s Test

Domestic terrorist plot unsealed:

Nine members of a Michigan-based Christian militia group have been indicted on sedition and weapons charges in connection with an alleged plot to murder law enforcement officers in hopes of setting off an anti-government uprising.

Presumably the Tea Klan and the right-wing noise machine will come out strongly in support military tribunals, repeated torture, indefinite detention without trial, and all manner of other fundamentally anti-American treatment for this lot of thugs. It’s the only way for the Republic to survive, right? Right? I mean, we can’t be worried if we need to get some Christianists wet and splash them with a little water if that’s what it takes to Protect The Homeland. Right?

Well, my response is – and by the way, I have trouble listening to what [Cheney] says sometimes, because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking, but my response is this: He’s just angry because the president doesn’t shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), inimitable and magnificent, discussing DarkSide himself: Dick Cheney. Where has Grayson been all my life?

Asked and Answered

David Broder: If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?
Lemkin: Yes.
David Broder: The wheels are turning, but they can still be halted before irreparable damage is done.
Lemkin: My, it’s amazing you think the damage has yet to be done. Why are you employed by a major media corporation, and upon which planet do you spend most of your time?
David Broder: …

Dr. Sean Maguire Alert

The Wall Street Journal uncritically (and unsurprisingly) runs this rather idiotic op-ed from former CIA official Herbert Meyer:

By authorizing Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to determine whether a full criminal investigation of CIA employees and contractors is warranted for the manner in which they interrogated captured terrorists, the President has thrown his power and support behind those far-left ideologues

Indeed, Obama has, by instructing his Justice Department to enforce the law, thrown his power behind those dreaded far-left ideologues. Remember when the GOP was the “law and order” party? Now they’re the Two Society Party: one, for our Leadership Caste, is utterly without law, restraint, or control. Do whatever you want. The other, for everyone else: unremitting and inflexible enforcement of the fullest possible extent of the law for even the most minor infractions. In America, you see, it’s critically important to be born well. Anybody else: go fuck yourself.

At any rate, these interrogators, even if and when they did break the laws, were only doing so with the best of intentions:

[they’d rather suffer torture than] be thought of as anything other than honorable patriots doing their best, under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, to protect our country from its enemies

I see. That is a compelling and well-reasoned defense. So torturing KSM some 180 times inside of a month was indeed some kind of extraordinary, ticking time-bomb type circumstance. Over a month. The United States barely escaped disolution by torturing this man repeatedly over the course of a month. Said torture, of course, providing no actionable intelligence whatever. But, somehow, that Saved America. Of course, we’re meant to forget that the CIA’s own inspector general has reported:

there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe

So neither safe nor effective. In fact, we got the only useful information from seized computers and voluntary statements. Everything gotten under torture was, apparently, either wrong or already known. Big surprise there.

But Meyer closes with a point we actually agree on:

By launching this latest attack on the CIA, the President has done more than merely throw a bone to his base. He has removed all remaining doubt about how the US now plans to confront the global threat of radical Islam.

Indeed, we plan to confront radical Islam by outreach, by education, and, when force is required, by following our own longstanding legal and military doctrines to the fullest extent possible.

And, lest we follow Cheney down the “only following orders” and “it’s not their fault, it’s not their fault, it’s not their fault!” rabbit hole, let’s remind ourselves of this particular outcome of our own Nuremberg Trials, a result of a defense so utterly discounted that it’s since become known as “The Nuremberg Defense”:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”