Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Cheney's Folly

The very “assertion” by former vice president Dick Cheney that “hundreds of thousands of lives” may have been saved by Bush policy following the attacks of 9/11 is at best, the regurgitated spin of a failed presidency--at worse, a delusionary psychosis which concludes that orchestrated evil, conceived out of ideological fear and abstract phantoms, would somehow make our nation safer.


To put this “assertion” into perspective let’s recall that “hundreds of thousands” is the abstract number oft quoted in reference to Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Lives saved. In fact, then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, has since stated that the fire-bombings orchestrated against the Japanese people would be grounds for war crimes had the US lost the war.


In the first of many seemingly self-indicting statements, Cheney states, “Nine-eleven caused everyone to take a serious second look at threats that had been gathering for a while, and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated. “


Is he freely admitting that threats and knowledge of a bold/sophisticated enemy had been gathering prior to nine-eleven? Just how long is a while? --Another abstraction for your conditioned pleasure.

“From that moment forward, instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count up the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place.”


No, dude, the “first place” would have been prior to the attacks. Yes?


“We didn’t know what was coming next, but everything we did know in that autumn of 2001 looked bad. This was the world in which al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear technology, and A. Q. Khan was selling nuclear technology on the black market. We had the anthrax attack from an unknown source. We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.”


It’s not coincidental that, Saddam Hussein: “with ties to Mideast terrorists,” comes last in this laundry list of threat/fear. It’s also not coincidental that none of these said “ties” are mentioned. This has been the spin from the start and it continues. This exemplifies why Cheney’s current blathering is more of the tired, worn, diarrhea of rhetoric that we’ve become so numb to during the Bush administration.


But let’s dig further:


“To make certain our nation country never again faced such a day of horror, we developed a comprehensive strategy, beginning with far greater homeland security to make the United States a harder target. But since wars cannot be won on the defensive, we moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks. We decided, as well, to confront the regimes that sponsored terrorists, and to go after those who provide sanctuary, funding, and weapons to enemies of the United States. We turned special attention to regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists."


Translated for coherency: We all but ignored the terrorist, letting OBL slip through our grip (although we had our chances) and planted our flag in the middle of Oilville, Iraq. But note that he’s now beginning the careful construct of linking the Iraq (WMD ((disproven)) theory) to the phantom terrorists. By now these guys were hanging out in every ice-cream parlor, barber shop, and Wal-Mart in the strip mall palace known as these United States.


But let’s get to the crux of the matter:


According to Cheney, the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people,” Intelligence reports, he claims, will show this to be true.

For those of us who hang to the delusion that there is a miniscule of fact in this statement, I urge you to do some brief digging into the fun & games orchestrated during the Abu Ghraib scandal, and reports from bipartisan human rights organizations such as Human Rights First. These accounts of abuse, torture and disregard for human life go beyond sickening and speak to the true nature and motives of this administration.

"The torture and death catalogued in excruciating detail by this important Human Rights First report did not happen spontaneously. They are the consequence of a shocking breakdown of command discipline on the part of the Army’s Officer Corps. It is very clear that cruel treatment of detainees became a common Army practice because generals and colonels and majors allowed it to occur, even encouraged it. What is unquestionably broken is the fundamental principle of command accountability, and that starts at the very top. The Army exists, not just to win America’s wars, but to defend America’s values. The policy and practice of torture without accountability has jeopardized both."

—David R. Irvine
Brig. Gen. (Ret.) USA

As exemplified by the quote from Gen. Irvine, another disturbing trend of this administration is to shift responsibility to lower channels, never truly owning the atrocities that happened under their command. Nearly as disturbing as the images leaked to the public was the blame cast on low ranking military members, who in these disturbing images, demonstrating advanced interrogation/torture techniques well beyond their rudimentary basic military training.


History has clattered out paragraph, page and chapter. No mount of back-spinning, partisan finger-pointing or diversionary rhetoric changes the score. The Bush Administration, transparent in the tentacles of history, will be tried and found guilty.