Cheney: "I went through the Iran/Contra hearings...this time around, I'll do my damnedest to defend"

[sabra]

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0904/24/sitroom.03.html

<snip>


Let's talk a little bit about national security and what's going on. Steve, you had a chance to interview the former vice president Dick Cheney, a very revealing interview. I'm going to read a little excerpt of what he says about this whole battle involving legal opinions, enhanced interrogation, whether it was torture. Listen to what he told you.

"I think it's fundamentally unfair to the lawyers, referring to Bush administration lawyers. I have strong feelings on the subject, Steve. Because I went through the Iran/Contra hearings and watched the way administration officials ran for cover and left the little guys out to dry. And this time around, I'll do my damnedest to defend anybody out there, be they in the agency carrying out the orders or the lawyers who wrote the opinions. I don't know whether anybody else will, but I sure as hell will."

All right. He's obviously not backing down at all. Steve take us behind the scenes, how did that interview go?

STEPHEN HAYES, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: You just saw an example of exactly how fired up he is about this. I expect that we will likely hear more from Dick Cheney, not less, in the coming days about these issues because he feels so strongly about them. At another point in our interview he actually praised George Tenet. He said, I think George Tenet did the same thing. That's why he sought these legal opinions, was to sort of protect the people who he was going to have carrying out these policies that he believed strongly was going to protect the United States. So he -- Dick Cheney is clearly fired up. I think he's not going to be back being down anytime soon.

[kentuck]

1. Interpreted :

"I will do anything to save my own ass."

[Psychic Consortium]

2. Correct. Cheney protects only himself.

Everyone else is expendable in his eyes.

[Psychic Consortium]

3. Cheney's power is gone.

He is seen as a bug with his wings torn off by Obama.

[Echo In Light]

What if it's not up to Obama, or any single individual within Hallowed institutions?

[Psychic Consortium]

12. You are correct. It is up to all of us to make a stand against sociopaths

who tried to bring down this country.

It is not Obama's job to do it for us.
We must work within the law to address the evil
in front of us.

Obama is paving the way for us to do the right thing.
We owe him much.

[Echo In Light]

19. Good start. What I suspect, however, is that even if Obama wanted to, it's not up to him to decide..

...and I'm really talking about any of a wide array of dire issues we face ...yet people of course base their views on, and vote for candidates centered around high dollar media packaging, and this indoctrinating notion that So-and-so will help bring back accountability, preserve democratic principles that Bush and his enablers attacked, etc ...but, what if none of the candidates offered up by the establishment for us to pick from are going to do that? ...what if it's all a game, an illusion? ...and by "it" I mean our representative democracy.

[Psychic Consortium]

22. Then it is up to the people to make it a representative democracy

in the true sense of the term.

Dear Echo, PC assures you with all its heart that the
21st century will be different. We will see the world
you envision. It will happen, in large part because of
people like you who can see it so clearly.

[Echo In Light]

25. It's Gramsci's 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will' thing

Thanks all the same :)

[Psychic Consortium]

28. Pessimism to clearly see the faults and then courage and optimism

to change the world.

PC assures you the 21st century will be
quite different from the 20th....

[Botany]

4. how about answering questions under oath?

I mean if Cheney wants to do so much .... he can show up and answer some questions.

BTW Iran Contra =

We sold weapons to the Ayatholla, hid the money in Swiss Bank Accounts, and used that money to help
fund a war in central America against people who never attacked us.

[Rob H.]

20. That's what I'd love to see

He wouldn't be such a chest-thumping wannabe badass then, but I imagine he'd flee the country or suddenly have "other priorities" if they were to actually get a subpoena to finally stick to that evil, slippery bastard.

[Bobcat]

5. Libby

Wasn't Scooter Libby one of Dick's "little guys"?

[ShortnFiery]

6. This is WHY we must *NAIL THESE EVIL MEN/WOMEN* - they're throwbacks of JUSTICE DENIED

from the past. :grr: :nuke:

Iran Contra Cover-Up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjHi7XTrDJM


"In any other country it would have been called a coup but they seem to have gotten away with it."


-----------

IF we don't investigate and prosecute, when the GOP traitors of today come back out of the woodwork it will be too late to forstall the realization of a FULL TOTALITARIAN STATE. :scared: :thumbsdown:


Chumbawamba - On The Day The Nazi Died Lyrics


We're told that after the war
The Nazis vanished without a trace
But the Italians are facist
Still dream of a master race

The history books they tell
Of their defeat at '45
But they all came out of the woodwork
On the day the Nazi died

They say the prisoner at Spandau
Was a symbol of defeat
Whilst Hess remained imprisoned
And the facists; they were beat

So the promise of an Aryan world
Would never materialize
So why did they all come out of the woodwork
On the day the Nazi died

The world is riddled with maggots
The maggots are getting fat
They're making a tasty meal of all
The bosses and bureaucrats

They're taking over the boardrooms
And they're fat and full of pride
And they all came out of the woodwork
On the day the Nazi died

So if you meet with these historians
I'll tell you what to say
Tell them that the Nazis
Never really went away

They're out there burning houses down
And peddling racist lies

And we'll never rest again...
Until every Nazi dies...

[malaise]

7. Yep he sure did his damnedest to defend

Scooter Libby. He refused to take the stand.

[gkhouston]

8. He's scared. Excuse me while I dance. n/t

[polichick]

9. Cheney will probably take his cue from Ken Lay - and conveniently die...

...rather than doing time.

[Echo In Light]

10. Ha...I thought the very same the other night

[polichick]

31. It's hard to imagine him being courageous enough to stand trial or do time.

[spanone]

11. the evil dick..

"One of the key congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand. Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact. A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney 'kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,' the source said. 'He kept saying if we go down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.' So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether. Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report. Only three moderate Republicans on the Senate side – Warren Rudman, William Cohen and Paul Trible – agreed to sign the report, after extracting more concessions. Cheney and the other Republicans submitted a minority report that denied that any significant wrongdoing had occurred."
http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/hamiltoniran-contra.htm

[Overseas]

27. Thanks for this reminder of Cheney's manipulation of so-called "bipartisanship" //nt

[JDPriestly]

29. Drug trafficking. Hmmm. Wonder what is being covered up in

Afghanistan. Since Viet Nam, drug trafficking has been a profitable sideline for someone, don't know whom, in several of the wars that the far-right has caused our country to get involved in. I sometimes wonder whether it is the link that connects it all together.

Viet Nam and Cambodia, Central America (transporting drugs) and now Afghanistan. I don't know of any Iraqi tie to drugs, but there, the lure was pretty obviously the vulnerable oil fields. It's always about profit. I would like to hope that Obama will stop that repeated cycle -- war -- drugs -- money -- death -- war -- drugs -- money -- death.

[liberal N proud]

13. Dick is only worried about Dick

[liberalmuse]

14. What a piece of work.

And an evil one at that. I wish we never had to see his face or hear his voice again.

[ShortnFiery]

15. Cheney GAMED the restrictions put into place after Iran-Contra.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/133073/lessons_learned:_iran-contra,_the_cia,_the_crs,_and_cheney's_assassination_squads/

Sy Hersh revealed that Cheney had convened a meeting not long after 9/11 where he and other alumni of Iran-Contra brainstormed how to avoid the legal problems they had with Iran-Contra.

/snip

The reason they got exposed, and this is what was said in the White House, there were too many people that knew too much--too many people in the military knew in '85 and '86, and too many people in the CIA knew, and Oliver North who you might remember what a great witness he was, was the wrong person to be running that. So what you do is you tell nobody. One of things Cheney wrote in his dissent to the Iran-Contra committee, Cheney said, "my god, Reagan was telling too many people too much, don't tell Congress anything. You don't tell the CIA much, you don't tell the military much, and YOU, Mr. Vice President, you're the Ollie North for this. We're going to run operations off the books and you're going to honcho them."

And this is what they did. And this is what is still left to be reported, this kind of stuff, this kind of extraordinarily contemptuous attitude towards the Constitution.

[Solly Mack]

16. Snort

Yeah...you just "watched" during the Iran-Contra hearings...that's it...you just watched.

[pleah]

17. Drop dead "dick". n/t

[undeterred]

18. Where he's going the fire never ends.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_2Zqa8hHFcqE/SKV0xeawrXI/AAAAAAAAApo/eMunduYFd60/s400/Dick+Cheney.jpg

[City Lights]

21. Five-deferment Dick will do his damnedest to defend!

:rofl:

Go cheney yourself, Dick, and shut the fuck up!

:nuke:

You deserve to rot in jail.

[supernova]

23. The only thing he ever learned

was how to be ever more secretive.

He needs to unlearn that.

I suggest repeated full-body cavity searches, performed in a plastic transparent box, in the middle of Union Station.

[Contrary1]

24. Get him on the stand under oath...

It will be a rerun of Jack Nicholson's character on A Few Good Men, minus the military uniform; of course. You don't get one of those for five deferments. Cheney will get so pissed, that he'll end up implicating himself in crimes we don't even know about yet.




Lt. Daniel Kaffee: Did you order the code red?
Col. Nathan R. Jessep: I did the job I had to do.
Lt. Daniel Kaffee: Did you order the code red?
Col. Nathan R. Jessep: You're God damn right I did!

[alfredo]

26. Good, he's the perfect man to defend torture and torturing. His ugliness

matches the ugliness of beating a shackled man to death.

[Johonny]

30. Why don't Republicans ever defend any other criminal

Here Cheney says he's going to fight hard for people who clearly did criminal behavior. Just like Iran-Contra where the issue at hand was also extremely criminal. Yet when else does this party ever fight for those accused of a crime? We're talking about a party that keeps wanting to forbid and criminalize more and more of modern human behavior unless... well they do it personally. I think these type of defenses clearly make a joke of the "law and order" party.

[Octafish]

32. Cheney helped cover-up[ the murder of CIA scientist Frank Olson.

Know your BFEE: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ford Covered Up CIA Murder of American Scientist

Sneer and Rummy's ideas about America and the Constitution aren't mine.

[bobthedrummer]

33. KICK

[ThomWV]

34. Let him keep talking - very few men are in jail for keeping their mouth shut.