Cheney Tortures the Truth
I have a good friend who gets after me for bringing up Bush/Cheney, and probably for good reason. It’s the new guy’s show and he and we need to get on with things. And big credit to Bush 43 for resolutely declining the opportunity to take shots at Obama despite the fact that Obama and crew are not nearly done taking shots at him. I believe that 43 will yet burnish his legacy, as so many have, by what he does and doesn’t say and do post-Presidency. But I digress.
Dick Cheney is another matter. I keep trying to ignore him but he’s in the news yet again today. In what must be a bitter pill, he now says that there is no connection between Iraq and 911, blaming George Tennant for that one . . .
But Hussein was “somebody who provided sanctuary and safe harbor and resources to terrorists. … [It] is, without question, a fact.”
Cheney restated his claim that “there was a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. It’s not something I made up. … We know for a fact that Saddam Hussein was a sponsor — a state sponsor — of terror. It’s not my judgment. That was the judgment of our [intelligence community] and State Department.”
Cheney identified former CIA Director George Tenet as the “prime source of information” on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Tenet “testified, if you go back and check the record, in the fall of [2002] before the Senate Intelligence Committee — in open session — that there was a relationship,” Cheney said.
Please note . . .
- He conflates al Qaeda with terrorism, as if all terrorism = al Qaeda
- Despite saying there is no link to 911, he says there is a link because, at least according to him, Iraq=terrorism=al Qaeda=911.
- He never offers a shred of evidence.
- All the evidence that has been made public says the link isn’t there.
Frank Rich points out in his latest editorial that the real crime here is that Dick Cheney bulldozed the media for the past 8 years, and he continues to do the same now that he’s out of office. He bends and tortures the truth and the mainstream media gives him the win over Obama by TKO. The problem is, he’s lying and he’s not being held to account.
Since 2002, the only folks who have consistently done any meaningful digging on Iraq are Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel in the McClatchy’s Washington Bureau (one of the few remaining and a testimony to why we need a vibrant free press). They have consistently gotten the story and gotten it right. So if you care, here’s a link to their analysis of Cheney’s rant on how Obama has made America safe for terrorists. Some of this you may decide to interpret as “reasonable people disagree.” But at least consider the possibility that there are a bunch of people with serious credentials and direct knowledge of the issues that Cheney is banging on about who say he is flat out wrong.
What I find particularly dispicable is that having blown 9/11, the intel was there they just didn’t want to listen to anything that the Clinton team had ever done or thought, having botched Afghanistan, butchered Iraq, and helped the bad guys recruit thousands more jihadis, he’s now going to play Casandra and do everything he can to shift the blame forward so that when something bad happens, and let’s be clear something will, he can shout I told you so.
This much I know
Dick Cheney will die. I just don’t know when, where, or how. But if I keep saying it, I’ll be right someday. But that doesn’t make me right to say it all the time.
Tags: DickCheney, al Qaeda, Warren Srobel, Jonathan Landay, Frank Rich, torture
0 comments
Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment