The real reason

Cheney hurt his back...



He's going to miss his secure superduper secret undisclosed location.....

Sometimes urban legends are based on truth

Like Cheney is a vampire... but I digress:

Nearing the end of eight years as Vice President, Dick Cheney bluntly dismissed the frequent suggestion that he was the one calling the shots in the White House. “It’s an urban legend,” he said. “It never happened.” […]

“This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, was simply not true.” Cheney said “there was never any question about who was in charge: it was George Bush and that’s how we operated.”

No wonder he's denying he had a hand in the stovepiping of Iraqi intelligence before the war and the pressuring of analysts and shutting up the Army War College with Rumsfeld's help. The PNAC neocon plan for war turned out so well...

Think Progress lists a few "legends":

Here are just some examples of Cheney abusing his vice presidential powers:

– Argued he was not part of the executive branch but instead a “barnacle” hanging between the legislative and executive branch.

– Cheney’s office failed to provide data on its classification and declassification activities as required by Executive Order 12958. “Cheney’s office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped.”

– Top Cheney aide David Addington “typed a substitute signature line” for Alberto Gonzales on a memo re-authorizing Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.

– “The Cheney team had…technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails,” said former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson.

– Documents prepared for the then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were “routed outside the formal process” to Cheney.

– A Cheney lawyer told the Secret Service in September 2006 “to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence.”

Next he'll be telling us his undisclosed secret location is a castle in Transylvania....

The show you must see

Over at Tengrain's Drive-in!



You'll scream your head off!

When will someone ask WHY?

Why was it necessary to break treaties and common sense to bring back torture? Because the answer is obvious?

To be forgiven, you have to repent

And feel some remorse.

I don't think Georgie knows what that means.









He'll never be able to say he's sorry. Or stop acting like an ass...








But we'll never be able to forget him.... let alone forgive him:

Impeachment?

Not while Bush can pardon everybody including himself.

We just need to wait for Seymour Hersh to start talking to all the eager Bush administration flunkies who are waiting for January 20th to spew. Let all of the information become public. The astonishment and anger will build. Demands will be made to punish those who demanded torture be used, that the Constitution be shredded, that treaties be ignored. As more and more people rat out the Bush cabal, investigations will have to be held. Indictments will have to be given, jail time insisted upon.

If we can't do it ourselves, other countries will try to arrest these war criminals. Bush and Cheney will not be able to travel without fear of arrest. Even though they will probably escape prosecution, they will experience scorn and shaming from their countrymen and colleagues.

Impeachment won't happen. But justice can.

Bush's Legacy: The ideology of lawlessness

Glenn Greenwald talks to Scott Horton, discussing accountability and why it is important to bring the Bush administration to justice:

Glenn Greenwald: My guest today is Scott Horton, who has written the cover story, the cover article for the current edition of Harper's, that explores various approaches for investigating and prosecuting Bush officials for crimes that have been committed over the last eight years. The article is entitled Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration.

[snip]

I want to ask about the more general point that you make: that although it's the case that in the past that presidents have broken specific laws, what has happened under the Bush administration is different in kind, not just degree, because what they've really done is assaulted the law itself. That's the argument that you've made. What did you mean by that?

SH: When we look at all these things in tandem, we see that there's a collective attitude that applies across the board, which is, they don't care about criminal law limitations on the power of the president. They believe the president has the right to ride roughshod over them. And in fact, just as a good example: if you look at Barton Gellman's book the Angler [Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency] -- excellent book -- he talks about the formation of the terrorist surveillance policy and its implementation. And he had David Addington, with the authority of Vice President Cheney, telling individuals who are putting in their proposals, to make their proposals completely disregarding the law, including the criminal law restrictions. And indeed, they specifically solicited proposals disregarding the law, and they implemented them disregarding the law -- knowing that they didn't have legitimate legal arguments to avoid the restriction, that they could just do it by force and dint of power and authority.

And they could only do that by getting high-level policy makers and people down the line to accept their position of being above the law. So they did that. They were basically governing via being at war with the law, and that's something that has not happened before. The closest case we had previously was the Nixon administration, but what I think what happened there is bland compared to what happened under George W. Bush.

GG: Yeah, I think it's a point that's often overlooked. We don't have isolated serial cases of law-breaking; it's really an ideology of lawlessness -- a principle that was adopted that the president in general has the right to act outside the law -- that distinguishes it from even the worst law-breakers that have occupied the White House and government agencies.

When I read things like this, my teeth curl with the thought of the Bush cabal escaping unscathed from their eight years of terror. We must have public exposure of their crimes and an accounting. To quote Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton:

argues that it is imperative to investigate, expose, and prosecute the Bush administration's war crimes, particularly its torture of detainees. Scott sets forth a detailed proposal for how this should be pursued, beginning with the creation of a Truth Commission to expose what was done and to generate public support for further proceedings, followed by prosecution.

A public egging while in the stocks would be a therapeutic start...

Do tell....

Seymour Hersh:

You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president's inauguration],' he says, with relish. '[They say:] "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.' He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won't change anything - 'They've got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves' - it will reveal how the White House 'set out to sabotage the system... It wasn't that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.'

The neocons may have gotten away with it for now. But I hope they become afraid to travel because citizens keep trying to arrest them, countries try them for war crimes in absentia, more and more loyal Bushies come forward and tell us what they were made to do and how they broke the law. I want them to live long and fearful lives cowering from the angry world community.

Who wouldn't want an endorsement from the Prince of Darkness?

Update 11/3: He really earned it!

Dying because it's a good political move

Soldiers are told to stay in Iraq not to protect our freedoms, not because of the supposed revenge for 9/11, not to spread democracy... but for political circumstances.

Maddow cited an interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, conducted last week by Iraqi state television, during which "he said when he was negotiating with the Bush administration to pick a withdrawal date for our troops to come home, they initially settled on about 15 months from now, the end of 2010. But then ... the Bush administration came back and told the Iraqis they'd actually like our troops to stay in Iraq an extra year, through 2011 ... 'due to political circumstances related to the US domestic situation.'"

"So the prime minister of Iraq says on tape," Maddow summarized, "according to our own government's translation, that the Bush administration wants to prolong the war in Iraq for an extra year because of our domestic politics."

"If you feel like your hair is on fire right now," she added, "you're not alone."

In the Bush Cheney administration, soldiers are expendable.

Our Waterloo

The Worst Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression by Nouriel Roubini:

This financial crisis signals the beginning of the decline of the American Empire; over time the relative economic, financial, military, geostrategic power of the US and reserve role of the US dollar will significantly decline.

And so George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney will go down in the history books as the people who broke the United States of America. Thanks, guys!

The Georgia war had Cheney's fingerprints on it?

What was a top national security aide to Vice President Dick Cheney doing in Georgia shortly before Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's troops engaged in what became a disastrous fight with South Ossetian rebels -- and then Russian troops?

[snip]

And yes, Joseph R. Wood, Cheney's deputy assistant for national security affairs, was in Georgia shortly before the war began.

But, the vice president's office says, he was there as part of a team setting up the vice president's just-announced visit to Georgia. (It is common for the White House to send security, policy, communications and press aides to each site the president and vice president will visit ahead of the trip, to begin making arrangements and planning the agenda.)

The White House disclosed on Monday that Cheney would hurry over to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Italy next week, almost immediately after addressing the Republican National Convention on Labor Day.

And so it was that a team from the vice president's office, U.S. security officials and others were in Georgia several days before the war began.

It had nothing to do, the vice president's office said, with a military operation that some have said suggests a renewal of the Cold War.

Uh huh. Right. And we should believe you exactly why? After all this time where nothing out of the Vice President's office has been the truth?

I don't think so.

I told you guys he'd have a dungeon in his compound in Paraguay!

Not only does the White House have its own interrogation room:

Usman is trundled from the SUV, escorted through the West Gate, and onto the manicured grounds. No one speaks as the agents walk him behind the gate’s security station, down a stairwell, along an underground passage, and into a room — cement-walled box with a table, two chairs, a hanging light with a bare bulb, and a mounted video camera. Even after all the astonishing turns of the past hour, Usman can’t quite believe there’s actually an interrogation room beneath the White House, dark and dank and horrific.

But because Georgie has been such an obedient boy for eight years, they'll let him pull the lever one more time:

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Monday approved the execution of an Army soldier who terrorized Fayetteville, N.C., for months in the late 1980s and was eventually convicted of raping and killing four women, and raping and attempting to kill another.

Bush signed off on the death penalty for Ronald A. Gray, who grew up in the Liberty City area of Miami and was stationed at Fort Bragg at the time of the crimes. Eventually, he was convicted in connection with eight rapes and four murders that took place in in the area. Gray, who was 22 and held the rank of specialist at the time of his court martial, has been on death row at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., since 1988.

Bush's action was the first time in more than half a century that a president has approved the execution of a member of the Armed Services.

Oh yes, we know that the command for torture came from the very top.

If you are reading this, you're probably on the list

To be rounded up. Pack a toothbrush:

Govt. May Have Massive Surveillance Program For Use In ‘National Emergency,’ 8 Million ‘Potential Suspects’

Last year, former deputy attorney general James Comey revealed that in 2004, he refused to “certify” the legality of certain aspects of the National Security Agency (NSA) spy program. Comey witnessed Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card try to force a bed-ridden John Ashcroft to approve the program. Comey, however, did not publicly give specifics as to what program he opposed.

CAP’s Peter Swire wrote on ThinkProgress at the time that Comey’s testimony implied that “other programs exist for domestic spying” outside of the NSA program. Radar’s Christopher Ketcham suggests that another spy program does exist: “Main Core,” a program that authorizes “computer searches through massive [unspecified] electronic databases” in order to discover “potential threats” in the event of a “national emergency”:

According to a senior government official…”There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” … One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Remember the ten easy steps to fascism:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

This explains all those secret private prisons around the country, the odd obsession that Cheney and Rumsfeld had about playing shadow government games, Cheney's claim that the Vice President was outside the law and the Constitution, the indifference to foreign workers, the ICE raids, Blackwater mercenaries, Gitmo, Tasers being issued to police and being scrubbed from autopsy reports, identifying every crime and misdemeanor as terrorism, and the officious arrogance of the airport security, doesn't it?

These loyal Bushies must have been promised really neat uniforms and high glossy black boots so they could shock and awe their craven neighbors. Is that why they gutted the treasury? To create a depression that would make Americans desperate to support a fascist regime? It might have worked when Georgie's grandfather Prescott Bush tried to start a coup against FDR.

Are they hoping another terrorist strike will do the trick?


crossposted at SteveAudio and American Street

I don't see why we need a president anymore

When the vice president (literally) gets things done with utterly no accountability.

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post:

How far will Vice President Cheney go to shield himself and his office from public scrutiny?

Last spring, Cheney asserted that he wasn't subject to executive-branch rules about classified information because he wasn't actually part of the executive branch.

Now his office argues that he and his staff are completely immune from congressional oversight. That's right: Completely immune.

Cheney's latest claim came in a response to a House Judiciary Committee request for vice presidential chief of staff David S. Addington to testify about his central role in developing the administration's torture policies.

Cheney lawyer Kathryn L. Wheelbarger wrote back: "Congress lacks the constitutional power to regulate by a law what a Vice President communicates in the performance of the Vice President's official duties, or what a Vice President recommends that a President communicate in the President's performance of official duties, and therefore those matters are not within the Committee's power of inquiry."

Mission Bungled

Watertiger says it best.

Update 5/2: I think it needs this picture.

So?

What you said to Senator Patrick Leahy and then some, Dick!

Amanda Terkel of Alternet:

This opposition to the war is not a "fluctuation" in public opinion. The American public has steadily turned against the war since the 2003 invasion. According to a new CNN poll, just 36 percent of the American public believes that "the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over -- down from 68 percent in March 2003, when the war began."

Even though he doesn't care what the American public wants, Cheney still thinks he is able -- and entitled -- to speak for the American public. Last month, Cheney declared, "The American people will not support a policy of retreat." If Cheney were actually listening to the "American people," he would know that 61 percent actually supports the redeployment of U.S. troops.

You certainly don't speak for me, Mr. Not-part-of-the-executive-branch-and-not-part-of- the-legislative-branch-mystery-government-official-person!

Sounds like something Cheney would really like to do

Madison Guy of Letter from Here scares us to death....

Imagine that!

How utterly bizarre! We couldn't have imagined this happening... oh good grief, you guys! How can this possibly be a surprise?

The Washington Post:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said.

The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records -- including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions -- for history and in case of any future legal demands.

Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.

Another official in that office on Tuesday challenged the study's credibility in a court affidavit, contending that current White House employees have been unable to confirm the veracity of the analysis or to recreate its findings. Waxman's disclosure provides the first details about the study's findings.

We saw this one a mile off. Why are people so amazed? I mean, in 2006 the Democrats take Congress and the next thing we see is a TRUCK filled with shredding machines driving up to Cheney's offices. This is the group that studied Watergate to see how NOT to make mistakes. Not to avoid breaking laws, mind you, but how NOT TO GET CAUGHT.

Cheney has wiped his fingerprints off of every thing he's ever touched. I'm sure he's behind this oh-so-mysterious email erasure thing....

Update 1/19: Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat cites an AP article and says:

Read the entire article for a sample list of some dates for which emails are known to be absent. Remember as you read that the government is legally required to archive all its emails. There's a system in place to do so. There is simply no way this quantity of emails can have gone missing accidentally.

Why is there any American anywhere who does not see that the current White House is one massive criminal enterprise?

"Why I Believe Bush Must Go"

"Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse."

George McGovern at the Washington Post:

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

[snip]

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

Thank you, sir. You are a true patriot.