AP | YahooNews.com

WASHINGTON – CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism almost suggests “he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”

Panetta told The New Yorker for an article in its June 22 issue that Cheney “smells some blood in the water” on the issue of national security.

Cheney has said in several interviews that he thinks Obama is making the U.S. less safe. He has been critical of Obama for ordering the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, halting enhanced interrogations of suspected terrorists and reversing other Bush administration initiatives he says helped to prevent attacks on the U.S.
Last month the former vice president offered a withering critique of Obama’s policies and a defense of the Bush administration on the same day that Obama made a major speech about national security.

Panetta said of Cheney’s remarks: “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

Asked if he agreed with Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wouldn’t question the motive behind Cheney’s criticism.
“I think Dick Cheney’s judgment about how to secure America is faulty,” Biden said. “I think our judgment is correct.”

CNN.com 

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he does not believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning or execution of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says Saddam Hussein “provided sanctuary … and resources to terrorists.”

He strongly defended the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, however, arguing that Hussein’s previous support for known terrorists was a serious danger after 9/11.

Cheney, in an appearance at the National Press Club, also said he is intent on speaking out in defense of the Bush administration’s national security record because “a clear understanding of policies that worked [in protecting the United States] is essential.”

“I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true,” Cheney conceded.

Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Dale Scott | 911Truth.org

Here is an excerpt from the text of what Cheney said at the American Enterprise Institute on May 21, 2009:

“For me, one of the defining experiences was the morning of 9/11 itself. As you might recall, I was in my office in that first hour, when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles an hour. That was Flight 77, the one that ended up hitting the Pentagon. With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave, now. A few moments later I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below.There in the bunker came the reports and images that so many Americans remember from that day - word of the crash in Pennsylvania, the final phone calls from hijacked planes, the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape burning alive. In the years since, I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.”– http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/21/cheney_obama_keeping_america_safe_96615.html (Emphasis added)

The first radar sighting of a plane approaching Washington was at 9:21 AM. In other words Cheney has confirmed his first account (and ours) that he was taken from his office earlier than 9:36 AM (as claimed in the 9/11 Report, p. 39), and first arrived in the bunker much earlier than “shortly before 10:00; perhaps at 9:58″ (9/11 Report, p. 40, citing Cheney interview with Newsweek, November 19, 2001). There were of course no images to watch for some time from the crash in Pennsylvania, as opposed to the Pentagon.What Cheney said yesterday adds nothing to his first account on September 16, 2001, but clearly discredits his second conflicting account for Newsweek two months later. (Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 197-98, 200-01)

James Petras | AlterNet.org

“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan.

McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects.

McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the ‘direct action’ forces of the ‘Special Missions Units. ‘Direct Action’ operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in ‘propaganda of the dead’, assassinating local leaders to ‘teach’ the locals to obey and submit to the occupation. Obama’s appointment of McChrystal as head reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war in the face of the advance of the resistance throughout the country.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Black | MinnPost.com

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government official who had experience with many of the crises.

Read the rest of this entry »

The feds dropped all charges against Susan Lindauer, and now she’s talking freely.  Michael Collins’s interview with Lindauer covers the warnings provided to the Bush-Cheney administration prior to 9/11.  It presents entirely new information from an angel that will add substantially to knowledge that terrible attack.

Michael Collins | AmericanPoliticsJournal.com

 I first wrote about Susan Lindauer’s struggle against the Bush-Cheney regime in October 2007, “American Cassandra: Susan Lindauer’s Story.”  This was initially published in “Scoop” Independent Media (complete series) and carried by a wide variety of concerned Internet news sites and blogs.  This interview follows the full dismissal of charges against her just before President Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009.  This is the first in depth interview that Lindauer has offered regarding 9/11.  Below is part one of the interview.

I asked Ms. Lindauer to make her own statement about why she’s willing to go into detail now about 9/11 and the governments handling of pre-9/11 intelligence.

For five years, I was the poster child for President Bush’s retaliation against Americans who opposed his War Policy in Iraq. In March, 2004 the Justice Department indicted me for acting as an “unregistered Iraqi Agent” (not espionage), because I delivered a prescient letter to my second cousin, Andy Card, former Chief of Staff to President Bush, warning of the dire consequences of War.

Read the rest of this entry »

Melissa Rossi | HuffingtonPost.com 

So many dastardly acts were committed during the Bush administration (many of them by the Bush administration) that it’s hard to nail down the worst. Senator Patrick Leahy recently suggested formation of a “Truth Commission” to investigate the interrogation, torture, and shredding of civil liberties that occurred as part of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” and as Sam Stein reported here directly approached Obama about opening investigations.

I’m still troubled by September 11, 2001. Not merely the terrifying events of the attacks that day, but the fact that it still hasn’t been fully explained. It could be and it should be. The Bush administration never came clean with “what really happened” - but the Obama administration needs to set history straight on what unfolded that day, and detail the role played by the Bush administration in it.

As more new information has emerged contradicting the official 9/11 Commission report or appearing to fill holes in it - reports about finding the black boxes of the hijacked airplanes, inconsistencies about Flight 93 (did it explode from a bomb onboard, was it shot down, or did it indeed crash as a result of the passenger rebellion?), contradictory reports about the identities of the hijackers and other reports that point to a number of Cheney-commissioned war games ongoing that day that the Bush administration never fully brought to light - and as the weakness of the 9/11 commission itself has come into the public arena — the Obama administration owes it to the American people to reopen that can of vipers and in this sifting through the events try to figure out what really happened to debunk the fallacies - be they conspiracy theories that don’t hold water or the suffocating blanket of disinformation continually dropped on Americans by the Bush administration.

Read the rest of this entry »

John F Harris, Mike Allen, Jim Vandehei | Politico.com

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”
Read the rest of this entry »

by Glenn Greenwald

It seems fairly easy — even for those overtly hostile to the basic rules of logic and law — to see what conclusions are compelled by these clear premises:

Associated Press, April 11, 2008:

    Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

    The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved. . . .

    The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Agence France-Presse, October 15, 2008:

    The administration of US President George W. Bush authorized the CIA to waterboard Al-Qaeda suspects according to two secret memos issued in 2003 and 2004, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Raw Story

Andrew McLemore

Published: Sunday January 4, 2009

If you don’t get punished, you didn’t go anything wrong, right?

That’s the message Vice President Dick Cheney gave in an interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday, suggesting that a president’s actions are legal if those actions didn’t result in his impeachment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com 

It’s par for the course for Obama and Biden, the men who promised “change” but in every step of their preparations for assuming office have pursued nothing but continuity, to acknowledge that they will protect criminals in the Bush administration from prosecution for authorizing torture, a complete violation of both the U.S. constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

When asked by ABC host George Stephanopoulos if top level Bush administration officials would be prosecuted for mandating prisoner abuse, Biden said that he and Obama would be “focusing on the future,” adding “I think we should be looking forward, not backwards.”

Such rhetoric goes to the very heart of the gigantic con job the “Obama change” hoax has wrought upon millions of befuddled Americans who naively presumed that voting for the lesser of two evils would result in anything other than more evil.

Perhaps Göring, Ribbentrop and the rest of the Nazis prosecuted at Nuremberg for their war crimes were following the wrong line of defense when they claimed they were merely “following orders,” they should have just proclaimed that the world should be “looking forward not backwards” and according to the Biden/Obama view of justice, they would have got off scot free.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dallas Business Journal 

Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have been named in a South Texas grand jury indictment on charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners being detained in Willacy County federal detention centers, The Associated Press said.

Willacy County is located in South Texas and includes the cities of Lyford, Raymondville and San Perlita.

The AP says the indictment alleges Cheney maintains a conflict of interest on the grounds that he has an investment in the Vanguard Group, a company that holds interest in private companies running federal detention centers. The indictment cites Cheney for “at least misdeameanor assaults,” on detainees because of his work with the prison companies, The AP is reporting.

The former attorney general, Gonzales, is cited on allegations that he used his former position to stop inquiries into the abuses.

Mike Whitney
Information Clearing House
September 20, 2008

Editor’s note: Mike Whitney wrote this article on the 4th of July, 2006. Cheney’s portfolio is simply more evidence that the current economic crisis was manufactured in advance. Darth Cheney is either clairvoyant or somebody tipped him off.

Wouldn’t you like to know where Dick Cheney puts his money? Then you’d know whether his “deficits don’t matter” claim is just baloney or not.

Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney’s financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 14, 2008; A01

14/09/08 “Washington Post” — - This is the first of two stories adapted from “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. Original source notes are denoted in [brackets] throughout.

Five government lawyers had gathered around a small conference table in the Justice Department command center. Four were expected. David S. Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney, got wind of the meeting and invited himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Juliano | RawStory.com

New documents from within the Bush administration and US intelligence community during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq reveal that the White House began assembling a case for war before it had compiled the intel that ostensibly formed the basis of that case.

A new report on the documents from George Washington University’s National Security Archive also presents compelling evidence that the Bush administration pressured the CIA and other intelligence agencies to tailor their reports to back-up Bush’s desire to invade. The report suggests the bulk of this effort was run out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, backing up numerous other post-war examinations of the path to invasion that saw Cheney as the mastermind of the plan to oust Saddam Hussein.

The Archive published a July 2002 draft of a CIA “White Paper” on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The draft was prepared months before a National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam’s regime, which Congress did not demand until September, although the final “White Paper” released in October purportedly summarized that very NIE.
Read the rest of this entry »

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran. 

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of theoverblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject washow to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

Read the rest of this entry »

American Monitor

“In the United States of America there is a hidden government about which you know nothing.”

So begins a revealing television exposé aired by CNN in 1991. The hour-long Special Assignment presented the findings of a yearlong CNN investigation into the ultra-secretive Continuity of Government (COG) program, commonly referred to as the “doomsday government” or the “shadow government”.

Read the rest of this entry »

George Washington’s Blog 

You may have heard that the Energy Task Force chaired by Dick Cheney prior to 9/11 collected maps of Iraqi oil, Saudi and United Arab Emerates fields and potential suitors for that oil. And you might have heard that the oil bigs attended the Task Force meetings.But you probably haven’t heard that a secret document written by the National Security Council (NSC) on February 3, 2001 directed NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the“melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 

“the review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields”. 

It is difficult to brush off Cheney’s Energy Task Force’s examination of arab oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy with known oil reserves because the NSC explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change.Indeed, a former senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the NSC said:

“if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans”. 

See also this essay.