1 Boring Old Man

 

• "We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists." Here, he continues with his fiction that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were connected through some kind of "known ties." This is the first instance in this speech of what will be a remarkable ability to skip over the actual allegations that are central to the complaints about he and the Bush Administration.
• "We decided, as well, to confront the regimes that sponsored terrorists, and to go after those who provide sanctuary, funding, and weapons to enemies of the United States. We turned special attention to regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists." "regimes that sponsored terrorists?" "sanctuary, funding, and weapons?" "regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction?" Well, Afghanistan and the Taliban provided sanctuary. No one objects to that invasion. But the rest of it? He again assumes that this covers Iraq. We don’t buy that was ever true, yet he continues to imply it even today.
• "The key to any strategy is accurate intelligence, and skilled professionals to get that information in time to use it. In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our Administration gave intelligence officers the tools and lawful authority they needed to gain vital information." While many of us question the "tools" given, the information sought was to justify an already foegone conclusion, particularly waterboarding. This "give our boys the tools" line has been coming up since the whole business with torture was ever introduced.
• "Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times had spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of everyone killed by al-Qaeda on 9/11. Now here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaeda. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people." They have never addressed the central issue in this issue. Their need for surveillance isn’t questioned. It’s their insistance on no oversight, going around the F.I.S.A. court, or some alternative arrangement. He’s blasting the New York Times who sat on this story for a whole year – plenty of time for them to find some suitable oversight mechanism. Cheney nor anyone else has ever really addressed why not have oversight. It’s another fiction about the allegations at hand, that we are saying no surveillance. We [and the law] are saying no surveillance without judicial oversight.
• "In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations." May or may not be true. At issue, did tough interrogations produce any information that could be believed? More to the point, were they, in fact, looking to find information that wasn’t true? information to bolster their forgone conclusions? Than seems to be the case.
• "In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." Show us that…
• "Yet somehow, when the soul-searching was done and the veil was lifted on the policies of the Bush administration, the public was given less than half the truth. The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question. Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release. For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers." Here, Cheney makes an accusation that the Obama Administration actively redacted information that would prove that these interrogations provided us with valuable intelligence. Further, that they are witholding documents that prove Cheney’s point. Bush and Cheney could’ve released those documents themselves. I see no evidence that Obama’s peoplew want to "discredit Cheney." They want us to shut up.
• "Apart from doing a serious injustice to intelligence operators and lawyers who deserve far better for their devoted service, the danger here is a loss of focus on national security, and what it requires. I would advise the administration to think very carefully about the course ahead. All the zeal that has been directed at interrogations is utterly misplaced. And staying on that path will only lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people." Thanks for the advice. We’ll consider it for a few minutes, then return to the task of getting the truth into the public record.
• "In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men." This is an old argument so thoroughly debunked that it requires little response.

This speech is  a repetition of Cheney’s narrative from the very beginning. al Qaeda and Iraq were in cahoots. Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction they might have given to Terrorists. Torturte was necessary and saved American lives. Abu Ghraib was a freak, not related to his policies. The Obama Administration is out to get him, and actively concealing information that will exonerate him [them]. He avoids the Central Allegations against them altogether: that they cooked up the reasons for invading Iraq; that they tortured people to get confessions to cover the Invasion; that they infiltrated the DoJ OLC to get their CYA opinions; and that most of what Cheney says in this speech is a public fiction. Dick Cheney might well be a patriot, but his way of expressing that patriotism was deceitful and way over the line of either his authority or commom decency.

When I read this speech, I think I learned something. As always, when I rfirst ead it, I felt intimidated. Dick Cheney has a way of sounding like an authority – which he is not. It’s a style that’s familiar to me, though not in this intimidating way. Narcissistic people speak with an almost infectious confidence. They believe that what they think is correct. They are uniquely impervious to criticism because they discount it as spurious attacks. And they have no curiosity or doubt about their own narratives. This speech of Dick Cheney’s could’ve been given in 2002 or anywhere in-between then and now. None of the intervening evidence has changed anything: No ties between al Qaeda and Iraq; no weapons of Mass Destruction; no welcome with open arms; outrage over the torture program; outrage over the OLC; the conviction of Scooter Libby; the 2008 election results; the collapse of the economy; etc. His story remains unchanged and continues to include lies of commission and omission just as it has from the start. It’s his confidence that makes him seem intimidating.

Open Thread
[the left coaster]
by Mary
Thursday :: May 21, 2009

About the rise in gas prices over the Memorial Day weekend? It’s a good bet that it is due to the hedge-funds speculating and not because demand is outstripping supply.

During a visit to McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, hedge-fund manager Masters also said that big institutional investors were sucking the air out of the fragile economic recovery, in part because their Wall Street partners were exempt from federal limits on how much they could bet on commodity prices.

The joke would sure be on them if they do push the US economy even further down. Maybe some regulations would be good to put in place now.

Issa: Waaahhhh! Dems All Reminding Us of Lies CIA Told in 2002!
By emptywheel on Paul Kanjorski

Here’s Darrell Issa, in the process of getting schooled by Tweety, who called him on his grandstanding attempt to get the FBI to investigate Nancy Pelosi’s allegation that the CIA led to her on September 4, 2002. [Somehow, neither Issa nor Tweety seem interested in the fact that Porter Goss’ statements, to date, support Pelosi’s contention that CIA didn’t tell Congress waterboarding had already been used before they were briefed.]

But I’m more interested in the attention that Issa pays to a much more inflammatory accusation that Paul Kanjorski has made. In his effort to suggest all the Democrats are beating up on CIA, Issa notes that Paul Kanjorski says "he was lied to a week later." It appears that Issa is not saying that Kanjorski was lied to in recent days (a week after Pelosi made the claim), but rather that Kanjorski says he was lied to in the week after September 4, 2002. Which seems to be this accusation.

In a town hall meeting in Bloomsburg, Pa. this week [leading up to September 3, 2007], Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a 12-term congressman, said that shortly before Congress was scheduled to vote on authorizing military force against Iraq, top officials of the CIA showed select members of Congress three photographs it alleged were Iraqi Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones. Kanjorski said he was told that the drones were capable of carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical agents, and could strike 1,000 miles inland of east coast or west coast cities.

Kanjorski said he and four or five other congressmen in the room were told UAVs could be on freighters headed to the U.S. Both secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and President Bush wandered into and out of the briefing room, Kanjorski said.

Kanjorski said it was the second time he was called to the White House for a briefing. He had opposed giving the President the powers to go to war, and said that he hadn’t changed his mind after a first meeting. Until he saw the pictures, Kanjorski said, "I hadn’t thought that Iraq was a threat." That second meeting changed everything. After he left that meeting, said Kanjorski, he was willing to give the President the authorization he wanted since the drones "represented an imminent danger"…

Several years later, Kanjorski said he learned that the pictures were "a god-damned lie," apparently taken by CIA photographers in the desert in the southwest of the U.S. The drone story itself had already been disproved, although not many major media carried that story. [my emphasis]

Issa’s caught up in trying to smear Pelosi, yet he’s unconcerned by the allegation that the CIA went out to the desert and trumped up some "Iraq UAV" pictures? Really? Or perhaps he thinks Paul Kanjorski has turned into a nutter? 

Because this allegation–which I’m not sure I had seen before–suggests the CIA was doing far more than trying to hide the fact they hadn’t given Congress notice of torture in timely fashion. Kanjorski’s saying that the week after CIA lied to Pelosi about torture, they showed him and others clearly false materials to persuade them to vote for Bush’s Iraq war. I’ve noted before that Democrats seem to be saying the ties between the lies about torture and the lies about Iraq are one and the same. Is that what Kanjorski is saying?

She’s posting this to discount the Pelosi criticism and focus on the C.I.A. I’m posting it as because it’s absolutely poisonous! Congressmen were shown pictures of killer drones presumably loaded with nerve gas and biologic agents steaming towards the U.S. by the C.I.A. to get them to vote for the Invasion of Iraq? But the drones were actually ours, pictures taken in the U.S. Desert? Bush and Rice wandered in and out of the room while these pictures were being shown?

Powell responds to Limbaugh and Cheney:
They have their own ‘version’ of the GOP
ThinkProgress
May 20, 2009

Earlier this month, Rush Limbaugh declared, “What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat.” Days later, Dick Cheney said that he would rather have Limbaugh in the GOP than Powell. “My take on it was that Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican,” Cheney said. Yesterday, Powell responded to the duo, issuing a sharp rebuke to them for attempting to marginalize his role in the party:

“Rush Limbaugh says, ‘Get out of the Republican Party.’ Dick Cheney says, ‘He’s already out.’ I may be out of their version of the Republican Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again,” Powell told the crowd.

Barack Obama, Dick Cheney plan dueling speeches
Politico
By MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI
5/20/09

President Barack Obama will attempt to regain control of a boiling debate over anti-terrorism policy with a major speech on Thursday — an address that comes on the same day that former Vice President Dick Cheney will be weighing in with his own speech on the same theme. The dueling speeches amount to the most direct engagement so far between Obama and his conservative critics in the volatile argument over what tactics are justified in detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.

The national security debate — egged on by frequent charges from Cheney that Obama is leaving the country more vulnerable to attack — is the only subject on which many Republicans believe they have been able to gain traction against a popular president and the Democratic majority that now dominate Washington.

But, as described by administration sources, Obama’s speech is also intended to quiet the ire aimed at him from the political left. Some activists are furious over his recent decisions on continuing military commissions rather than civilian trials for suspected terrorists, and his about-face in deciding to fight a court order releasing photos of detainees undergoing abuse. Obama advisers are comparing Thursday’s speech to his big-picture Georgetown University speech on the economy last month — not intended necessarily to produce “hard news” but a sustained effort to describe and defend his policies and the political and intellectual assumptions behind them.

A centerpiece of the president’s speech will be his plans for dispersing the detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Senate Democrats, running from the White House as never before this year, moved Tuesday to withhold $80 million he had requested to close the prison by early next year. In response, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs promised “a more detailed plan.”

Cheney will be speaking at 10:45 a.m. on “Keeping America Safe: An Address by Dick Cheney” during a 45-minute appearance at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Cheney will take questions during his open-press appearance, which was scheduled several weeks ago…

Along for the Ride
TPM
05.20.09
By Josh Marshall

CNN and MSNBC will apparently broadcast former VP Cheney’s torture speech live tomorrow.

After all these years, I still don’t really understand the motor that drives this machine. It really does feel to me like they can’t conceptualize a world without the "Cold War" – like it was our finest hour and we must get back there as soon as possible. If you’ve never read it, the PNAC 2000 Report Rebuilding America’s Defenses makes their strategy beyond clear. The premise then was that President Clinton had allowed the American Military to deteriorate after the fall of the Berlin Wall, saying that Clinton was living off of "Reagan’s investments." It was a detailed report, but in the end the bottom line was to increase Military spending dramatically – and there were all kind of specific recommendations for various fancy weaponry to invest in. The premise was that our "Defenses" were inadequate.

So they came into office, and we got attacked by 19 guys with Home Depot Razor Blade Package openers who learned how to take off but not how to land airplanes. Their only technology was whatever it takes to con people into suicide missions. All those fancy Military Systems didn’t help.

But that didn’t dissuade the Neocons. Instead of attacking our desert rat enemy directly, they invaded the country of a Middle Eastern blowhard they knew they could beat and created a learning lab for the suicide and roadside bombers, recruiting new members for them by mistreating anybody that our forces got hold of. It was a miserable failure and they’ve been removed from office "for cause."

Tomorrow, we’re going to hear Cheney tell us why going paranoid was a good idea, and how we should continue to approach the world with his doomsday mentality – torturing, imprisoning, intimidating, treating the rest of the world as less than, living with him on the ‘dark side’ of his own creation. It’s become increasingly clear that much of the chaos of the world is something we have had a real part in – that our imprudent showing of strength has in fact weakened our actual defenses and our world position.

When I look back on these last years, I see Colin Powell as part of a huge tragedy. The Neoconservatives saw our own State Department as an enemy. Her name was Madeleine Albright – she was a woman, she was Clinton’s Secretary of State, and she was good at her job. The Neocons hated her and the idea of Diplomacy in general, wanting to return to the era of strength and intimidation. They didn’t like the U.N. either. It was just in the way, watering down things rather than solving problems the right way – War. In the run up to the Iraq War, they actually bugged the U.N. to find out what was going on. Then Bush appointed the major opponent to the U.N., John Bolton from A.E.I., over the objections of almost everyone on the planet. And they appointed a popular wartime General as Secretary of State [Colin Powell].

Powell tried to actually do his job, but was overwhelmed by the Cheney/Rumsfeld machine – ultimately sacrificing himself in a U.N. speech advocating the Invasion of Iraq. It was a moment of shame for the United States, for Colin Powell, and for the U.N. itself. Now he’s being villified by Cheney and a few other Republicans because he won’t join the March of the Crazies that is currently being mounted in Washington. In spite of his U.N. speech, I miss Colin Powell. I hope he will stick around and become the nidus of some revival of sanity in the Republican Party.

While the Powell comments and tomorrow’s speeches got me thinking about what I wanted to say in this post, my thoughts ran further. Right now, it seems to me that there are two Republican Parties – both out on a limb. The Conservatives are mainly the vocal Congressmen who are preaching the gospel of small hands-off government, fiscal responsibility, and anti-socialism. The Neoconservatives are the paranoid Hawks lead by Cheney and all of the people at A.E.I.  Neither group has a leg to stand on, but my point right now is that they don’t even seem like the are part of the same political party. The first group is trying to defend a position clearly responsible for the worst economy in nearly a century. The second group is defending an un-necessary war and a complete failure to engage our real enemy.

U.S. forces have held 35,000 detainees in Iraq since the onset of war. Of those, only 1,300 have been tried, and only half of those tried have been convicted, averaging roughly two percent of the detainee population. The combined figures of those detainee in both Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is upwards of 70,000.

According to CENTCOM sources, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq has so far held 684 ‘Coalition trials’ involving 1,259 security detainees, in which a total of only 636 detainees were convicted. Sources say that in total more than 21,000 detainees have been released from Iraq internment facilities. The CENTCOM slide contains a graphical breakdown of each camp and its detainee population. Included in this count are Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, Camp Cropper, Fort Suse and Camp Ashraf. Other, less known camps are not included in this count, including Al-Kazimiyah and Al-Nasiriyah. Sources familiar with US detention camps also point to an alleged facility at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as an installation on the USS Baton.

Again, look at the CENTCOM numbers and explain to me how it is possible that we captured this many "terrorists" when there are not this many terrorists [at least prior to Bush’s 8 year crime spree] in the world to begin with? If only 2% were tried and convicted, what happened to the rest? Let us even assume that only a few thousand were detained for a longer period of time, tortured, and then released, why so many? It does not require that many people to be tortured into a false confession. A handful is enough. So if we have a faux "war on terror" does it not follow that such a war should have a faux "terrorist" army we are at war with? I think you can see where I am going with this and this idea has haunted me. To make the question very clear, let me restate it more simply:

Did we torture and release prisoners in order to radicalize them and create the enemy army we needed to justify an endless "war on terror?"

To consider this possibility even in passing is like experiencing a slow mental bleed, but now considering that this set of crimes could in fact be likely is the loss of hope and faith in everything that I thought this country stood for. I think you can understand why I have been so reluctant to publicly discuss this theory. I have had trouble just considering it because of my strong faith in the good of my country. I don’t know if and how this could be proved, but the circumstantial evidence is starting to point in this unavoidably horrific direction.

I can’t yet allow myself to go in that direction. I’ll leave that one for her. But I have to admit that it wasn’t so long ago that I would’ve dismissed the idea that we would torture prisoners in order to create a "faux-link" between al Qaeda and Iraq to justify the invasion of Iraq. I would’ve called such an idea an apocalyptic conspiracy theory. But I now believe that’s exactly what we did. So it’s getting hard to rule out anything.

I was so tangled up in the outrage at those awful pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib five years ago that it never occurred to me to ask, "Who were those prisoners?" In light of what we’ve learned about Gitmo recently, it’s a really obvious question. Recently, we’ve focused our attention on the "high value" detainees and their treatment, but we also know that a lot of those people at Gitmo were innocents swept up and held for no real reason.  The number of people in the Cuban facility was small, "Since October 7, 2001, when the current war in Afghanistan began, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantánamo. Of these, approximately 420 have been released without charge. As of January 2009, approximately 245 detainees remain" compared to these numbers from CENTCOM of the prisoners held in Iraq.

Wikipedia: Elizabeth Edwards

On November 3, 2004, the day Kerry conceded defeat in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with breast cancer. She later revealed that she discovered a lump in her breast while on a campaign stop in Kenosha, Wisconsin a few weeks earlier, in the midst of the campaign. Edwards was treated and has remained an activist for women’s health and cancer patients…

Wikipedia: John Edwards

In October 2007 The National Enquirer began a series of reports alleging an adulterous affair between Edwards and former campaign worker Rielle Hunter. By July 2008, several news media outlets speculated that Edwards’ chances for the vice presidency may have been harmed by the allegations, which now included that he fathered a child with Hunter and had visited her and the baby girl at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. However, the story was not widely covered by the press for some time, until, after initially denying the allegations, an outright admission was made by Edwards himself.

In an August 8, 2008 statement, and an interview with Bob Woodruff of ABC News, Edwards admitted the affair with Hunter in 2006 but denied being the father of her child. He acknowledged that he had been dishonest in denying the entire Enquirer story, admitting that some of it was true, but said that the affair ended long before the time of the child’s conception. He further said he was willing to take a paternity test but Hunter responded that she would not be party to a DNA test "now or in the future." A campaign aide, Andrew Young, claims that he, not Edwards, is the child’s father. An NBC report suggested that Young may possibly be covering for Edwards.

In May 2009, newspapers reported that Edwards’ campaign was being investigated for conversion of campaign money to personal use related to the affair. Edwards said that the campaign was complying with the inquiry. The relevant US attorney refused to comment. In the same month, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News reported that he had been told by members of Edwards’ staff that they had planned a "doomsday strategy" to derail Edwards’ campaign if he got close to the nomination. However Joe Trippi, a senior advisor to the campaign, said the report was "complete bullshit".

When you look at that picture up there from their wedding, it’s hard to imagine that things would’ve played out like this. Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense, listening to either one of them. I suppose her cancer, or her outrage, might explain her books and her going public. And he doesn’t make any sense at all. If he’s that much of a mark, this was not his first affair. And if he has good sense, he would have headed for the hills at the first or second carnal thought. There was too much at stake. Neither one of them are acting reasonably.

Were I in search of something to explain all of this, I know where I would start –  I’d start with Wade. He is their 16 year old son who was killed in an auto accident in 1996. She writes about it. He talks about it [Edwards discusses impact of losing his son]. They started a Foundation from it. But do things like that ever really heal? I don’t think so. And I wonder if this strange drama that we’ve watched unfold on the public stage didn’t start when they met something in life that they couldn’t conceive, something none of us are really prepared to deal with. It recolors life, meaning, priorities, relationships – all the things that matter. I would suspect that were all known, they are both victims of the ill wind that blew their son’s Jeep off of the road 14 years ago.

GOP Losses Span Nearly All Demographic Groups
Only frequent churchgoers show no decline in support since 2001
by Jeffrey M. Jones

…

Implications

The Republican Party clearly has lost a lot of support since 2001, the first year of George W. Bush’s administration. Most of the loss in support actually occurred beginning in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court – both of which created major public relations problems for the administration – and amid declining support for the Iraq war. By the end of 2008, the party had its worst positioning against the Democrats in nearly two decades.

The GOP may have stemmed those losses for now, as it does not appear to have lost any more support since Obama took office. But as the analysis presented here shows, the losses the GOP has suffered have come among nearly all demographic groups apart from some of the most ardent Republican subgroups.

A few people were removed "for cause" – too biased to even consider. Then there were peremptory challenges that sent some of the rest of us packing. The jury was then the "leftovers." In my three trips through this process, I was always an early casualty in the peremptory challenges. Not that I wanted to hang around the courtroom for weeks on a jury, but I’ll admit that my early demise stuck with me for a while, and I finally asked a litigator friend what it was that made me such a jury pariah. After he stopped laughing [which took a while, I might add], he told me that I was an "expert." "Experts of any kind are dangerous," he said. "You see experts are used to being experts, and think they are experts on everything. If you get one of those on a jury and they side against you, your goose is cooked." I guess it’s a compliment to be considered an "expert," but I had the nagging feeling that he was telling me that people like me are "know-it-alls." I’d like to argue with that, but here I am, a retired psychiatrist, writing a political blog, so I suppose he was right enough. Mea Culpa…

This remained an odd way of doing things in my mind. How did such a process evolve? I don’t know the answer to that, but I now think it’s pretty ingenious — in fact it’s downright brilliant. And, I’m learning, it’s consistent with the way the political mind actually works. In the interpretation of the Gallup Poll above, there’s a good example. After documenting the miserable state of the Republican Party, there’s the section on Implications. They list three things: Bush’s nomination of an obviously unqualified friend to the Supreme Court; his incompetent and inadequate response to the Hurricane destruction of a great American city; and his persistence in pursuing a doomed and ill-conceived war. That seems right to me, but if you think about it, it’s odd. Those are indictments of George W. Bush, not the ideology, Conservatism, and not the organization, the Republican Party.

We do a lot of our politics in the negative, often voting against, rather than for.  At an earlier point in my life, I swore off voting against, having voted for some real losers, because of some outrageous behavior by the people in office. Then I made a related voting mistake I will always regret. I didn’t vote for Al Gore who was well qualified, but I was mad at for certain positions he’d taken [sticking with Clinton when he lied being the main one]. I sure didn’t vote for George W. Bush, but voting wrong by not voting in the 2000 election will haunt me forever. It was a double negative. I liked Clinton’s policies as well as Gore’s, but I got on a moral high horse I wish I’d never mounted. I expect a lot of us rode that high horse and participated in a collective error of unimagined proportions. Mea Culpa redux…

As much as I’d love to see Obama’s election as a mandate from the people, I’m not sure that’s right. And as much as I’d like to see the sorry state of the Republican Party as an indictment, of their beliefs I’m not sure that’s right either. Karl Rove made that mistake in his oft-quoted speech to the New York Conservatives in June 2005 after Bush’s second victory. He described liberalism as headed for extinction. Whoops!

The Republican Party is not dead. It’s only wounded. We didn’t win. The Party in Power was struck "for cause." In the heirarchy of things [Ideology; Hot Buttons like Abortion, Homosexual Marriage, Stem Cell Research; and Job performance] Bush and Cheney flunked big time on Job Performance, but those other things remain. Though I have come to hate the term, the 2008 election was a vote for "Regime Change" as much anything. The Conservative leanings of the country remain strong in the never-ending American struggle to deal with our cultural diversity. Obama’s vision of America remains in the campaign stage rather than a victory. And the Republican Party is not a skeleton on the Botswana plains. It’s a political party severely damaged by the incompetence of George W. Bush and the disturbed mentality and immorality of Richard B. Cheney. So, from my point of view, Cheney is a welcome [though dangerous] player on the media stage. Nothing better than an already struck know-it-all lobbying to get on a jury…

Cheney said in 2004 Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq-al Qaida link
McClatchy Newspapers
By Jonathan S. Landay
May 15, 2009

WASHINGTON — Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true. Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

The head of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo from 2002-2005 confirmed to McClatchy that in late 2002 and early 2003, intelligence officials were tasked to find, among other things, Iraq-al Qaida ties, which were a central pillar of the Bush administration’s case for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq. "I’m aware of the fact that in late 2002, early 2003, that (the alleged al Qaida-Iraq link) was an interest on the intelligence side," said retired Army Lt. Col. Brittain Mallow, a former military criminal investigator. "That was something they were tasked to look at."

He said he was unaware of the origins of the directive, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official has told McClatchy that Cheney’s and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s offices were demanding that information in 2002 and 2003. The official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter, requested anonymity…

The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam’s regime had maintained a "relationship" with al Qaida, raising the danger that Iraq might give the group chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S.

"Absolutely. Absolutely," Cheney replied… "The [al Qaida-Iraq] links go back," he said. "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it." No evidence of such training or of any operational links between Iraq and al Qaida has ever been found, according to several official inquiries.

It’s not apparent which Guantanamo detainees Cheney was referring to in the interview. One al Qaida detainee, Ibn al Sheikh al Libi, claimed that terrorist operatives were sent to Iraq for chemical and biological weapons training, but he was in CIA custody, not at Guantanamo. Moreover, he recanted his assertions, some of them allegedly made under torture while he was being interrogated in Egypt…

Well it’s five years later and we are the "anybody who wants to look at it." We are looking at it. We know that they waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times during the period when they were trying to establish that link and neither of them confirmed it. And we know that Ibn al Sheikh al Libi did confirm the link under torture in Egypt, but later recanted. We know from multiple sources that the White House and Defense Department were pressing to get this information. But we know of no prisoner, tortured or not, who confirmed the Iraq/al Qaeda connection while at Gitmo. So what Cheney said in that interview seems like it was a lie. He might claim that he was confused and really referring to Ibn al Sheikh al Libi [but didn’t want us to know they were "outsourcing" torture to Egypt]. But wait, by January 6th, 2004, Ibn al Sheikh al Libi was clear he had only said that to escape torture, and that it was not true. And the C.I.A. had severe doubts about the original confession.

So, what’s Cheney talking about?  Independent of his current line that torture wasn’t torture, or that torture was effective, or there are memos that could be released that vindicate him – where is anything that backs up this statement? "Absolutely. Absolutely."

The Associated Press has one of those interactive maps showing a Stress Index – determined from the Unemployment Rate, the Foreclosure Rate, and the Bankruptcy Rate by US County. It’s kind of fun to play with. The top figure shows the hardest hit areas as darker colors. Poor Oregon, California, and Michigan! But my reason for showing the pictures was something that surprised me. The lower figure is the difference between February and March – an Improving Stress Index is blue, a worsening Stress Index is brown. Unless I’m way misreading this thing, it looks promising to me.