Cheney's Coup (by Sidney Blumenthal) & How VP & Minions Led Us Into War

[kpete]

(pic not from salon - I just thought it was appropriate)


Published on Thursday, February 23, 2006 by Salon
Cheney's Coup

A 3-Year-Old Executive Order That Vastly Expanded His Powers Illuminates How the Vice President and His Minions Led Us Into War.

by Sidney Blumenthal

After shooting Austin lawyer Harry Whittington, Dick Cheney's immediate impulse was to control the intelligence. Rather than call the president directly, he ordered an aide to inform White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card that there had been an accident but not that Cheney was its cause. Then a host of surrogates attacked the victim for not steering clear of Cheney when he was firing. Cheney attempted to defuse the subsequent furor by giving an interview to friendly Fox News. His most revealing answer came in response to a question about something other than the hunting accident.

Cheney was asked about court papers filed by his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the leaking of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame. (She is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq.) In those papers, Libby laid out a line of defense that he had leaked classified material at the behest of "his superiors" (to wit, Cheney). Libby detailed that he was authorized to disclose to members of the press classified sections of the prewar National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. (The NIE was exposed as wrongly asserting that Saddam possessed WMD and was constructing nuclear weapons.) Indeed, Cheney explained, he has the power to declassify intelligence. "There is an executive order to that effect," he said. Had he ever done that "unilaterally"? "I don't want to get into that."

..........................

Bush operates on the radical notion of the "unitary executive," that the president has inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances. By his extraordinary order, he elevated Cheney to his level, an acknowledgment that the vice president was already the de facto executive in national security. Never before has any president diminished and divided his power in this manner. Now the unitary executive inherently includes the unitary vice president.

..................

To advance their scenario for the Iraq war, Cheney & Co. either pressured or dismissed the intelligence community when it presented contrary analysis. Paul Pillar, the former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."

.................

Since the coup d'état of Executive Order 13292, however, the vice presidency has been transformed. Perhaps, for a blinding moment, Cheney imagined he might classify his shooting party top secret.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0223-33.htm

[spindrifter]

1. A Warm Bucket of Spit--

yeah, that pretty well describes Ch*ney.

[Betty]

4. more like shit

IMHO

[spindrifter]

6. The spit description came from

the link.:bounce:

[Peace Patriot]

2. Blumenthal makes a number of riveting points, as usual. Such a fine

junta analyst! I was adding things up while I read it through.

They get into power illegitimately in the first place, by Supreme Court fiat.

They commit the ultimate in malfeasance (or worse) with 9/11.

They don't like our laws that prohibit presidential war by fiat, nor any of our international treaties and agreements that prohibit it, so they lie through their teeth, bully (and probably anthrax) Congress into submission, and break all our laws by invading another country without justification--and kill tens of thousands of innocent people.

They don't like our laws about prisoners of war, nor any of our international treaties and agreements that specify how POWs should be treated, so they just make up their own rules and categories--"enemy combatants"--and imprison whomever they wish, even citizens of the U.S. and U.K., and keep them in whatever conditions they wish, for however long they wish, completely without charges against them or access to the courts or to their families or to the Red Cross.

They don't like our laws on torture, nor any of our international treaties and agreements that prohibit it, so they just shove those aside as well--and get their Bush Cartel toady and chief law enforcement officer of the U.S., Alberto Gonzales, to write memos GIVING themselves authority to break all of these laws, and to torture, and render, and imprison, anyone they wish, and whisk them away on black flights to torture dungeons in middle Europe, if that is their whim.

They don't like our laws restricting presidential domestic spying, so they again write themselves an internal memo, exempting them from the FISA laws, and shove all that aside as well, and proceed to spy on everybody, all over America, without even a post facto warrant (all that's required in emergencies). Even this blatant felony violation of the law by the president goes unchecked--he brags about it; he promises to continue doing it.

They don't like our laws and rules protecting the security of our port facilities, so they just shove all that aside, and sell our ports off the fundamentalist, theocratic sheiks of the United Arab Emirates, a country that spawned two of the 9/11 hijackers, and that uses child slaves in camel races, and where women are chattels to their fathers, brothers, uncles and husbands. Just like that. Piss off with your laws and rules. Piss off with your objections to theocracy. Piss off with your worries about security. The sheiks will protect you.

The Constitution says that the president is the commander in chief. Not the vice president. But that doesn't suit them--so, by fiat, they just extend presidential powers to the V-P, to do what he likes with U.S. intelligence--hide it, invent it, invite his friends to dinner to read it, blackmail Congresspeople, journalists and ordinary citizens with it, destroy his business rivals, pinpoint arms dealers who might be treading on his territory, keep his finger on the pulse of things in the underworld, and "out" any U.S. secret agents or worldwide counter-proliferation contacts that get in his way. We know that's what he's doing with it. But, even if it were innocent, it completely violates the Constitution.

Not to mention the Patriot Act, and host of other violations of the law, of the Constitution and of everything we cherish in our democracy.

That Bush and Cheney have not been impeached is mind-boggling.

I know the reason why--it's because both they and most of Congress were not elected by the American people, they were "selected" by Diebold and ES&S, two rightwing Bushite voting machine corporations who are now counting all our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' PROPRIETARY programming code, and virtually no audit/recount controls--a circumstance brought about by the two most corrupt Bushites in Washington DC, Tom Delay and Bob Ney. Diebold, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush/Cheney campaign chair, major donor and fundraiser. ES&S, a spinoff of Diebold, initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave a million dollars to the Chalcedon Foundation (which, among other things, touts the death penalty for homosexuals). These are the people "counting" our votes behind a veil of secrecy.

But even know the reason why--and knowing of the collusion of the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, and the War Democrats--it is still mind-boggling.

Blumenthal is right that Cheney probably thought he could keep his shooting of Whittington a national security secret. What check is there on him to make him think he couldn't? In fact, you have to wonder, why he didn't.

[WI_DEM]

3. true but lets not absolve Bush from his willingness to be a used

as a puppet.

[glitch]

5. He's top minion. Not bright but not stupid, not a puppet. Fully complict.

Definitely not absolved.

Edit: so pleased to see the word minion used again. These guys are perfect minions. Ambitious, loyal, willing bots in a malevalent matrix. :puke:

[oasis]

7. "Used intelligence not to inform decision making, but to justify a

decision already made."

Slimy, rat bastard Cheney is the nmost evil person on the planet.