Category Archives: Cheney

NEWS & OPINION: Cheney’s effort to emulate Stalin

Cheney, like president, has a warning for Iran

“The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences,” Mr. Cheney said, without specifying what those might be. “The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Mr. Cheney delivered his warnings during a wide-ranging foreign policy speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research organization. During the 35-minute talk, he also took aim at Syria, accusing Damascus of using “bribery and intimidation” to influence the coming elections in Lebanon, and he presented the case for the administration’s muscular approach to investigating suspected terrorists.

But Mr. Cheney reserved his harshest language for Iran. Calling it “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” he said, “our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions.” [complete article]

Serious consequences

As time passed, the terrorists believed they’d exposed a certain weakness and lack of confidence in the West, particularly in America. Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists’ reasoning this way: “During the Cold War,” Dr. Lewis wrote, “two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: ‘What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'” End quote.

It’s really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)–openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union–our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn’t it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC. Put differently, he is very proud of his world-view, indeed eager to share it with Beltway ‘elites’. Who will clear this dangerous rot out of Washington and help us restore our good name? [complete article]

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PREVIEW: The Cheney coup

Cheney’s law

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy — without congressional approval or judicial review.

Now, as the White House appears ready to ignore subpoenas in the wiretapping and U.S. attorneys’ cases, FRONTLINE’s season premiere, Cheney’s Law, airing Oct. 16, 2007, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), examines the battle over the power of the presidency and Cheney’s way of looking at the Constitution. [complete article]

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: State-sanctioned torture

Secret U.S. endorsement of severe interrogations

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture — the prohibition on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment.

Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.

At the administration’s request, Mr. Bradbury [head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department] assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.

At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.

“If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,” Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, “then they are now saying that officials broke current law.”

In the end, Mr. Bradbury’s opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.’s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that “shocks the conscience” was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The sociopathic nature of the Bush administration has always been evident in its shameless use of language as the means through which it can conceal its actions and obscure its intentions. The long-discarded signature phrase used to deflect criticism, doubt, and misgivings, was moral clarity. The president could be trusted because he and those around him were empowered by the strength of their moral convictions, or so we were meant to believe.

Thus, when Bush and Cheney were accused of having instituted an interrogation system that clearly sanctioned the use of torture, Bush was adamant that the United States does not permit nor condone the use of torture. And how could we know that? Because no treatment of a detainee would be permitted that “shocks the conscience.”

In parallel, yet in complete contradiction with this assertion, was the idea that everything possible would be done to protect American lives. Why is this a contradiction?

Because, if what is deemed acceptable or unacceptable treatment of a detainee is going to be determined by a factor other than the condition of the detainee — specifically, by whether or not the lives of others can be protected — then the condition of the detainee becomes irrelevant. “We pulled the detainee’s finger nails out because we knew that by so doing we would be able to locate and diffuse the bomb and save thousands of lives.” This is the spurious line of reasoning that gives the ticking time-bomb scenario its popular appeal.

The administration, however, has always wanted to be on both sides of the fence. It wants to assert that it applies a form of moral pragmatism that allows it to do whatever is necessary, yet it also wants to assert that it is morally absolute in prohibiting torture.

What it refuses to acknowledge is that there can be no meaningful definition of torture that allows for mitigating circumstances — a definition that would in effect claim that something which might otherwise be described as torture, ceases to be torture because a greater good is being served.

The decoy it came up with to obscure this contradiction, is the term, “shocks the conscience.” Skeptics would instantly question the use of such a notion since it is obvious that what might shock one person’s conscience might not shock another’s. Yet as a piece of political propaganda, the phrase is clearly intended to resonate well in the minds of those Americans who actually believe that this is a presidency that upholds moral principles. In other words, this is intended to reassure the faithful — not ward off the critics.

That said, if we deconstruct the language, we can quickly expose the lie.

The dictates of conscience are infinite, yet in every instance conscience reveals the directions of an internal moral compass. What would truly shock the conscience would do so, irrespective of the terms of a Justice Department legal opinion. What would shock the conscience would be any type of action that denied the humanity of the victim while diminishing the humanity of the perpetrator.

When we consider the various actors in the Bush-Cheney torture tragedy, it is significant that the advocates and enablers of this policy have by and large been people who display neither an interest nor ability to follow the dictates of their own moral compass — these are the servants of obedience and loyalty whose allegiance to presidential power is the very stuff upon which fascism thrives. In contrast, those who displayed real moral clarity knew that not even the president of the United States could be allowed to sway their conscience.

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FEATURE & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The Administration’s plan for Iran

Shifting targets

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Zbigniew Brzezinski says, “This time, unlike the attack in Iraq, we’re going to play the victim. The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to overplay their hand.” And more graphically, a retired American four-star general says, “It’s got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks.”

But time is on Iran’s side. All they have to do is patiently refuse to rise to every bait and then in just over a year the baiters will be out of office.

This is what makes the Israelis and the neocons nervous. They claim that the “point of no return” they fear comes when Iran acquires the capability to produce nuclear weapons, yet what appears to be a more immediate fear is of Cheney’s point of no return. This, more than anything else, is what makes 2008 a critical year.

And even though one would expect that the Pentagon would be chastened by the disaster in Iraq, Hersh reports increasing support for the new strategy for attacking Iran:

The revised bombing plan for a possible attack, with its tightened focus on counterterrorism, is gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon. The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply depots, and command and control facilities.

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”

A limited bombing attack of this sort “only makes sense if the intelligence is good,” the consultant said. If the targets are not clearly defined, the bombing “will start as limited, but then there will be an ‘escalation special.’ Planners will say that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria there. The goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the balls go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike planning.”

No doubt the allure of a surgical strike has been reinforced by the legendary success Israel just had in striking Syria with impunity. Yet are memories so short that everyone has forgotten the lessons from a year ago? Israel’s effort to bomb southern Lebanon “back to the stone ages” left tens of thousands of civilians homeless but it didn’t halt Katyusha rockets raining down on northern Israel.

Now Iran, apparently willing to gamble on harnessing America’s fear of al Qaeda, is reviving memories of the USS Cole. Hersh quotes a State Department adviser saying, “They are bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship—to signal the Americans that they can get close to them.” Hersh goes on to explain, “I was told by the former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.”

In all of this, what seems extraordinary is the administration’s resilient belief that simply by changing the narrative you can change the outcome. The US describes its attack on Iran as an act of retaliation, then Iran becomes all contrite, eats humble pie and says, “we learned our lesson”? I don’t think so.

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OPINION: Who will start the war on Iran?

Why Bush won’t attack Iran

During a recent high-powered Washington dinner party attended by 18 people, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft squared off across the table over whether President Bush will bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush’s team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush would hold fire and not make an already disastrous situation for the U.S. in the Middle East even worse.

The 18 people at the party, including former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, then voted with a show of hands for either Brzezinski’s or Scowcroft’s position. Scowcroft got only two votes, including his own. Everyone else at the table shared Brzezinski’s fear that a U.S. strike against Iran is around the corner. [complete article]

See also, Adm. Fallon Presses Case Against Iran (AP) and Rice swipes at IAEA, urges bold action on Iran (Reuters).

Editor’s Comment — Here’s the inside story from someone who knows more than the insiders. Steve Clemons always comes up with interesting stuff. He is of course far too modest to divulge whether he was one of the high-powered people at the dinner party he describes, but he was obviously there in spirit if not body, casting his vote with Scowcroft. By the end of the piece though, the insider’s insight — that Bush won’t initiate an attack on Iran — becomes what Clemons should concede: a moot point.

Clemons says that “a classic buildup to war with Iran, one in which the decision to bomb has already been made, is not something we should be worried about today.” He nevertheless concedes that we should be worried about an “accidental war” — one not preceded by a classic buildup. This sounds like a distinction that probably concerns high-powered dinner-party pundits more than anyone else.

What should concern us all is whether those who are trying to build up the momentum for war can effectively be disempowered. In that regard, the role of the press is crucial and just as happened in the buildup to the war in Iraq, with all too much frequency the press is letting us down by parroting unsubstantiated accusations and failing to challenge their precious political sources.

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NEWS: The coming war with Iran

Bush setting America up for war with Iran

Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Back on July 13, the New York Sun reported:

President Bush is set to instruct the Treasury Department to block assets associated with Iran’s revolutionary guard corps in a new executive order declaring financial war on foreign saboteurs of the Iraqi government.

The paperwork to designate Iran’s revolutionary guard corps, or IRGC, and Quds Force is now on the president’s desk awaiting his signature, according to three administration officials who requested anonymity. The designation of the IRGC and Quds Force would mark the first time the finance related executive order process, reserved usually for foreign terrorist organizations, would be used against a branch of a foreign military.

On August 15, a month later, the Washington Post reported:

The United States has decided to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a “specially designated global terrorist,” according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group’s business operations and finances.

Today, in an article that refers to the “intensifying the debate over the Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the New York Times reports:

While some White House officials and some members of the vice president’s staff have been pushing to blacklist the entire Revolutionary Guard, administration officials said, officials at the State and Treasury Departments have been pushing a narrower approach that would list only the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, or perhaps, only companies and organizations with financial ties to that group.

If either the Quds Force or the entire Revolutionary Guard fits the legal criteria for a “specially designated global terrorist,” why would President Bush have waited two months to sign the order? What the debate and the delay makes clear is that if and when this designation is made it will be done so for purely political reasons. Indeed, if the Iranians were guilty of everything about which they are being accused, the question would not be about when it becomes expedient to apply the force of the US Treasury Department; it would be how the United States is going to respond to acts of war.

We’ve been here before. Whenever this administration is bobbing and diving in the process of shaping its legal arguments, the political thrust is already evident. George Bush’s gut is telling him, it’s time to hit Iran. The legal, strategic, political, and purely rational arguments are being constructed after the fact.

And where in this is it possible to imagine that lessons learned from Iraq are being applied?

Inside Cheney’s brain, I imagine it runs something like this: Shock-and-awe works — it brought down Saddam; reconstruction doesn’t. So long as we don’t send in the army, the air force and the navy can take care of Iran.

And now that the British poodle is no longer available to provide Bush with some sycophantic “international support,” a French poodle has happily taken his place. The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner today said, “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.”

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