It's all Cheney's fault! For starters. [Archive]

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Yerdaddy

11-02-2006, 12:46 AM

Here's the introduction to a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/" target="_blank">Frontline piece</a> that looks like a good read. I'll be reading it over the next couple of days and then, no doubt, pissing and moaning about if for no damn good reason. Just thought I'd share.[quote]Amid revelations about faulty prewar intelligence and a scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and <a href="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/posttopic.cfm/themes/cheney.html">Richard Bruce Cheney,</a> the most powerful vice president in the nation's history. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government <a href="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/posttopic.cfm/themes/darkside.html">would have to operate on the "dark side."</a>In "The Dark Side," FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror, and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence <a href="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/posttopic.cfm/themes/tenet.html">George Tenet</a> for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war.Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies <a href="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/posttopic.cfm/etc/network.html">throughout the government</a> who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. But a potential obstacle was Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration who had survived the transition by bypassing Cheney and creating a personal bond with the president. After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. Cheney's primary ally in this effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "You have this wiring diagram that we all know of about national security, but now there's a new line on it. There's a line from the vice president directly to the secretary of defense, and it's as though there's a private line, private communication between those two," former National Security Council staffer <a href="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/posttopic.cfm/interviews/clarke.html">Richard Clarke</a> tells FRONTLINE. In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet. Through interviews with <a href="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/posttopic.cfm/interviews/maloof.html">DoD staffers</a> who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, FRONTLINE details how questionable intelligence was "stovepiped" to the vice president and presented to the public.From stories of Iraq buying yellowcake uranium from Niger to claims that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, "The Dark Side" dissects the now-familiar assertions that led the nation to war. The program also receounts the vice president's unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he questioned mid-level analysts on their conclusions. CIA officers who were there at the time say the message was clear: Cheney wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat. At the center of the administration's case for war was a classified <a href="http://www.ronfez.ne

cupcakelove

11-02-2006, 03:36 AM

Does this tell us anything we didn't already know?  What drives me nuts isn't that something like this happened, its that something like this happened, and the majority of people in this country don't care.

A.J.

11-02-2006, 03:46 AM

Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies <a href="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/posttopic.cfm/etc/network.html">throughout the government</a> who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design."<img src="http://mellody.co.za/michaela/palpatine/gallery/emperor11.jpg" border="0" />

Bulldogcakes

11-05-2006, 02:24 PM

<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612" target="_self" title="The Neo Cons turn on Bush">The Neo Cons turn on Bush</a> Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not
have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and
had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into
Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider
other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most,
which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' …
I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the
capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not
in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both
correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct
military intervention? Well, maybe we could have." Guys like Pearle were the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq, and now things are going bad they're stabbing Bush in the back. Big surprise. Just in case this pompous scumbag didn't make you sick a long time ago, now he will. From Ken Adelman, Neo Con Pentagon insider.   The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you
can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I
would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you
know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go."  Which is why REAL conservatives have always been more isolationist than internationalist. And why this administration is not, and never was, conservative.   <blockquote />  

This message was edited by Bulldogcakes on 11-5-06 @ 6:35 PM

Kevin

11-05-2006, 02:27 PM

Everyone knows Chaney is the real Satan behing the puppet strings. And btw, did anyone else enjoy those crackpot evangelical's get just mortified by their leader this past week?

This message was edited by Kevin on 11-5-06 @ 6:27 PM

Gvac

11-05-2006, 07:20 PM

Yerdaddy

11-06-2006, 02:58 AM

I've said before that some of these neoconservatives had their hearts in the right place - they believed in what Adelman describes neoconservatism as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world". I think they were unrealistic about the practical effects of aggressive unilateral military action in the world. They were a conservative version of liberal Utopians. But they weren't all like that. There were also the neocons, like Cheney, who saw the aggressive approach of neoconservative ideas as a way to impliment old-school ambitions of the Cold War era - ie. overthrowing governments and installing cooperative strongmen like the Shah in Iran, for the sake of American power. (Clearly that was the goal of Iraq. Creating democracy is absurd without security. American war plans never included enough troops to provide security and the Coalition Provision Authority was thrown together at the last minute because of changing circumstances. Thus, there were no plans for democracy until it was known that no WMD would be found.) I think it's possible that these neocons interviewed in the article were unaware of the actual intentions of the administration. It would have required a willful naivety, but it's possible. I imagine the fact that they were only involved in the administration for the first phases of the war is a sign that they weren't needed anymore because that's where the ideas of the two camps diverged. But the most important thing that this split between the neocons, and the criticism by these folks should point out is that there are two major issues involved in the Iraq war fiasco: 1. why we went there in the first place, and 2. what we did to fuck it up once we did. Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."Conservatives naturally like to use one to deflect from the other; accusing critics of only harping on #2 because they were against #1. This is the biggest danger to our country right now, in my opinion. If conservatives could just separate the two and were capable of any genuine self-criticism, then they could see that the Bush administration - for whatever reason - carried out this war in an incredibly incompetant fashion. That's what the facts bear out, but because of the blind faith of conservatives in America, it's being treated as if it never happened. Therefore, future leaders are going to look at similar options as attractive becuase they will see that they've got a free pass from democratic accountability. Hell, I think Bush is looking for a way to invade Iran with that same principle in mind. He's probably thinking, "if I don't make some of the same mistakes, I can be successful in Iran and people will forget about Iraq." And what has he got to lose? He's not running for re-election. His poll numbers only go down in off-election years. He won re-electon while he was in the process of losing the war. In his first mid-term elections he pulled off a miracle - gaining seats for his party in Congress, which only happened once or twice in the whole 20th century. And, if he loses only a slight majority in Congress tomorrow, it's still not even close to the kind of defeat that should come from the fact that you've more-or-less lost the war in Iraq at this point. Politically, Bush is doing great, and that encourages him and future presidents to try the same stupid shit that they did in Iraq. I don't

CuzBum

11-06-2006, 03:09 AM

Yerdaddy wrote: I've said before that some of these neoconservatives had their hearts in the right place - they believed in what Adelman describes neoconservatism as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world". I think they were unrealistic about the practical effects of aggressive unilateral military action in the world. They were a conservative version of liberal Utopians. But they weren't all like that. There were also the neocons, like Cheney, who saw the aggressive approach of neoconservative ideas as a way to impliment old-school ambitions of the Cold War era - ie. overthrowing governments and installing cooperative strongmen like the Shah in Iran, for the sake of American power. (Clearly that was the goal of Iraq. Creating democracy is absurd without security. American war plans never included enough troops to provide security and the Coalition Provision Authority was thrown together at the last minute because of changing circumstances. Thus, there were no plans for democracy until it was known that no WMD would be found.) I think it's possible that these neocons interviewed in the article were unaware of the actual intentions of the administration. It would have required a willful naivety, but it's possible. I imagine the fact that they were only involved in the administration for the first phases of the war is a sign that they weren't needed anymore because that's where the ideas of the two camps diverged. But the most important thing that this split between the neocons, and the criticism by these folks should point out is that there are two major issues involved in the Iraq war fiasco: 1. why we went there in the first place, and 2. what we did to fuck it up once we did.  [quote]Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."  Conservatives naturally like to use one to deflect from the other; accusing critics of only harping on #2 because they were against #1. This is the biggest danger to our country right now, in my opinion. If conservatives could just separate the two and were capable of any genuine self-criticism, then they could see that the Bush administration - for whatever reason - carried out this war in an incredibly incompetant fashion. That's what the facts bear out, but because of the blind faith of conservatives in America, it's being treated as if it never happened. Therefore, future leaders are going to look at similar options as attractive becuase they will see that they've got a free pass from democratic accountability. Hell, I think Bush is looking for a way to invade Iran with that same principle in mind. He's probably thinking, "if I don't make some of the same mistakes, I can be successful in Iran and people will forget about Iraq." And what has he got to lose? He's not running for re-election. His poll numbers only go down in off-election years. He won re-electon while he was in the process of losing the war. In his first mid-term elections he pulled off a miracle - gaining seats for his party in Congress, which only happened once or twice in the whole 20th century. And, if he loses only a slight majority in Congress tomorrow, it's still not even close to the kind of defeat that should come from the fact that you've more-or-less lost the war in Iraq at this point. Politically, Bush is doing great, and that enco

CuzBum

11-06-2006, 03:17 AM

Does anyone know how many soldiers and Marines we actually have in reserve to send to Iraq to try and clean up the mess?

A.J.

11-06-2006, 04:06 AM

Gvac wrote: <img src="http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20061104/capt.87ef6dd1880c42899b5da73837ee50df.marijuana_ad s_co_wxs102.jpg?x=380&y=255&sig=4J5eYSBPFOmQAt308M4vOg--" border="0" /> Apparently, he will be spending Election Day on a hunting trip.

Gvac

11-06-2006, 03:29 PM

By the way, that's an actual political advertisement from a group in Colorado that's seeking to legalize marijuana.

FUNKMAN

11-06-2006, 03:44 PM

he's no Lon Chaney    <img src="http://www.ronfez.net/messageboard/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/images/smile.gif" border="0" /><img height="490" src="http://swilley7.150m.com/lchaney.jpg" width="607" border="0" />

epo

11-06-2006, 05:31 PM

I like how law & order Dick Cheney talks about the fact that he would ignore Congress if the subpoena were made:<a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/category/dick-cheney/">http://www.crooksandliars.com/category/dick-cheney/</a>