Home » Posts tagged 'dick cheney'

Tag Archives: dick cheney

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

For Hollywood, ‘Vice’ Remarkably Astute about Politics

January 11, 2019

For Hollywood, ‘Vice’ Remarkably Astute about Politics

Adam McKay’s movie may be flawed, but it’s still must-see for his depiction of how Cheney amassed power by exploiting Watergate, an inexperienced president and 9/11, writes James DiEugenio.

In 2015, director Adam McKay did something unusual in Hollywood.  He made a good film out of a good book.  In fact, one could argue that McKay’s movie “The Big Short” is even better than Michael Lewis’ book.  It is funnier, has a faster pace and is much more innovative stylistically.

McKay has now done something even more unusual for Hollywood.  He has made a good film about an unattractive and unlikeable character, former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Appropriately, the film is called “Vice.” I am going to say some critical things about “Vice.”  But let me start by recommending that everyone who reads this website see this film. It’s not often that Hollywood produces a film this honest, ambitious and intelligent about the contemporary American political scene.

Vice: Portrait of the abuse of power. (@vicemovie on Twitter)

Early in his life, Cheney flunked out of Yale and was tagged with two DUI’s.  His wife Lynne—who later became a prolific author—helped straighten him out  and put him on a path toward a political career.  From that point on, McKay, who also wrote the script, frames Cheney with the following epigraph, which is written across the screen at one point:

“Beware the quiet man.  For while others speak, he watched. And while others act, he plans.  And when they finally rest, he strikes.”

The warning applies to three key sections covered by the film.

Watergate Power Vacuum

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

VICE – The Dick Cheney/Rumsfeld Conspiracy

January 1, 2019

VICE – The Dick Cheney/Rumsfeld Conspiracy

I went to go watch VICE – the story about how Dick Cheney took over the government with the aid of his wife – Lynne Cheney. Vice is a film that seeks to bring complicated information about the inner corruption in Washington and transform it into a digestible and entertaining format. There is no question that Christian Bale delivered a very impressive performance of how Dick Cheney really is – a secretive and distant man whose eyes were always filled with naked contempt. Amy Adams gave a fantastic performance as well and captured the real character of the former Second Lady Lynne Cheney who was very much like her husband – ambitious, and equally just as ruthless.

While the film captures the reality of what took place, it completely misses the real story behind the scenes as to even how Cheney came to be Vice President. The film shows that he was out of politics and had effectively retired for some time. It pretends that George Bush called him to be his Vice President and they negotiate that Cheney will have most of the power and Bush was too stupid to understand what he was agreeing to.

As always, for whatever reason, I seem to be always in the middle of just about every major event for the past 30+ years. I have stated before that I was asked to fly around the country and meet with Republicans who wanted to run for President. Prior to 1999, they were told I was there to advise them on the world economy and how it functioned. I have been to White House dinners and testified before Congress. I have taken calls from Washington in times of crisis. So meeting with people who wanted to run for President was nothing unusual for me.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Washington’s Matrix Is Closing Down Truth Throughout the Western World

September 15, 2018

Washington’s Matrix Is Closing Down Truth Throughout the Western World

For a number of years I have emphasized that 9/11 was used by Dick Cheney to significantly reduce the public’s, the judiciary’s, and Congress’ access to information about what the executive branch is doing, thereby preventing legal, legislative, and electoral action against the unlawful and unconstitutional behavior of the executive branch during the Cheney/Bush and Obama regimes.

Recently I discovered on my bookshelves Charlie Savage’s extraordinary book, Takeover (2007), which describes how Cheney and his minions, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, and Shannen Coffin, used secret Department of Justice (sic) memos and executive orders from George W. Bush to prevent the release of any information that would get in the way of Cheney’s agenda for war in the Middle East and a police state at home. If Americans understood that an immigrant from Korea, John Yoo, wrote secret DOJ memos that shredded both the separation of powers and US civil liberties, there would be even more opposition to immigration of peoples who are not dedicated to our founding document, the US Constitution.

Ten years later David Ray Griffin’s 2017 book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, also documents how Dick Cheney fed the US Constitution into a shredder.

I intend to review these two books together so that you can see that there is nothing left of the United States as defined by the US Constitution. What has caused me to mention them now is The Saker’s interview with Michael Hoffman about Amazon’s use by the government as a proxy censor. In the name of private enterprise choosing what it wants to sell, the Amazon monopoly enables the government to censor without the government violating the First Amendment.

Read this: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50261.htm and you will see how non-enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act has enabled Washington to create private monopolies such as Amazon that do the dirty work for Washington that the First Amendment prevents.

How Wikipedia Lies

April 21, 2018

How Wikipedia Lies

Did you know that Vice President Dick Cheney admitted that on 11 September 2001 he, as President George W. Bush’s brief stand-in during the 9/11 attacks that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, issued an order (and it was carried out) to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 while it was in the air near Pittsburgh? If what he said at the time was true, then the standard ‘historical’ account of the plane’s having been brought down as a result of action by the passengers, would be concocted, not history at all.

Here is the video-clip of V.P. Cheney on 9/11, making this claim and explaining why he gave that order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vV3fjfeb9Q&list=PLOg2tzhKRd4j-yNHID9_Ru3MWe-VwwCxl&index=4

The Wikipedia article on Flight 93 provides the standard account, and fails even so much as just to mention the Vice President’a assertion and explanation that he provided on national TV at the time of the 9/11 events.

So: I edited the Wikipedia article by adding a sentence at the end of its opening paragraph, and by following that sentence with a brief second paragraph, and here is that entire two-sentence addition:

Vice President Dick Cheney alleged that he gave the order to shoot down Flight 93, and explained why when asked about it by Chris Wallace of Fox News as shown in this film-clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vV3fjfeb9Q&list=PLOg2tzhKRd4j-yNHID9_Ru3MWe-VwwCxl&index=4

Consequently, the account given below of what brought the plane down — an account inconsistent with what Cheney said — could be entirely false.

On the web browser that I was using, the addition showed as having been successfully made in the Wikipedia article. However, to be sure, I opened the URL in a different browser, and this time my addition was absent. I then went back to the “Edit” page” and this time to the “View history” page, and clicked there on “(talk)” and found this message, which I saw virtually immediately after I had thought that I had inserted the new information:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How ‘Operation Merlin’ Poisoned U.S. Intelligence on Iran

March 3, 2018

How ‘Operation Merlin’ Poisoned U.S. Intelligence on Iran

The CIA’s “Operation Merlin,” which involved providing Iran with a flawed design for a nuclear weapon and resulted in an alleged whistleblower going to prison, was the perfect example of creating intelligence in order to justify operations, reports Gareth Porter.

Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA’s covert “Operation Merlin,” who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation had harmed U.S. security.

The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert operation.

But the accumulate evidence shows that the intelligence not only did not support the need for Operation Merlin, but that the existence of the CIA’s planned covert operation itself had a profound distorting impact on intelligence assessment of the issue. The very first U.S. national intelligence estimate on the subject in 2001 that Iran had a nuclear weapons program was the result of a heavy-handed intervention by Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt that was arguably more serious than the efforts by Vice-President Dick Cheney to influence the CIA’s 2002 estimate on WMD in Iraq.

The full story the interaction between the CIA operation and intelligence analysis, shows, moreover, that Pavitt had previously fabricated an alarmist intelligence analysis for the Clinton White House on Iran’s nuclear program in late 1999 in order to get Clinton’s approval for Operation Merlin.

Pavitt Plans Operation Merlin

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Washington tacitly operating under a new monetary theory?

December 27, 2017

Is Washington tacitly operating under a new monetary theory?

In 2002 when soon-to-be-dismissed U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill warned then Vice President Dick Cheney that the Bush administration’s tax cuts would drive up deficits and threaten the health of the economy, Cheney famously answered: “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

In the wake of the recently approved federal tax cut,voices concerned about the damage that deficits will do are rising again.

What’s curious is that since Cheney’s rebuke of O’Neill, growing federal government deficits seem not of have mattered. In fact, the largest deficits ever boosted the economy after the 2008-09 recession, exceeding $1 trillion annually for four years.

All of this suggests that the federal government has for a long time been operating under an unspoken monetary theory, namely, that government spending does not need to be backed by revenues and that the debt issued to fill the gap between spending and revenues will have little effect now or in the future.

But isn’t there some level of federal debt which would cripple the federal government and the U.S. economy?  A common metric for measuring this debt is the ratio of federal debt to annual gross domestic product (GDP). When one looks at a graph of this, the growth in debt seems perilous, rising from a low of around 30 percent of GDP in the early 1980s to more than 100 percent of GDP today.

Seemingly more perilous is the rapid growth in Japanese government debt. That debt has soared from a low of around 40 percent of GDP in 1990 to almost 200 percent of GDP now. Yet, the oft-prophesied demise of Japanese government finance has not occurred.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the US Became a Warmonger Police State

September 22, 2017

How the US Became a Warmonger Police State

 

Professor David Ray Griffin is a tenacious person. He has written a number of carefully researched books that demonstrate the extraordinary shortcomings in the official account of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the subsequent anthrax attack. He has provided the mountains of evidence completely ignored by the US government’s account and the presstitute media.

In his recently published latest book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World , Professor Griffin demonstrates how 9/11 was used by the Zionist Neoconservatives, the Cheney/Bush regime, and the military/security complex with the complicity of Congress and the US media to create Islamophobia among the American public in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and provinces of Pakistan with Iran in the crosshairs. These wars are based on lies and fabricated “evidence,” on determination to control pipelines and oil flows, on maximizing profits for the military/security corporations in which Cheney has a personal interest, and on extending neoconservative hegemony over the world.

One consequence has been the destruction of US constitutional protections that protect liberty and violations of US and international law such as the laws against torture.

Another consequence has been millions of displaced refugees from Washington’s wars over-running the countries of Europe.

Indeed, Europe faces a “Camp of the Saints” situation, and the US now has a police state in which all citizens are subject to: indefinite detention (imprisonment) on suspicion alone without conviction or evidence presented to a court; assassination on suspicion alone without due process of law; and total violation of privacy, including body cavities, without presentation of a court warrant. American women are now subjected to having their vaginas examined by police in public on the roadside.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Q&A: ON THE UNTOUCHABLE ‘LORDS OF SECRECY’

January 10, 2015

Q&A: ON THE UNTOUCHABLE ‘LORDS OF SECRECY’

Powerful, unaccountable, and operating far in the shadows, the Lords of Secrecy, as author Scott Horton calls them, are real, and they are in charge of our national security state.

Horton, a lawyer, journalist and human rights advocate, makes the case in his book, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy, that because the public is allowed to know so little, it has effectively been cut out of national security decisionmaking.

I had a chance to ask Horton some questions earlier this week. Here is an edited transcript:

Who are the Lords of Secrecy? Name me three.

The Lords of Secrecy are the heads of the national security and intelligence agencies who exercise the power to create secrets.

But I think we have to designate, as the dark overlord of the Lords of Secrecy, Richard Bruce Cheney. I don’t think there’s anybody else who even comes close. The man who invented stamps with his own special security classifications. He is a cult figure for the Lords of Secrecy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

NYT Editorial Board Demands Criminal Prosecution Of Dick Cheney For CIA Torture Program

December 23, 2014

NYT Editorial Board Demands Criminal Prosecution Of Dick Cheney For CIA Torture Program.

The New York Times editorial board has called on President Barack Obama and the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, in a scathing editorial published Sunday.

The board demanded that the investigation look into involvement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as several other former Bush officials, with regards to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report detailing the CIA’s post-Sept. 11 torture program. The 500-page report, released in early December, examined the tactics inflicted upon terrorism suspects, whom interrogators waterboarded to the point of near drowning and rectally rehydrated.

“These are, simply, crimes,” the board wrote.

“No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report,” The Times continued. “Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.”

The board then asked the big, lingering question: As the U.S. seeks to regain “moral credibility,” who should be held responsible? While the editors themselves could not answer, the board named those they strongly feel should be investigated first, in addition to Cheney, including: Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; former CIA director George Tenet; and Office of Legal Counsel attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, among others.

More from The New York Times:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress