And just when you thought Mitt Romney was the only Republican presidential candidate who isn't batshit crazy

I guess he just looked sane when compared to Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Because what else other than batshittery explains this:

Mitt Romney yesterday praised former Vice President Dick Cheney, saying he would seek a running mate who shared many traits of longtime, and often controversial, political figure.

At a town hall meeting in a retirement community in Arizona, Romney was asked whether he would name a Tea Party person as his vice presidential nominee. He didn’t answer directly, instead saying that his “overwhelming critera” was that they be ready to become president.

“I think it was last weekend I was watching C-SPAN, and I saw Vice President Dick Cheney and he was being asked questions about a whole host of issues -- following 9/11, the affairs in various countries in the world,” Romney said, according to MSNBC . “And I listened to him speak and said whether you agree or disagree with him, this is a man of wisdom and judgment, and he could have been president of the United States.”

“That’s the kind of persona I’d like to have – a person of wisdom and judgment,” he added.

Posted without comment

In the interest of dialing it back a notch, I'll refrain from snarking:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he has not decided whether to seek a heart transplant for what he called his “end-stage heart failure” but said he will make that decision “at some point.”

[snip]

Regarding his heart, Mr. Cheney said that he might be able to live for years with the new device implanted in his chest.

“The technology’s gotten better and better and we’ve gotten more and more experience with people living with this technology,” he said. “So I’ll have to make a decision at some point whether or not I want to go for a transplant. But we haven’t addressed that yet.”

Have at it.

I'll kick in 50 bucks to put him IN prison. Who's with me?

So Halliburton gets a bunch of money from fat government contracts. Guess what it's doing with some of it:

Oilfield services company Halliburton is in negotiations with the Nigerian government to keep its former CEO, Dick Cheney, out of prison, according to a news report.

Sources inside Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission told GlobalPost this week that a settlement keeping the charges against Cheney out of court could cost as much as $500 million.

Nigeria filed charges against Cheney this week in an investigation of alleged bribery estimated at $180 million. Prosecutors named both Halliburton and KBR in the charges, as well as three European oil and engineering companies -- Technip SA, EniSpa, and Saipem Construction.

The charges allege that engineering contractor KBR, until 2007 a subsidiary of Halliburton, was among companies that paid bribes to secure a $6 billion contract for a natural gas plant. KBR pleaded guilty to the same bribes in a US court in 2009, and agreed to pay a $382 million fine. The Nigerian charges appear to stem from the US case -- though, in that trial, Cheney was never directly charged.

It's not clear from the GlobalPost report if the $500 million figure refers to the amount Halliburton will have to pay, or whether that amount would cover all the companies that have been charged.

Further complicating the issue is that the negotiations appear to be an out-of-court settlement, because Nigerian law doesn't recognize plea bargaining.

The idea that an out-of-court settlement could be used in a criminal case angered anti-corruption activist Adetokunbo Mumuni, who told GlobalPost, "There cannot be an out of court settlement. In a purely criminal matter like this, the full letters of the law should apply. Whoever is involved should be taken through the entire process to determine their guilt or not."

The legal vagueness surrounding the reported negotiations will likely fuel accusations that Halliburton and the other accused companies are attempting to bribe their way out of a bribery prosecution.

CNBC finance "guru" and wrongheaded asshole Jim Cramer calls Halliburton "a great American company."

NOW can we stop giving these criminals contracts?

Of all the government spending that teabaggers complain about, strangely missing is the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that goes into the coffers of Halliburton (and by extension, of Dick Cheney, who still receives about $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from his tenure there). Even when Halliburton receives industry contracts, it's because of taxpayer money squandered, as with its recently-announced contract to refurbish oil wells in Iraq for ExxonMobil-- wells that would not be available to them had George W. Bush and Dick Cneney not decided to invade Iraq. But Halliburton made plenty of money off of the BushCheney war adventure:


March 2003: Halliburton is awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires and make emergency repairs to Iraq's oil infrastructure.

May 2003: Halliburton's Iraq and Afghanistan contracts are valued at $600 million.

December 2003: An audit shows that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. government by as much as $64 million.

May 2004: Then still a subsidiary of Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root already has received $5 billion in LOGCAP (Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program) contract money. KBR has electrocuted American soldiers, given them tainted water to drink and spoiled food to eat.

February 2006: Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root is awarded a $385 million contract to build temporary immigration centers. You know, the ones that the teabaggers think Obama built to hold THEM.

June 2010: Halliburton is awarded a rebuilding contract for Haiti following the devastating earthquake. There is currently a cholera epidemic in Haiti -- six months after Halliburton's contract is awarded.

And it isn't just the U.S. government for whom Halliburton does shoddy work, for it was the company behind the cement used to attempt to seal the bottom of the Macondo Deepwater Horizon well. And the company knew damn well that the cement was unstable -- and used it anyway:

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

And we all know how THAT turned out.

We were right all along

Remember when we marched in the streets of New York City in early 2003, over a half-million of us that no one called a movement, chanting "No blood for oil!"? They said we were wrong. They said it was about a constantly-changing stream of excuses to go to war in Iraq. Rachel Maddow, whose microphone was cut off right in the middle of it, had a devastating commentary on the wreckage of America's reputation as a result of the Bush/Cheney lies. I'll post the video in the morning if it's up. But it turns out we were right all along. I posted earlier this week about how Halliburton and Shell oil had been given the rights to develop the Iraq oil field. And now the parade truly begins:

But as the troops move out, the oil companies are moving in. According to a July report from the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, oil production in Iraq is currently about 2.4 million barrels per day. The goal, by 2017 is to produce 12 million barrels per day. That’s quite a leap, especially since average production levels have held steady for more than two years. It’s going to a take a lot of investment to expand production by 10 million barrels per day.

How much? That’s anybody’s guess. For example, in January, ExxonMobil signed an agreement to redevelop and expand an oil field in southern Iraq. A company spokeswoman says that “total field capital expenditure will depend on full project scope,” which is currently being examined.

There’s a pile of oil money pouring into Iraq right now. Since last year, the Iraqi government has awarded 11 development deals to various consortia. BP and China National Petroleum Corp. are developing the enormous Rumaila field, which has a total proven reserves of about 18 billion barrels. Other companies winning awards include Royal Dutch Shell (working with ExxonMobil on one project and Malaysia’s Petronas on another), France’s Total SpA, Angola’s Sonangol, Italy’s Eni SpA, Russia’s Lukoil and China National Offshore Oil Corp. The signature bonuses to be paid by the consortia are anywhere from $100 million to $500 million.

More investment is on the way. Iraq’s oil ministry is planning to build four new refineries that will nearly double the country’s refining capacity. Oil services firms like Weatherford International and Schlumberger are expanding their operations in the country. Earlier this month Halliburton won a deal to drill 15 wells in the Basra province in southern Iraq, though the financial terms have not been disclosed.

If development goes as planned, rebuilding Iraq’s oil sector could be a highly profitable investment for these companies over the long-term. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq has the third largest proven oil reserves in the world (after Saudia Arabia and Canada). In 2008, oil exports accounted for nearly 90% of the country’s revenues.

Go take a look at "Faces of the Fallen" over at Washington Post. Go look at those faces of sons, brothers, lovers, husbands, fathers, wives, sisters, and friends whose blood was spilled because the Bush family not only regards the entire country as their own little fiefdom to be plundered for the benefit of themselves and their friends, they regard the entire WORLD as their own little fiefdom to be plundered for the benefit of themselves and their friends.

These young Americans died so that Dick Cheney can stuff more cash into his pocket in an attempt to fill the black hole that he has inside him where most of us have souls. These young Americans died so that George W. Bush could finally feel like a man. These young Americans died so that oil executives everywhere could buy a few more Maseratis, another mansion, more diamonds for their trophy wives.

We honor the service of these young Americans. We grieve their deaths, and we will carry the burden of our responsibility for them the rest of our lives. These young people trusted their country and they trusted their government. These young people loved their country. They believed in their country. And their country betrayed them. And no amount of revisionist history is ever, ever going to change that.

We should feel no joy tonight; no sense of relief that it's finally over. Because it will never be over. There are still 50,000 American soldiers in Iraq, and tens of thousands more in Afghanistan, trapped in an effort run by aging men who refuse to accept, even after the lessons of Vietnam, that some wars cannot be won and should not be fought. We do this over and over and over and over again. As long as there are small, mean little men who think that sending other people's children to fight somehow makes them bigger, as long as we give these mean little men the power to do so, we are going to be trapped right along with them.

Oh, and in case you want to know what the bottom line of it all is? Here you go.

Oh, and President Obama? Your party is still going to get its ass kicked in November anyway.

UPDATE: Rachel:

Rachel and Richard Engel:

Why am I not surprised....

...that Dick Cheney's fingerprints are all over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill:

An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history, drilling experts said Thursday.

The process is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor. Cement, pumped down the well from the drilling rig, is also used to plug wells after they have been abandoned or when drilling has finished but production hasn't begun.

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, workers had finished pumping cement to fill the space between the pipe and the sides of the hole and had begun temporarily plugging the well with cement; it isn't known whether they had completed the plugging process before the blast.

Regulators have previously identified problems in the cementing process as a leading cause of well blowouts, in which oil and natural gas surge out of a well with explosive force. When cement develops cracks or doesn't set properly, oil and gas can escape, ultimately flowing out of control. The gas is highly combustible and prone to ignite, as it appears to have done aboard the Deepwater Horizon, which was leased by BP PLC, the British oil giant.

Concerns about the cementing process—and about whether rigs have enough safeguards to prevent blowouts—raise questions about whether the industry can safely drill in deep water and whether regulators are up to the task of monitoring them.

The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface.

Federal officials declined to comment on their investigation, and Halliburton didn't respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal.

According to Transocean Ltd., the operator of the drilling rig, Halliburton had finished cementing the 18,000-foot well shortly before the explosion. Houston-based Halliburton is the largest company in the global cementing business, which accounted for $1.7 billion, or about 11%, of the company's revenue in 2009, according to consultant Spears & Associates.

And there's more:

The failed blowout valve? It was manufactured by Cameron International. One look at Cameron's board should tell you all you need to know. They're all Bush/Cheney contractor cronies, here and around the world.

The Bush Administration is the gift that keeps on giving, long after they've left the scene. And here, right on schedule, are the Usual Suspects.

Rachel Maddow eviscerates Dick Cheney

THIS is why Rachel is the best in an industry where far too many so-called "journalists" do nothing but fellate Republicans:

The Obama Administration is protecting a war criminal

When the history books write about the Obama Administration, Barack Obama's biggest shortcoming won't be his coziness with Wall Street, but his refusal to see justice done to the worst war criminal in the history of the United States: Richard Bruce Cheney.

Here's how confident Cheney is that he won't be prosecuted: Not only did he advocate waterboarding a suspect who was already talking, as I noted yesterday, but he came right out and said that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding", and also came right out and said that the orders for CIA operatives to torture detainees came right from himself and his ventriloquist's dummy from Texas:

The reason I've been outspoken is because there were some things being said, especially after we left office, about prosecuting CIA personnel that had carried out our counterterrorism policy or disbarring lawyers in the Justice Department who had -- had helped us put those policies together, and I was deeply offended by that, and I thought it was important that some senior person in the administration stand up and defend those people who'd done what we asked them to do.

So now you have the most recent vice-president of the United States admitting to a war crime, and NOTHING is going to be done about it by his successor.

And THAT is going to be the biggest failing of Barack Obama.

More here, here, and here,

Why we hate Chris Matthews - in a nutshell

Yesterday Chris Matthews pointed out to Ron Christie [insert your own sound clip of closet door closing here], the toadying former aide to Dick Cheney the FACT, the double standard that Cheney and the entire Republican Party REALITY of the Bush Administration's lack of response to both the threats before the 9/11 attacks and to Richard Reid, the December 2001 shoe bomber. Of course he had to, given Joan Walsh's ferocious presentation of facts. But Tweety didn't stop there; he went on to point out that everyone on the right (and that includes Joe Lieberman) is using the attempted bombing on Christmas Day as an excuse to beat the drums for an expanded war in the Middle East.

Watch:

What's hilarious about this exchange is the Republicans regard the Democrats as the "Pussy Party", a bunch of overwrought, overly-emotional girly-men, not the real manly-man chest-beaters like Dick Cheney. Except who is it that's running around like a chicken without a head because a depressed, angry, alienated 23-year-old decided to get laid by 72 virgins in heaven? And yet here is Cheney's ventriloquist's dummy, complaining that Barack Obama isn't emotional enough.

So why is this an example of Why I Hate Chris Matthews? Because it shows that TWEETY KNOWS BETTER, even more often than what we saw last night, he does crap like this:

The press loves the boogeyman story because it makes them feel like crusaders for freedom and allows them to make common cause with macho right wingers. It's far more exciting than dull stories about losers who don't have jobs --- you can see the exhilaration coming off of them in waves. They love it.

Case in point, Chris Matthews, who is ready to force everyone to be cavity searched in the ticket line:

Matthews: You know what when we get on an airplane, we give up all kinds of checks we don't do by just walking down the street. I think we give up a certain amount of rights just getting on an airplane and I think you've got to recognize that your safety is tied up with everyone else on that plane's safety and anybody else that gets hit on that plane. You don't own the right to be on that plane because you're getting on an airplane so you do have to yield some civil rights...And by the way, Cliff, you know it and I know it, they're going to get smarter and smarter and sooner or later they're going to get all kinds of people to do their dirty work for them. They're the enemy. They're going to use any means they can to get us. They're out to kill us. Let's be as smart as they are because they are already smart.

Run fer yer lives!

Apparently, Matthews thinks that there is some Koranic law that requires all attacks against America to take place on an airplane. If some terrorist with imagination succeeds in a mall or on a bridge will we have to submit to profiliong and screening there too? Sounds like it.(And if he thinks these would-be terrorists like Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab are super criminals, no wonder he's petrified.)

And that's why we hate Chris Matthews -- because he's not stupid. He's not even a craven political opportunist like Pete Hoekstra, trying to pull in campaign cash from a bunch of unemployed people in Michigan who can no longer afford to fly anywhere but who can't see a connection between the money squandered by the Bush Administration on pointless and badly-conducted wars and the fact that they have no health care. He's a media opportunist, and that may be worse.

(cross-posted at Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews.)

How can Republicans say they love America when they think it is a weakass wuss of a country?

For the last decade we've had to listen to Republicans call themselves patriots and us traitors because we believe in the Constitution and in the system of laws and justice that was built to found this country. Conservatives seem to have so little faith in the ability of the system that the Founding Fathers they so revere put together that they believe we have to resort to the worst human rights abuses of the worst tyrannical nations and groups in the world in order to survive.

It may very well be that it is not possible to survive without turning into a nation that tortures, that invades nations without provocation, that has to throw its values in the trash in order to live to see another day. I don't buy it for one minute, but people like Dick Cheney and Peter King and others who have been shitting their pants for the last nine years while the rest of us have gone about the business of living our lives do live it. I suppose they think that the millions of people who continue to live in New York within sight of Ground Zero, and the many more who commute to work there every day in skyscrapers are a bunch of wusses if they don't believe in torture and show trials and indefinite imprisonment without charges.

We're seeing just what kind of frightened, little men these people are by the vapors they're having about trying terrorism suspects in New York. First it was Dick Cheney calling the current President a traitor, now it's a group of Republican lawmakers demonstrating their utter lack of faith in the very nation they claim to love, respect, and revere:

Standing in front of the Supreme Court this morning, a group of Republican lawmakers railed against the court system run out of the building behind them. A sign affixed to the plexiglas podium each spoke at in turn spelled out the reason for their concern. "Protect our homeland," it read. "Keep terrorists out of America."

The justice system laid out in the Constitution, they said, is just too weak to protect American citizens from wiley terror suspects. From "activist judges" to courtroom sketch artists, the group reeled off a list of reasons the Obama administration decision to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. for trial could quite possibly end in, as Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) suggested, a nuclear attack on the United States.

[snip]

King suggested that "activist" judges could be inclined to release terror suspects over some liberal legal principle or another. "A judge can rationalize most anything," he said. "If you're a living, breathing -- how should I say it? -- 'evolving' constitutionalist than you can write anything you want to justify your own rationale."

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) was troubled by what might happen when waterboarding and the American right to a fair trial met in a U.S. courtroom. She worried what might happen if terror suspects argued they'd been given "cruel and unusual" punishment at Gitmo.

"This is what scares me because they're in a U.S. court now and the rights are different," she said. "What will they say [about their detention] and what could happen and could they be out among the people again? It's very frightening."

How frightening? Mushroom cloud frightening, according to Franks. He said that a federal trial would give the suspects "a megaphone to speak to the planet," which he said "only hastens the danger" of, literally, a nuclear terrorist attack.

When a reporter pointed out that federal trials aren't televised, perhaps making the "megaphone" a little less likely, Republicans said there were other ways for terror suspects to peddle their propoganda from a U.S. courtroom -- for example, sketch artists.

What I would ask these lawmakers is this: If the justice system which is such an integral part of what we know as a free nation is "too weak" to handle these trials, then what exactly is it about America that they are trying to defend? Is it the right of the military to plunder other nations for the benefit of giant multinational corporations? Is it the right of banks to profit off of government cash while gouging borrowers? Is it the right of Republican lawmakers to enrich themselves with corporate cash while ignoring the needs of the people they represent? If we are not a nation of laws, then what are we? A nation of chickenshit faux-tough guys like Dick Cheney, with his five military deferments because he had "more important things to do" than fight a war he believed in? A nation of greedy scumbags? If we are not about justice, then what ARE we?

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

God, will this overcompensating limpdick NEVER go away:

MCLEAN, Va. — On the eve of the unveiling of the nation’s new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side with the Taliban if they think the United States is heading for the exits.

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

After reading that I have to either perform a self-lobotomy with a chef's knife just to make it stop, or look at some major league cuteness.

I choose Teh Cute:

OK. I feel better now.

Before it's all over they'll have people believing that 9/11/01 occurred on Bill Clinton's watch

And perhaps they'll even have the teabaggers believing that George W. Bush was never president; that we morphed somehow right from Bill Clinton from Barack Obama. How that's going to fit together with the Golden Reign of Dick Cheney, I have no idea, but I'm sure they'll find a way.

In the wake of the WSJ editorial echoing the longing of the right to have Biggus Dickus run for President in 2012 (with its accompanying longing for a nice attack on this country in order to help the effort along), Olbermann poked the appropriate fun at the whole idea on Countdown last night:

(Fellow Morning Sedition fans will find themselves wondering if the "Jonathan Larsen" credited as the writer of the mock ad is the same Jonathan Larsen who used to produce the late and lamented morning radio show.)

Chris Kofinis may have been beside himself with laughter, but I'm not sure you can discount the idea. George Bush liked the trappings of power, but when the going got tough, he started wanting to just go home and hit the bottle again. But Cheney needs power; he needs the power to implement wars and commit enough mayhem so that enough people die to fill the black hole in himself which he needs to keep stocked at all times with fresh human souls. And with the Republican field right now seemingly limited to a boring and undistinguished governor of Minnesota, the Pillsbury Doughboy's evil twin, and two insane women, I wouldn't count Cheney out.

Cheney's "We kept this country safe after 9/11" meme is insulting to those of us with half a brain. There's no longer any hiding that Richard Clarke and others were trying to get the Bush Administration to take seriously the threat of another attack. We all know now about the Presidential Daily Briefing that made pretty clear that something was about to happen. We all know about the curious coincidences in the days before the attacks that have kept conspiracy theorists hopping ever since. There's no legitimate excuse Cheney can make for these attacks playing out the way they did. And yet there is such hunger on the right for a stern, authoritarian father figure that they are eager to have Cheney come out from the hole under the stairs even during the day just to rescue their country from Scary Negroes™ and others who don't think authoritarianism is synonymous with freedom.

I think it's premature for Olbermann and Kofinis to be laughing, though. Because if the economy does not improve; if health care reform turns out (as I fear it will) to be nothing but a mandate to buy crappy insurance from companies who won't pay claims and $4000 in tax increases for every family with family coverage through their jobs as they are taxed on the entire value of the premiums; if there are still no jobs and if foreclosures are rampant, Americans would vote for Satan himself. And in Cheney, they just might get their chance.

The pathetic, frightened little man that lives behind the Dick Cheney mask

It's long been fascinating to me how utter, pants-crapping, complete and total fear became somehow synonymous with toughness after the September 11 attacks. The more afraid you were, the more you bought a Hummer and duct tape and plastic sheeting, the more of a patriot and a tough guy you were. I'm still not sure how that equation works.

And no one was more of a frightened, craven, small man about Al Qaeda than Dick Cheney. Huddled for possibly years in his underground bunker where the boogeyman wouldn't get him at the same time as New Yorkers who fled that city on foot on that day returned to work BECAUSE THEY HAD TO; because they didn't have the luxury of fear, it's ironic and mysterious that this chickenshit asshole is still being touted by his daughter on national television as being The Guy To Defend America™.

When you look at all the faux-macho posturing of the Bush years from even the small amount of distance we have now, it's difficult to believe how a country could be so taken in my what would have been called hysteria if perpetrated by a woman instead of a dour man with a perpetual snarl who could shoot a friend in the face and then get the friend to apologize.

But now, as many of us suspected at the time, Dick Cheney was perfectly willing to send the military into the streets of America, knocking on suburban doors in search of terrorists:

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests.

The most benevolent explanation for this is that Cheney was so freaked out by the 9/11 attacks that he overreacted and his eight-year campaign to eliminate Americans' right to be left alone by their government was simply a misguided overreaction to the attacks. Given what we know about Cheney, and given that the guilty pleas of the so-called "Lackawanna Six" and others arrested on terrorism charges were apparently the only way to avoid being given "enemy combatant" status and that the talk of "wedding" and "big meal" by one of what the Bush Administration called a sleeper cell was actually about the wedding of one of them and a big meal, it's hard to imagine that this trial balloon of having tanks roll down the streets of America was just about arresting a few guys in upstate New York.

Point/Counterpoint: Dick Cheney vs Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Point: "There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source. So, it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves." - Dick Cheney to ABC, December 16, 2008.


Counterpoint: "I made up stories." - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, speaking for himself.

Summary: How pathetic and ironic is it when al Qaeda terrorists have to set the record straight about our own national security?

(Crossposted at Welcome Back to Pottersville)

Leon Panetta is right

Joe Biden may be diplomatic and say it's inappropriate to judge another man's motives, but it's hard to argue with Leon Panetta's belief that Dick Cheney wants another attack on this country:

CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration's approach to terrorism almost suggests "he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point."

Panetta told The New Yorker for an article in its June 22 issue that Cheney "smells some blood in the water" on the issue of national security.

Cheney has said in several interviews that he thinks Obama is making the U.S. less safe. He has been critical of Obama for ordering the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, halting enhanced interrogations of suspected terrorists and reversing other Bush administration initiatives he says helped to prevent attacks on the U.S.

Last month the former vice president offered a withering critique of Obama's policies and a defense of the Bush administration on the same day that Obama made a major speech about national security.

Panetta said of Cheney's remarks: "It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

The only area in which Panetta is mistaken is that there's no "almost" about it. Dick Cheney's power was always contingent on a frightened, traumatized population. As more information came out about how Cheney and his puppet frontman ignored screaming evidence that an attack was about to happen, thereby allowing almost 3000 people to die in the name of amassing political power, most Americans are sadder but wiser now. The idea of a former Vice President wanting this country to be attacked no longer seems as ridiculous as it did eight years ago. And with the PNAC neocons with whom Cheney is associated openly gleeful at the prospect of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prevailing in Iran, it's perfectly legitimate to ask ourselves with just whose side Dick Cheney is aligned.

Dick Cheney is the biggest piece of shit in the known universe

And that's a lot of shit of which to be the biggest, let me tell you. But what can you say about a Vice President who puts the blame for the 9/11 attacks on the head of counterterrorism who time and time again warned the Bush Administration that Al Qaeda was a real threat planning real attacks -- and was ignored? Well, if you're Jon Stewart, you can do something other than just scream into the ether:

This is no Freudian slip

The man is President of the United States. Everyone knows who Barack Obama is. There is just no excuse for this kind of juvenilia anymore:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney confused the president of the United States with the world's most-wanted terrorist in a speech on Monday.

Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney answered a question as to why his administration had not caught Osama bin Laden. But in a faux pas certain to end up on cable news networks and late-night talk shows, Cheney transposed bin Laden's name with that of the current president.

"I believe he's still out there someplace," Cheney said of bin Laden. "I'm sure the current administration will continue to search for him. He's an important figure, obviously. We would have loved to have captured on our watch. We didn't. I'm sure the Obama people feel the same way.

"The important thing is that I don't think he can have much impact in terms of managing an organization, because that link between Obama [sic] and the people under him is pretty fragile. I don't think he has the capacity to do as much harm as he did at one point, but we ought to still continue to chase him."

Asshole.

(h/t)

Richard Clarke smacks down Cheney, et. al.

Richard Clarke has had quite enough of Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and the rest of the Bush Administration's war criminals' claim that "they kept us safe after 9/11", thank you very much. He reminds us that when the warnings were there, these murderous criminals ignored them. I believe it was that they wanted an excuse to go into Iraq, but Clarke seems to learn more towards simple incompetence:

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Go read the whole thing. Clarke has tried mightily to be diplomatic in the years since the 9/11 Whitewash the Bush Administration Commission, but after Dick Cheney's reprehensible behavior of the last two weeks, he's finally decided to point out what many of us have known ever since that day in 2001: That when it counted, these people were AT BEST asleep at the switch. If you want to paint yourselves as competent, you don't claim credit for closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.

To the extent that we live in a more dangerous world today, it's BECAUSE of the mistakes of the Bush Administration. Frank Rich enumerates them today:

On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.

Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.

When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.

“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”

The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.

And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”

Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.

What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.

After all the lies, after all the botching of this nation's anticipation of terrorism, handling of terrorism, and policy in the Middle East, why on earth, other than craven attempts at getting ratings, is ANYONE even listening to anything Dick Cheney says? And why is anyone giving him any credit at all for knowing what he's talking about? The news media were in thrall to these people for eight years, and they're in thrall to them still. Perhaps they feel fear gets ratings. Perhaps they long for the kind of punitive Big Daddy that Cheney represents instead of the one who'll get on the swingset with you like Obama. Perhaps they think that global thermonuclear war will be a cool thing to cover. But you can get that if a Democrat had botched eight years in office the way the Cheneybush Administration did, David Gregory and the rest of the media whores wouldn't be fellating him on national television.

Obama World vs. Cheney World

Today Eugene Robinson demonstrates why he won the Pulitzer Prize:

Which reality do you inhabit, Obama World or Cheney World? If it's the latter, remember that storm clouds are always gathering. Don't forget your umbrella.

[snip]

In Obama World, choices are artifacts of reasoning and thus are only as valid as the logic underlying them. Security and freedom, for example, do not have to be seen as an either-or proposition. The nation never came to a fork in the road with one path labeled "torture" and the other labeled "disaster." In Cheney World, choices are binary and absolute. There's no wiggle room, no gray area, no time for second thoughts and no debate about how our options are framed. It's my way or the highway, citizen.

In Obama World, objective fact matters. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is significant. The absence of any link between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is relevant. In Cheney World, facts are based more on conviction than evidence. If it's possible to imagine "nuclear-armed terrorists," as Cheney did in his speech the other day, then they "exist" at least as a concept -- and this conceptual existence justifies torture, among other abuses.

Oh, there's more, and worth your time to read, because it points out the central paradox of Cheney world -- that in his dark vision of the universe, living in a state of constant, pants-crapping fear is macho and manly and shows how tough you are, and rational perspective is for pussies. When put that way, one wonders why the Cheney vision is so appealing to Republicans. Perhaps it's because they truly do constitute a Party of Psychopaths.

Ask those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks if "We kept America safe after 9/11" means anything to them

No, I don't think we should let up on Dick Cheney's claim that he "kept us safe after 9/11." Closing the barn door after the horse leaves, when you knew that door wasn't secure doesn't qualify you for a medal. An administration that came into power claiming that "the adults are now in charge" and then ignored (perhaps deliberately) warning after warning that something very big and very bad was about to happen has absolutely ZERO claim on "keeping us safe."

Now, former 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben Veniste, best known for asking Condoleeza Rice for reciting the title of the now infamous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing, has heard quite enough about how Dick Cheney's lunatic view of the universe "kept us safe" AFTER the Bush Adminitration's spectactular level of negligence:

In the interview with Bush, Ben-Veniste asked the president why he hadn't met with the FBI director after getting the PDB.

Bush replied that there were concerns predating his administration about politicizing the FBI and interfering in pending cases.

But "this was no pending case subject to claims of political interference," Ben-Veniste writes in his book.

The president said he couldn't recall whether he asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to get in touch with the FBI regarding the PDB, according to the book.

There was no immediate response from a spokesman for the former president to requests for comment.

Finally declassified by the Bush administration amid public and political pressure in April 2004, the PDB from Aug. 6, 2001 said, "The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden related." The PDB also said that the CIA and the FBI at the time were investigating a call to the U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates three months earlier saying that "a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives."

It's clear that Dick Cheney is now operating in accordance with his "One Percent Doctrine" -- that if there is a one percent chance that something is true, you proceed as if it were a foregone conclusion. In this case, given his daughter Liz' inadvertent revelation that her dad is crapping his pants at the thought that he might be prosecuted for his crimes, he probably feels that there is MORE than a one percent chance, even though so far the Obama Administration has been loath to even entertain the possibility. But as Cheney makes his Legacy Tour, and keeps repeating his safety claim, at what point do we actually start to look not at the post-9/11 record, when ANY administration would have stepped up to the plate, but at the time period between January 20 and September 10 2001, when warning after warning of an impending attack came in -- and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did nothing.

Nothing.

They. Did. Nothing.

The choice we have in our view of these criminals is simple: Were they simply stupid, utterly incompetent, or did they decide to let things play out so they could invade Iraq? Take your pick. Whichever you choose, it is completely inconsistent with Dick Cheney's public posture as Savior of America™.