More Insane Rantings from the Crazy Man in the Attic
By: emptywheel
October 22, 2009

Someone let Dick “PapaDick” Cheney out of his undisclosed location last night–they even gave him an award for being a “keeper of the flame.” In spite of the fact that the press is covering it as another serious attack from Cheney, I find it pretty laughable.

How else to treat a speech, for example, in which PapaDick boasts that Rummy got this “flame-keeper” award before him?

^{I’m told that among those you’ve recognized before me was my friend Don Rumsfeld. I don’t mind that a bit. It fits something of a pattern. In a career that includes being chief of staff, congressman, and secretary of defense, I haven’t had much that Don didn’t get first. But truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.}

From that auspicious start, Cheney launches into a screed against Obama for shutting down missile defense in Czech Republic and Poland–he complains that Obama did not stand by the agreements that Cheney and Bush made.

^{Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith…}

But he moves directly from that complaint to complaining that Obama is honoring the commitment Bush made to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

^{Next door in Iraq, it is vitally important that President Obama, in his rush to withdraw troops, not undermine the progress we’ve made in recent years. Prime Minister Maliki met yesterday with President Obama, who began his press availability with an extended comment about Afghanistan. When he finally got around to talking bout Iraq, he told the media that he reiterated to Maliki his intention to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq. Former President Bush’s bold decision to change strategy in Iraq and surge U.S. forces there set the stage for success in that country. Iraq has the potential to be a strong, democratic ally in the war on terrorism, and an example of economic and democratic reform in the heart of the Middle East. The Obama Administration has an obligation to protect this young democracy and build on the strategic success we have achieved in Iraq.}

Don’t worry. I wasn’t really expecting any intellectual consistency from Dick Cheney. Cheney’s complaints about Obama’s Afghanistan policy in this speech are getting a lot of press. What no one else wants to mention, though, is Cheney’s refutation of Obama’s complaint that the Bush Administration never really had a real Afghan strategy. Cheney refutes that, you see, by noting that they conducted a strategic assessment of Afghanistan in Fall 2008, seven years after committing troops to Afghanistan.

^{Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy. In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team.}

Hahahaha!! Cheney believes that developing an Afghan strategy in an attempt to force Obama’s hand can make up for the seven years during which he oversaw the complete neglect of the war against the people who actually hit us on 9/11.

I also note that Cheney neglected to mention–not even once, not even in a speech talking about “new challenges” from the Taliban–Pakistan. Perhaps that’s because Cheney was personally in charge of our Pakistan policy for the last three years of the Bush Administration, during which period that country became the source of the real instability in the region…

There’s the conflation of the information collected from KSM using torture (which KSM has said included a number of lies) with the information collected using rapport-based intelligence.

^{In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, by the time it was over he was not was not only talking, he was practically conducting a seminar, complete with chalkboards and charts. It turned out he had a professorial side, and our guys didn’t mind at all if classes ran long. At some point, the mastermind of 9/11 became an expansive briefer on the operations and plans of al-Qaeda. It happened in the course of enhanced interrogations. All the evidence, and common sense as well, tells us why he started to talk.}

There’s the insistence that Cheney kept us safe–ignoring, of course, all the attacks on our allies.

^{Eight years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive – and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed. So you would think that our successors would be going to the intelligence community saying, “How did you did you do it? What were the keys to preventing another attack over that period of time?”}

^{Instead, they’ve chosen a different path entirely – giving in to the angry left, slandering people who did a hard job well, and demagoguing an issue more serious than any other they’ll face in these four years. No one knows just where that path will lead, but I can promise you this: There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the policies and the people that have kept this country safe…}

I’m most fascinated, though, by the desperation of this passage: the appeal to the “legal underpinnings and safeguards” and the claim to “moral bearings.”

^{In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings – and least of all can that be said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel.}

Is it possible the crazy man in the attic realizes his attempts to convince others that he is anything but a torture-hungry monster just sound crazier and crazier as he babbles on?

emptywheel‘s comments stand on their own [and I love "crazy man in the attic" as a name]. But I find Cheney’s comments beyond disquieting. Three years ago, David Corn and Michael Isikoff published Hubris. At the time, it was a real eye opener. We’d had books from Richard Clarke and Paul O’Niell that alerted us to the truth about the Administration and Iraq, and we would have a book in early 2007 that told pieces of the story better [Anatomy of Deceit – emptywheel], but Hubris stood out as the first book with a full complement of facts that sealed the deal. We were lied to, systematically lied to. The book is still worth reading [less than a dollar on Amazon]. The title was perfect. It’s still perfect:

hu⋅bris /hyoo-bris, hoo/

–noun
excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.

se⋅di⋅tion   /sɪˈdɪʃən/

–noun
1. incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government.
2. any action, esp. in speech or writing, promoting such discontent or rebellion.
Synonyms: insurrection, mutiny. See treason.

To psychotherapists, excessive pride or arrogance turning into contempt is an all too familiar pattern. All you have to do to make it happen with such cases is to cross them, or to simply decline to mirror their wonderfulness. Dick Cheney’s failures are there for everyone to see. I think he’s banking on another terrorist attack [a possibility no matter what we do] so he can say "See! I kept you safe!" He tried banking on something once before [Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq]. That paranoid "hunch" didn’t pan out as well as he planned. Frankly, when or if we are attacked again, I doubt that the world will rally to Dick Cheney. He’s too publicly sick at this point to gather much of a following.

And fortunately, nobody much is listening [except, of course, Rush Limbaugh – Dick Cheney Takes It to Obama].  There’s lots of right wing venom coming Obama’s way, and plenty of people  are  involved in "incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government," but they’re not doing it by screaming "Cheney [or Bush] was right." In fact, they mostly speak as if the last eight years never happened [and I don’t blame them]. Actually, no one but Cheney is even talking about the Bush Administration at all except those of us who are still angry about it – not even Bush himself. And nobody is very interested in spending money on missiles in Eastern Europe or listening to any more hype about thats "bold" surge. Cheney talks as if we aren’t still in the middle of an economic crisis, a crisis that he and his partner in crime ignored as it built while they wiled away the hours with their foreign wars and surges.

Not very long ago, we were being told that history would be kind to Bush and Cheney, proving them right. We argued that history would reveal how terrible they really were. We might have both been wrong. If what’s happening these days is any indication, their reign may end up being a blank spot – and that might well be the hardest thing of all for Dick Cheney to bear…

[to recall a recently used quote]

… a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.