An Update On Dick Cheney, War Criminal

An astute reader emailed in this link from The Atlantic.

Ta-Nehisi Coates boils everything down into a bite sized paragraph :

It's amazing, though it shouldn't be, to see the former vice-president of the United States arguing that the government still should be torturing people, and that torture is one of the things he's proudest of. I think the worst thing about the Obama administration's "looking forward" doctrine is that it virtually guarantees that torture will happen again--perhaps even under the very next administration.

I could not agree more.

And on a recent edition of Democracy Now! Salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell discuss the real fallout of the Cheney book:

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the most significant aspects of the rollout of Dick Cheney’s book is that he’s basically being treated as though he’s just an elder statesman who has some controversial, partisan political views. And yet, the evidence is overwhelming, including most of what Colonel Wilkerson just said and has been saying for quite some time, and lots of other people, as well, including, for example, General Antonio Taguba, that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder—his word—of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about.

And yet, what we have is a government, a successor administration, the Obama administration, that announced that there will be no criminal investigations, no, let alone, prosecutions of any Bush officials for any of these multiple crimes. And that has taken these actions outside of the criminal realm and turned them into just garden-variety political disputes. And it’s normalized the behavior. And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is talking about?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I certainly do. And I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I agree with almost everything he just said. And I think that explains the aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words like "exploding heads all over Washington." This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will "Pinochet" Dick Cheney.

There's more from Wilkerson here:

"[Cheney]'s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him," Wilkerson added.

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested for war crimes.

As both Bush and Cheney should be.

Dan Simpson, in today's P-G, has a list of reasons why he won't buy or read Cheney's book:

1) He is a liar. Anyone who would take the United States to war based on two false reasons -- the claim of Iraq having nuclear weapons and of the Saddam Hussein regime having links to al-Qaida -- has no further right to be believed about anything. Mr. Cheney's approach to these deadly lies was to choose and interpret U.S. intelligence to reinforce his goal, as opposed to arriving at a truth upon which to base U.S. policy.

2) He is a killer. His deliberate actions, probably intended to get himself and President George W. Bush reelected in 2004, led to the deaths of more than 4,400 Americans and countless thousands of Iraqis. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, fine; George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, no way.

I would have added stuff about the torture and the non-existent WMDs and the domestic surveillance. But that's just me.

Many thanks to the Obama Administration! By taking any prosecution of the war crimes off the table, it's at least partially legitimized the crimes Cheney is so so proud of.

Here's to hoping that some country somewhere has the courage to "Pinochet" Dick Cheney - war criminal.

Frank Gaffney - Fear Monger

This past Friday I found my self strolling, as I am sometimes fond of doing at lunchtime, towards Market Square dahn-tahn.

Needless to say I was surprised to stumble over a tea party rally being held there.

For the news details here's McNulty of the P-G:

Entering its second year, Pittsburgh's tea party movement had its now-traditional tax day rally in Market Square today, attended by roughly 500 supporters and a gaggle of counter-demonstrators.

Alas, by the time I got there the gaggle had dispersed leaving the 500 or so tea partiers to be kept wide-eyed and entertained by none other than Rose ("Obama may be the devil because he attracts flies and rats") Tennant.

An interesting morsel from the P-G follow up the next day:

Underscoring the tea party's role in the GOP, [Pittsburgh tea party organizer Patti] Weaver, a former candidate for Allegheny County executive, invited fellow GOP candidates Chuck McCullough and D. Raja onto the stage.

Chuck McCullough was there? I wonder if someone from this anti-establishment crowd asked him about his impeding trial. I wonder if anyone in the crowd asked him about his being charged with taking money from an elderly client to make political donations in her name but without her authorization.

I wonder.

I didn't see that if it happened. What I did see was blazing fear mongering by Center for Security Policy President, Frank Gaffney. Some things to keep in mind when ascertaining the credibility of Mr Gaffney:

• He's a birther. In 2008 Gaffney wrote:

Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii. There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian. If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.

Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.

• His Center for Security Policy is heavily supported by foundations controlled by our very good friend Richard Mellon Scaife:

$175,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2009.
$300,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2008.
$300,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2007.
$350,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2006.
$350,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2005.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2004.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2003.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2002.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2001.

Nice to know that such a grass roots movement can host a crazie speaker connected to some very old school conservative money.

Then there's Gaffney's certainty about Saddam's WMD.

Now that we've established Frank Gaffney as completely infected with teh crazie, let's move on to what he was talking about. Gaffney's yelled, screamed, and ranted about how SHARIA LAW IS RUINING THIS COUNTRY.

Sharia's EVERYWHERE! AND IT'S TAKING OVER!

Except it's not. From Reinbach at the Huffingtonpost:

Here's how Gaffney described what he calls the threat to the New York Senate's Homeland Security and Military Affairs Committee on April 8th: ."The threat...is best described, I believe, as a politico-legal-military threat whose express purpose is to have it imposed world-wide, subject to a theocratic ruler called a Caliph. That is of course a program that is completely at odds with our Constitution, our form of government, our way of life, our freedoms."

I'll admit that sounds pretty grim. Even if it does seem a lot like the threat of Global Communism I used to hear about as a kid.

The truth? Sharia is religious law, and no religious law can be imposed on the US without amending the Constitution -- twice -- to repeal both the opening clause of the First Amendment, and the Supremacy Clause in Article 6.

Something he never got round to telling the crowd. Here's the opening clause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

And here's the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

Huh. I thought the tea partiers knew the Constitution.

I guess when it comes to billionaire-funded WMD finding birthers like Frank Gaffney, the truth is something to be jettisoned in favor of fear.

The Most Ridiculous Item Of The Day:

Mike Pintek.

I caught a little of Night Talk last night. In the first segment, prior to a surprisingly entertaining taped interview with Peter Tork of the Monkees, Pintek interviewed Ron Kessler, author of the new book The Terrorist Watch.

Kessler described the 8-month long interrogation/debriefing of the captured Saddam Hussein by FBI special agent George Piro and this, Pintek fans, is where the fun began.

Kessler said that Saddam admitted to Piro that he had no WMD before the 2003 invasion. He faked having the weapons because he wanted Iran to think he had them.

At that point, if you looked hard enough, you would've seen Pintek's brain going into overdrive (what-do I-do-now-what-do I-do-now-what-do I-do-now?). Dancing quickly, he was able to establish that Saddam must've had lied to absolutely everyone about the non-existent WMD. And then by a few short steps of conservative illogic, he was able to imply that the Bush administration was merely wrong (that is, not dishonest) about Saddam's WMD - carefully letting George W. Bush off the hook for lying to us about Saddam's WMD.

Nice try, Mike. Didn't work and it made you look desperate, but a nice try nonetheless.

Here's Kessler in his own words. From Newsmax.com:

Saddam confided to Piro why he had no weapons of mass destruction but pretended he did. Saddam said that because of the war of attrition he had with Iran, Iran always remained a threat to him. And if Iran thought he had serious WMD, it would be reluctant to engage him again. On the other hand, if he said he had them, Iran would never listen. But if the U.S. said that he had them, Iran would believe it.

So every time inspectors came, Saddam gave them the runaround, reinforcing for Iran’s consumption the notion that he had WMD. And that explains why, if there were no WMD, he acted as if he did have them.

It's a mystery to me why Newsmax is allowing this on its site. But that is neither here nor there.

The point is, here's an FBI agent telling a experinced author who's written a number of books on the US intelligence services (the CIA, FBI and so on) as well as a book called "A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush" that one of the main reasons for the war in Iraq is wrong.

And Pintek spun it the best he could - into Dubya's incompetence.

Good going Mike. Yer doin a hekuva job.

Jack Kelly Sunday

This time, he's writing about Syria. While the whole column isn't about WMD, he begins with it.

I decided, after doing a little research on what's in today's P-G, to take a somewhat different approach. Let's contrast and compare what he's saying about WMD in Syria NOW with what he's said in the past.

Should be fun, no?

Today:

An explosion ripped through a military base near Aleppo in northern Syria July 23, killing 15 Syrian soldiers and dozens of Iranian engineers. Summer temperatures of up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit caused an ammunition dump to "cook off," the Syrian government said.

Since the explosion occurred at 4:30 in the morning, some were skeptical of the government's explanation.

Jane's Defence Weekly is reporting in its Sept. 29 issue that the blast occurred while the Syrians and Iranians were attempting to put a chemical warhead on a Scud C missile. Most of the injuries were caused by the dispersion of nerve and mustard gas.

I'm wondering why he doesn't say whether these chemical weapons were the same weapons that he'd written previously were shipped into Syria before the war.

Take a look. He wrote on February 5, 2006:

Special Republican Guard brigades loaded yellow barrels with the skull and crossbones sign on each barrel onto two airliners from which the seats had been removed, [former Iraqi Air Force General] Georges Sada said. There were 56 flights in all.

After pointing out some skepticism as to Sada's story, he went on to list some other sources telling similar stories of Saddam's WMD being moved into Syria before the war, even ending the piece with:

Those who have bet their political futures that Saddam had no WMD may be starting to sweat.

And then on November 6, 2005 he wrote:

The Iraq Survey Group found no large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. This could be because no such weapons actually existed.

Or it could be because they were moved to another country between the time Congress authorized the use of force against Iraq and when the war actually began.
"We've had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official told reporter Kenneth Timmerman.

And then on May 2, 2004:

...Israel's military chief told an Israeli newspaper there is "no doubt" that Iraq possessed both chemical weapons and the means to deliver them. In the first two days of the war, the United States -- acting on tips from Israeli intelligence -- destroyed the aircraft Saddam had prepared to carry chemical munitions, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon said. The munitions themselves were buried, or transferred to other countries.

"We very clearly saw that something crossed into Syria," he said.

"We have six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official told Kenneth Timmerman of Insight magazine.

A Syrian intelligence officer, in letters smuggled to an anti-regime activist in Paris, identified three sites in Syria where Iraqi WMD are being stored, Timmerman said. The sites were the same as those identified earlier by a Syrian journalist who defected to Europe.

Note the overlap from the previous article. The bit of information from Kenneth Timmerman was used both times.

And then on February 1, 2004:

But Kay also said there was ample evidence of ongoing WMD programs in Iraq, and programs to build missiles with longer ranges than permitted by U.N. resolutions. There were indications, he said, that some weapons of mass destruction may have been moved to Syria. These statements received little attention from journalists.

And finally this on December 21, 2003:

The recently retired director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. James Clapper, told Agence France Presse in October there was evidence from satellite imagery that Saddam moved WMD into Syria just before the onset of hostilities.

So with all that "evidence" that Saddam's WMD were moved to Syria, why isn't J-Kel connecting the dots and saying they were once Saddam's?

Or if there is evidence they're not, why not say that? Wouldn't that be an even scarier scenario: The stuff the Iranians and Syrians were trying to load onto scud missles was from some other additional source than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

I wonder why no connection.

Overheard on KDKA - Fred's at it again

Yesterday, I was listening (as I sometimes do) to Fred Honsberger and I heard him, yet again, use the "Georges Sada defense" in another bleak attempt to prop up dubya's decision to take this country to war.

A caller tried to point out the non-existence of Saddam's WMD as evidence of dubya's dishonesty and Fred dutifully snapped to attention with the above mentioned "Georges Sada."

Here's what he said (it's a paraphrase, I was taking notes):

We have Georges Sada. He was Saddam Hussein's Airforce General and he said
the WMD was flown into Syria before the war."

All of that, of course, is absolutely true. Georges Sada was a 2-star general in the Iraqi Air Force and he did say that the WMD were flown to Syria before the war. The stuff that Fred's leaving out (and this is stuff he should know about) shows how much spin is necessary in order to push this tired old excuse of a story.

Let's look at Sada's history. True he was a 2-star general in the Iraqi Air Force, but is he one now? According to Fred Nile, President of the Christian Democrati Party in Australia:

Sada was ordered to join Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party in 1986. He refused to do so and was thus forced to retire.

By my count that was 21 years ago. Nile goes on:

Shortly after Sada was forced out of the air force Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Sada was the first man he called back into service. He was restored to his former position and put in charge of the air force. Sada was obviously a loyal citizen of Iraq but because he would not execute the American prisoners he was thrown into prison.

This, according to his aubiography was in 1991. By my count that's 16 years ago. Since then he'd held no role in Saddam's regime. His book quotes (though doesn't name) a couple of pilots as the source of the story. According to Sada, they flew the WMD to Syria in the Spring of 2002.

On whether he actually saw this taking place, Sada admits during an interview with Brian Lehrer that he was not an eyewitness to the events.

Remember Congressman Peter Hoekstra? He's the guy who, along with Rick Santorum, announced the "finding" of Saddam's WMD in the form of those 500 empty shells. The story proved to be bogus. The story does point out, though, that Hoekstra was one of those who believe that the WMD were in Iraq before the war. In the New York Sun on March 6, 2006 we can see these sentences:

Mr. Hoekstra said that after the committee's staff had interviewed former Iraqi regime officials recommended by a former general, Georges Sada, he could not confirm General Sada's account that weapons of mass destruction had been transferred to Syria in the spring of 2002 in a converted civilian aircraft.

"We have not been able to verify the claims made in General Sada's book," Mr. Hoekstra said. "We followed up pretty extensively. There were some interesting things. But we can't verify the aircraft transfer."

So. Fred's telling a story about a retired general who'd been thrown in prison by Saddam Hussein and had since had no official interaction with that regime ever again, no direct evidence of the transfer of WMD to Syria other than two unnamed sources, and no verification from a sympathetic member of Congress who himself was keen to find evidence of pre-war Saddam's WMD.

And it all comes up empty.

Fred, honestly, should you retire this story? It's over. It's untrue. There's nothing there.

The More Things Change....

From Editor and Publisher:

As widely noted in the press, TV and on the Web in the past 24 hours, Karl Rove stole the show at this year's gathering of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association in Washington D.C. with his attempt at rapping, hipping and hopping. President Bush seemed content to avoid controversy, which is just as well, considering what happened at the same dinner gala in March, 2004 -- a low point during his term in office and for the media.

Since Bush's "joke" about not finding WMD, an additional 2700 Americans have died in Iraq.

I'm glad they're still finding things funny at the White House.

While you're pondering the complete lack of humanity at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, take a look at this. I found it at youtube.

Have a good morning, Pittsburgh