Cheney's Secret

Mother Jones thinks that former V.P. Dick Cheney is having the last laugh regarding the U.S. energy policy that was molded and formed in secrecy during the Bush-Cheney era. "The Deepwater Horizon disaster raises new questions about the Bush administration's secret energy task force."

Dick Cheney hasn't made much time for television appearances lately. But in the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon unleashed a torrent of oil on the Gulf of Mexico, his name has been creeping back into the press. "The truth is that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney administration wanted: full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies that are supposed to be overseeing the industry," liberal commentator Arianna Huffington said on ABC's This Week last Sunday. Cheney's daughter, Liz, was on hand to defend her father. "Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on," she shot back. "What you are saying has no relationship to the truth, no relationship to the facts."

The reality is a lot more complicated than that. Many of the policy and regulatory failures that laid the groundwork for the BP catastrophe can be traced back to the Bush-Cheney era. But so far, this question has received relatively little attention—mostly because the task force that developed the former administration's energy policy operated in extreme secrecy. Did the task force's decisions play a role in the BP spill? And could the Gulf disaster finally provoke new scrutiny of the task force's clandestine workings?

Cheney's secret energy task force.

The energy task force was created days after onetime oilman George W. Bush took office in 2001, and was headed by Cheney, a former CEO at Halliburton, one of the world's largest providers of oilfield products and services. For months, the task force solicited input on US energy policy. On May 16, 2001, the group issued its final report, which was submitted to Congress in June. But the participants and details of the discussions were kept tightly under wraps.

The open-government group Judicial Watch tried to pry details of the task force's deliberations from the administration in June, arguing that the sessions qualified as public information under the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the open-meetings law. The US General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, also sought information on which industry executives and lobbyists had attended the gatherings.

But in the first of many clashes over presidential secrecy, the White House rejected those requests, arguing that it was entitled to conduct the meetings behind closed doors thanks to executive privilege. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club sued, but the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the administration. Though some information has trickled out in the years since, the vast majority of the task force's deliberations remain hidden from the public eye.

The task force position of deregulation of offshore drilling.

Here's what we know about the task force and offshore drilling. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, was able to obtain 13,500 pages of heavily redacted documents that gave a glimpse into the role industry leaders played in shaping the administration's policies (NRDC also got a list of the documents (PDF) that the administration refused to turn over). In July 2007, the Washington Post got a list of the roughly 300 groups and individuals who met with task force staffers and, in some cases, Cheney himself.

BP officials were among those who "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the administration, though when that fact came to light, the company refused to comment on those meetings. We still don't know what specific policy areas BP execs weighed in on. Perhaps it's little surprise that BP recently hired Cheney's former press secretary, a public defender of the secret task force, to help the company with crisis communication after the spill.

But we do have a few more details about other oil industry players in the talks. Chevron's CEO contributed a detailed list(PDF) of ways in which the government could "eliminate federal barriers to increased energy supplies"—many of which were incorporated in the task force's final report. This included recommendations to ease federal permitting rules for energy development and a request that the administration support opening up new areas of the eastern Gulf of Mexico for offshore oil and gas development. Doing so, wrote Chevron CEO David O'Reilly, would "demonstrate a commitment to reject unjustified opposition to new energy leasing and development."

The American Petroleum Institute offered its own long list of suggestions for energy policy. A March 20, 2001, email from API to an official at the Energy Department included a draft executive order calling for all federal agencies to issue a detailed statement on any regulatory action that "adversely affects energy supply, distribution or use." It was nearly identical to the order Bush issued just two months later.

The connection between the task force and the Energy Policy and its effect.

Many of the recommendations from the task force report were adopted in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. That legislation provided $6 billion in subsidies for oil and gas development. Royalty payments for oil and gas development were waived in several regions of the US. Some companies were allowed to pay royalties with oil, rather than money—a less transparent system that was more vulnerable to abuse. The bill also provided $1.5 billion in direct payments to companies to incentivize drilling in deepwater wells, and curtailed the power of states to oversee oil and gas exploration off their coasts under the Coastal Zone Management Act.

In addition, the bill weakened environmental protections for offshore drilling, making it easier to exclude a broad range of exploration and drilling activities from analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. This has been cited as the reason that the Deepwater Horizon site was not subjected to a thorough environmental analysis.

The task force's final report also presented a rosy picture of the offshore drilling industry. Newer oil and gas drilling methods, it said, "practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms" and "enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources." The report advocated lifting the moratorium on portions of the outer continental shelf, noting that "concerns over the potential impacts of oil spills have been a major factor behind imposition of the OCS moratoria." Bush lifted the executive moratorium in 2008, and the Democratic-controlled Congress allowed its own moratorium to expire.

Unanswered questions.

But there's a lot we still don't know. The task force recommendations included scaling back regulations and oversight of offshore drilling while expanding incentive programs and access to resources, many of which would come to pass in future legislation. But how much the task force may have guided decisions at federal agencies—in particular the notoriously lax Minerals Management Service (MMS)—is unclear. The administration's directives across the agencies actively discouraged any regulations or oversight that might hinder development of resources.

Among the many questions is what role the task force may have played in a 2003 decision by the MMS not to require offshore rigs to install an acoustic shut-off switch, a remote-controlled backup system that seals off an underwater well even if the rig above is destroyed. Countries like Norway and Brazil require this precaution, and MMS considered doing the same. But oil companies complained that the $500,000 devices were too expensive and, they argued, ineffective. Ultimately, MMS made the switches optional. The Deepwater Horizon was not outfitted with such a device, which could have prevented the spill. Other concerns include a failure to implement new cementing policies or act on known concerns about key components on drilling rigs.

Investigations without subpoena power.

The Department of Justice has launched criminal and civil investigations into the disaster, while a presidential commission is looking into both the spill and offshore drilling policy in general. That commission currently lacks subpoena power, though there's an effort underway in Congress to grant the commission that power. Numerous congressional committees have also launched probes of the spill. A congressional aide working for one of those committees indicated that there has been some discussion of revisiting the task force in those investigations, though no concrete steps to do so have been taken.

Open government advocates say this might be the appropriate time to push for more information about his task force. Mandy Smithberger, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, says that it's "definitely a ripe time" to find out more about what went on in the meetings. "I don't think you can understand how we got to where we are without looking back," she says.

"When you have a disaster of this magnitude, it raises the question, if in this whole secretive process, what was discussed, how much did the Bush administration ignore, how much did they allow the oil and gas industry to basically do what they wanted," says AnneWeismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. "Secrecy is so pernicious that it can continue to damage even when the administration is not in power."

Secrecy, deregulation, oil subsidies and a lack of accountability are just a few of the problems that have stemmed from the Bush-Cheney era energy policy. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now spreading and effecting the ecosystems across vast areas. So to has the energy policies of the previous administration infiltrated and caused loopholes and unbridled greed in the power play of oil and money.

The Vampires of Oil

Newsweek asks, "Why Is Dick Cheney Silent on the Oil Spill?" The former vice president is usually a vociferous defender of his time in government. But not on the disaster in the gulf.

When the Obama administration, or the media, or just about anybody contradicts Dick Cheney's views on national security, he is far from shy about responding. But facing a firestorm of criticism over the oil spill, he's been notably silent.

More than national security, energy policy and the oil industry might be considered Cheney's real areas of expertise. He was chairman and CEO of oil-services company Halliburton between 1995 and 2000. And, of course, he worked prominently on energy policy as vice president from 2000 to 2008.

Halliburton was working on the Deepwater Horizon rig just before it blew up, opening the well and sending oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Some experts have speculated that the company may have been to blame for the explosion. The pro-oil atmosphere (and Cheney's continued links to Halliburton) during his vice presidency, have also come to the fore since the April 20 accident.

The criticisms center on a possible conflicts of interest and cronyism. Cheney received a $34 million payout when he left Halliburton to join George W. Bush's ticket in September 2000. But the Congressional Research Service found that he "retained ties" to the company into 2003, while in government, through "unexercised stock options and deferred salary."

In 2001 Cheney headed a team tasked with developing national energy policy. The Washington Post reported that many of those consulted were from big oil and gas companies, some also donors to the Bush campaign and the Republican Party. The task force's executive director, Andrew D. Lundquist, subsequently became a lobbyist representing companies who appeared before him—including, according to the Post, BP, Duke Energy, and the American Petroleum Institute. Critics accused the administration of cronyism, and argued that the National Energy Policy Report, issued by the White House in May 2001, was unfairly lax toward the "dirty energy" companies at the expense of renewable and sustainable alternatives.

In 2005 President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act, which retained the focus of Cheney's report, into law. It included what has become known as "the Halliburton loophole," which removed authority from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate a potentially dangerous gas-drilling process invented by Halliburton.

These links, the fact that Cheney's former campaign press secretary Ann Womack-Colton has recently become BP's head of U.S. media relations, and the general pro-oil, anti-regulation atmosphere in the Bush years have not escaped the attention of the pundits. MSNBC's Chris Matthews highlighted the Halliburton-Cheney connection in an interview with Jay Leno on the BP spill. Frank Rich, in The New York Times, pointed out that the Interior Department degenerated into a "cesspool of corruption," under Bush and Cheney, and that the pair bequeathed Obama "a Minerals Management Service as broken as the Bush-Cheney FEMA exposed by Katrina."

His ears ringing with the cries of "Cheney's Katrina," a title many are striving to bestow on the gulf oil spill, one might expect the former VP to convene journalists for a speech, like he did in May last year at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute to talk about national security. That lengthy rebuttal was timed specially to coincide with a speech President Obama gave on the same topic—a ploy calculated to get the maximum press attention. The closest we have this time is Liz Cheney, Dick's daughter, arguing with Arianna Huffington on ABC's This Week.

We wondered why. Are the claims too substantial to refute? Is Cheney so incensed that he cannot trust himself to speak? Or, conversely, is he perhaps so sanguine about the entire issue that he doesn't feel it merits comment? We reached out to Cheney, via the American Enterprise Institute, to ask. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no response by the time we posted this.

Do not expect Dick Cheney to comment on the oil spill. Given Cheney's history, he will not rise to the occasion but will sulk and hide in the crevices he calls home. However, it is time for accountability from BP and Halliburton.

Another Republican Double Standard

It's politics. The Democrats and the Republicans both do it. It's politics!

Bill Clinton, on behalf of the White House Chief of Staff, offered Joe Sestak an unpaid position. According to a memorandum from the White House Counsel, President Clinton raised with Congressman Sestak "options of service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board. Congressman Sestak declined the suggested alternatives, remaining committed to his Senate candidacy." The memorandum claims there was no impropriety.

We found that, as the Congressman has publicly and accurately stated, options for Executive Branch service were raised with him. Efforts were made in June and July of 2009 to determine whether Congressman Sestak would be interested in service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board, which would avoid a divisive Senate primary, allow him to retain his seat in the House, and provide him with an opportunity for additional service to the public in a high-level advisory capacity for which he was highly qualified. The advisory positions discussed with Congressman Sestak, while important to the work of the Administration, would have been uncompensated.

It has been suggested that discussions of alternatives to the Senate campaign were improperly raised with the Congressman. There was no such impropriety. The Democratic Party leadership had a legitimate interest in averting a divisive primary fight and a similarly legitimate concern about the Congressman vacating his seat in the House. By virtue of his career in public service, including distinguished military service, Congressman Sestak was viewed to be highly qualified to hold a range of advisory positions in which he could, while holding his House seat, have additional responsibilities of considerable potential interest to him and value to the Executive Branch.

The Republicans and right wing pundits have jumped on this event to suggest several scenarios. They have claimed that President Obama hasn't fulfilled his promise of "transparency" and this just reflects a "politics as usual" administration. There are allegations that this "could be President Barack Obama's Watergate scandal." Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), even went so far as to say that, “This is punishable by prison. It is a felony, and this is exactly what President Obama campaigned against."

Watch a Fox discussion about the legality behind the Sestak offer.

Bill Crystal claims that this is "not politics as usual." As usual, Bill Crystal is wrong!

The Obama Administration White House Counsel notes that this happens all the time.

There have been numerous, reported instances in the past when prior Administrations — both Democratic and Republican, and motivated by the same goals — discussed alternative paths to service for qualified individuals also considering campaigns for public office. Such discussions are fully consistent with the relevant law and ethical requirements.

There have been several times when Republican administrations have asked candidates to drop out of a race. President Ronald Reagan, Vice President Dick Cheney and even Karl Rove have pursued this course of action.

In 1981, AP had the following story. President Ronald Reagan offered a job to Senator Hayakawa in order to "clear the field" for his daughter, Maureen to seek the Republican nomination for Senate.

Sen. S.I. Hayakawa on Wednesday spurned a Reagan administration suggestion that if he drops out of the crowded Republican Senate primary race in California, President Reagan would find him a job."

Hayakawa, who was seeking a second term at the time, was being urged by GOP officials to withdraw from the 1982 primary, a race that included, among others, Reps. Barry Goldwater Jr. & Bob Dornan, San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson, and First Daughter Maureen Reagan. The last thing the White House wanted was a split-conservative field that would end in the nomination of Rep. Pete McCloskey, a longtime anathema to the Right.

Hayakawa ultimately decided not to run for re-election. Wilson won the primary and was elected in November.arl Rove

In an April 19, 2001 Minneapolis Star Tribune article. Both Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove urged Minnesota House Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty not to challenge St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman for the 2002 Republican nomination for U.S. Senate seat .

Minnesota House Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty said Wednesday that he won't run for the U.S. Senate in 2002, but only because Vice President Dick Cheney called him on his cell phone earlier in the morning and urged him not to challenge St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman for the Republican nomination.

Pawlenty's dramatic last-minute decision is the latest development in an extraordinary intervention by the White House and President Bush on behalf of Coleman, who was chairman of the Bush presidential campaign in the state.

The White House's intense interest in the race is a reflection of the 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate.

It may also signal a keen interest by Bush for Republicans to win the seat held by Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., who has been among the president's most severe critics.

On Tuesday night, White House political strategist Karl Rove called Pawlenty and urged him not to run. Pawlenty said he was still intending to begin an exploratory candidacy after the Rove call.

But the request from Cheney, which came as Pawlenty was returning from a dentist's office with his daughters, was impossible to resist.

"On behalf of the president and the vice president of the United States, [Cheney] asked that I not go forward. . . . For the good of the party, for the good of the effort [against Wellstone] I agreed not to pursue an exploratory campaign," Pawlenty said at a news conference.

At the White House, a spokesman for Bush confirmed that Cheney made the call, but he declined to elaborate.

Not only does Bill Crystal have a selective memory but so does Liz Cheney and Karl Rove.

Is Karl Rove guilty of 18 U.S.C. 595? Rove et al. are at least guilty of a Republican double standard.

Liz Cheney, The Defender of Lies

Lawrence O'Donnell tears into Liz Cheney for her remarks criticizing President Obama for his visit to Dover AFB. Liz Cheney lies again. Chip off the old block.

Via Crooks and Liars:

O'DONNELL: When President Obama honored our Afghanistan war dead by taking part in a military ritual at Dover Air Force Base yesterday, it was easily predictable that a Republican would criticize him for it. And in our fourth story on the Countdown, the former Vice President's pet attack dog, his daughter Liz Cheney, has now done just that. And once again, she wasn't going to let the facts get in the way.

On the John Gibson radio show yesterday, Ms. Cheney was rehashing her father's fact-free critique of President Obama's war in Afghanistan, and then Mr. Gibson asked her about the President's appearance at Dover Air Force Base.

LIZ CHENEY (RADIO AUDIO): I don't know why he went to Dover. I mean, I think that clearly it is very important for a commander-in-chief, whenever he can in whatever way it possible, to pay tribute to our fallen soldiers, our fallen military folks. But, I think, you know, what President Bush used to do was to it without the cameras, and I don't understand sort of showing up with the White House Press Pool with photographers and asking the family if you can take pictures. I just... that's really hard for me to get my head around—I think it's an honorable and important thing for us to pay tribute. There's no greater sacrifice people make to the nation. But, it was a surprising way for the President to choose to do it.

O'DONNELL: As we mentioned yesterday, President Bush never went to Dover Air Force Base to honor dead American soldiers on their final journey. And Vice President Cheney... never did either.

Hey Liz, have you ever lost a relative in battle? I have. My cousin Johnny, West Point graduate like his father before him. I wish the President or the Vice President had met his casket on the way home.

You know what 'never' means, Liz? It means zero. It means that in over seven years of two wars, your dad never left the comfort of his White House office or the Vice President's mansion and got himself up to Dover to bear witness to how his warmongering fell on families of dead American soldiers. Never, not once.

Liz, don't let your dad do this to you. Don't let him parade you onto the stage to defend the indefensible. Let him suffer the full weight of the shame that we know he must feel when he watches Barack Obama do what he never had the decency to do.

President Bush did meet with grieving military families in private, and he went to military hospitals to visit the wounded. As for Ms. Cheney's reference to cameras, the policy of banning media coverage of coffins continued unaltered throughout the Bush administration. Thus, even families that wanted media coverage of their loved one's ceremony were not given any choice in the matter.

Furthermore, President Obama did not make any special requests to any of yesterday's eighteen families as Ms. Cheney implies, I mean lies. The vast majority of those families had already made their individual decisions about media coverage under the current policy before the notification that President Obama would be part of the ceremony.

As for Dick Cheney, when he was Vice President, he sometimes met with the war wounded, but like President Bush, he never went to Dover, either. Never.

And a reminder, Mr. Cheney successfully sought out five deferments from the draft to avoid having to serve his country in the Vietnam War. Mr. Cheney's fifth and final deferment a result of his wife's becoming pregnant with Liz. Mr. Cheney was granted a 3A status, the hardship exemption by his draft board, which was available to men with children at that time.

VP Cheney's Fuzzy Math

Via Washington Monthly

"What Vice President Cheney calls 'dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and the American public,'" Gibbs said. "I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously."

That's a pretty good response, actually.

Now, if you watch the whole clip, you'll notice that Gibbs repeatedly references a request for additional troops and resources for the conflict in Afghanistan from Gen. David McKiernan in early 2008 -- a request that Gibbs argues Bush/Cheney put off for the next administration to deal with.

Rebuking Cheney's Torture Propoganda

Jeremy Scahill rebukes Dick Cheney's torture propaganda in seven points.

First of all, Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised it to criticize the Bush administration’s lie-filled, one-way propaganda train to the Iraq war).

Second, CIA interrogators themselves have said that they believed that Cheney’s torture policy put individual CIA personnel in legal jeopardy.

Third, Dick Cheney showed utter contempt for the CIA when he went not once, not twice, but more than a dozen times to Langley to pressure analysts to fit intelligence to his political agenda. He and his top aide Scooter Libby were “attempting to pressure analysts on the subject of weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former counterterrorism chief at the CIA. So when Cheney talks about being “offended as hell,” let’s remember how much faith Cheney had in the CIA in the lead up to the Iraq invasion.

Fourth, the tactics Cheney apparently loves were a violation of US law, international law and conventions that the US has ratified—including the Convention Against Torture ratified under the militant leftist regime of Ronald Reagan.

Fifth, there is no evidence—none—to suggest any of this torture produced any actionable intelligence. “I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney told Sean Hannity back in April on Fox News. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Well, those documents were released last week.

One of the few people that had actually seen the documents to which Cheney was referring before they were released and had the courage to speak up was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. In May, he said: “I am a member of the Intelligence Committee, and I can tell you that nothing I have seen, including the two documents to which [Cheney] has repeatedly referred, indicates that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary or that they were the best way to get information out of detainees.” Now that the public has had access to these documents, it is clear, as Feingold said months ago, that Cheney was “misleading the American people.”

Sixth, at the end of the day, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the debate about whether torture actually worked is not the central point here:

The debate over whether torture extracted valuable information is, in my view, a total sideshow, both because (a) it inherently begs the question of whether legal interrogation means would have extracted the same information as efficiently if not more so (exactly the same way that claims that warrantless eavesdropping uncovered valuable intelligence begs the question of whether legal eavesdropping would have done so); and (b) torture is a felony and a war crime, and we don’t actually have a country (at least we’re not supposed to) where political leaders are free to commit serious crimes and then claim afterwards that it produced good outcomes.

If we want to be a country that uses torture, then we should repeal our laws which criminalize it, withdraw from treaties which ban it, and announce to the world (not that they don’t already know) that, as a country, we believe torture is justifiable and just. Let’s at least be honest about what we are. Let’s explicitly repudiate Ronald Reagan’s affirmation that ”[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever … may be invoked as a justification of torture” and that “[e]ach State Party is required [] to prosecute torturers.”

Seventh, one last point about Dick Cheney and his little toadie Chris Wallace when they talk about how there hasn’t been another attack since 9-11. Remember toadie’s sarcastic words: “I just want to point out to the audience that it is purely coincidental that this country has not been attacked since 9/11.” How about the more than 4,300 US troops that have been killed in Iraq as a result of the Bush-Cheney lie factory? That is more American dead than perished on 9/11. Those young men and women would not have died in Iraq had it not been for the policies of Bush and Cheney.

Another Cheney Moment

Be thankful that he is no longer the V.P.

Report: Cheney wanted to illegally deploy American troops in U.S. cities.

The New York Times reports that in 2002, Vice President Cheney and his administration allies urged President Bush to deploy American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to apprehend a group of terrorist suspects (the “Lackawanna Six”) and declare them enemy combatants. The Times notes:

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.

Cheney cited a DoJ memo co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that “the president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States.” Siding with Condoleezza Rice, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and others, Bush rejected Cheney’s advice and “ended up ordering the F.B.I. to make the arrests.”

This is just another reason to be vigilant against daughter Liz Cheney!!!

Cheney Disavows 9/11-Iraq Link

Truthdig has the story...

White House photo by David Bohrer
Dick Cheney, then vice president, laughs as he makes a fool of us all.

On Monday, former Veep Dick Cheney admitted at long last that there was no link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq, contrary to what the Bush administration had led the nation to believe in 2003 in order to justify waging a war on a country rich in history, culture ... and oil. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and American casualties later, we thank you, Dick.

Bloomberg:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheney said reporting by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still the vice president said there had been a longstanding relationship between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Read More

Adding Color to Dick Cheney

In this very funny SNL skit, Dick Cheney sits for makeup before an interview for Meet the Press. WATCH:

Jon Stewart Hits the Dick on the Head

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Excuse Me Your Dick Is Out
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The Cheney 'Alternative Reality' Plan

Former VP Dick Cheney has been "everywhere" in the media. He has been speaking of enhanced interrogation, otherwise known as 'torture'. WATCH:

As Rachel Maddow points out, Cheney is on his "torture works" tour. There is much speculation as to the effect or reason for Cheney's public re-emergence.

Steve Benen thinks that Cheney might have an eye on the 2012 Presidency.

Maureen Dowd who calls the VP the "Rogue Diva of Doom" says that Cheney's antics will pull the GOP down a "black hole of zealotry."

A “dismayed” Republican remarked: “We’re trying to turn the page and he’s climbing out of the grave to haunt us.”

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) declared that nothing in those memos suggests that torture was the most effective way to gain information:

Nothing I have seen — including the two documents to which former Vice President Cheney has repeatedly referred — indicates that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary, or that they were the best way to get information out of detainees. The former vice president is misleading the American people when he says otherwise.

A former FBI man who interrogated an al-Qaida leader said Wednesday extreme techniques used by the Bush administration were "ineffective, slow and unreliable" and caused the prisoner to stop talking.

So why is Cheney doing this?

A Time article speculates:

Cheney is clearly troubled both by Obama's rollback of the policies he championed and the buzz on the left that a sitting President might prosecute a predecessor who took those policies too far. [...]

Cheney is "trying to rewrite history," says a Republican consultant who has experience in intelligence matters. [...]

What's quite clear about Cheney's sudden chatty spree is that he wants to refocus the question about waterboarding and other interrogation techniques from whether they were legal to whether they worked. [...]

A far darker explanation for the spring offensive isn't about the past but the future. Obama officials have spied something like a set-up in Cheney's latest gambit. One of the Bush team's biggest talking points in its final days in office was an insistence that its greatest accomplishment was preventing a second attack in the years after Sept. 11. By laying down the charge now that Obama has made the country less safe, the Bush team may be able to point fingers of blame if a second attack ever comes.

Cheney speaks of the Bush Administration successfully defending the nation "for 7 1/2 years" after 9/11. But he forgets that 9/11 happened on the Bush/Cheney watch.

Another explanation ties in with the theory that Cheney is "trying to rewrite history." Cheney, Bush and Rove have been masters of presenting an alternative reality. It doesn't matter that a former FBI interrogator states that the Bush interrogation techniques were 'ineffective or unreliable.' It doesn't matter if memos or an investigation shows that Cheney is wrong about torture. Cheney knows that by flooding the airwaves week after week, he has already created his own reality on the issue of enhanced interrogation or torture and there are people who believe him.

By being so insistent that these interrogation techniques work he has created uncertainty.

Torture Report Contradicts Cheney

Waterboarding Neither "Efficacious Or Medically Safe"

From Gregg Sargent's The Plum Line:

There’s a big piece of news about Dick Cheney and torture buried toward the end of this big Washington Post piece about the torture wars.

Specifically: The White House has decided to declassify and release a classified 2004 CIA report about the torture program that is reported to have found no proof that torture foiled any terror plots on American soil — directly contradicting Cheney’s claims. The paper cites “allies” of the White House as a source.

Dem Congressional staffers tell me this report is the “holy grail,” because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works — and its release will almost certainly trigger howls of protest from conservatives. [...]

Here’s the key nugget from the Post piece:

Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos…

Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.

This news is particularly timely in light of Cheney’s continuing high-profile claims that torture may have saved “hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Sam Stein from Huffington Post notes:

But there is no need to wait for the report's declassification. Information from its pages was already made public in the footnotes of the Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Steven Bradbury in 2005 and released by the current administration less than one month ago.

And the conclusion seems pretty clear: Not only did interrogators, for a period of time, use waterboarding that was deemed by U.S. officials to be more frequent and intense than was medically safe, it did so to apparently limited results.

As the Huffington Post reported back in mid-April, on a footnote on Page 41 of the Bradbury memo, it is written that "Agency interrogator[s]" had "in some cases" used the waterboard in a manner different than the way "used in the [the Marine Corps' Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape] SERE training."

"The difference was in the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed," read the footnote, citing the IG report. "At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose." [...]

The important things to take away from the footnote seem clear: for a period of time interrogators were using the waterboard with a "frequency and cumulative use" that had to be toned down. Moreover, they were doing it in a way that was determined to not be "efficacious."

The officials tasked with crafting and implementing the interrogation methods adjusted the techniques to fit within the legal parameters set forth by the Bush Department of Justice. But for a period of time, they were operating in excess and outside those bounds.

'Moderate' is not a Republican Word

Former VP Dick Cheney was on Face the Nation. When asked whether he would side with Powell over Rush Limbaugh about the future of the GOP (moderation vs. doubling down on core principles) he rejected moderates and chose Gingrich over Powell.

If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican.

Slightly taken aback, host Bob Schieffer asked Cheney whether he truly thought Powell was "not a Republican."

I just noted he endorsed the Democratic candidate for president this time, Barack Obama. I assumed that that is some indication of his loyalty and his interest

While Cheney defined the move as a product of Powell's changing politics; Limbaugh has insisted the endorsement was race-based.

Today on ABC's This Week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) also said, "I don't want to moderate either. I think our policies, the principles of our party, are as viable today as they have been in the past."

The Sunday Morning Line-Up

It's the GOP 'Where Are They Now' Sunday.

• ABC, This Week: Gen. David Petraeus, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)

• CBS, Face The Nation: Former VP Dick Cheney

• CNN, State Of The Union: Gen. David Petraeus

• Fox News Sunday: Gen. David Petraeus, former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)

• NBC, Meet The Press: Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan; Asif Ali Zardari, President of Pakistan

Why is the media giving former VP Cheney a platform? Where are the Democrats?

The Necessity of Accountability: UPDATE

Both of these videos should be watched:

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh claims the Bush administration had a secret operations unit with authority to take out targets across the globe. Source: CNN

Rachel Maddow: Obama Strikes Back

Jonathan Turley "Obama Should Appoint a Special Prosecutor"

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

UPDATE: Former Cheney Aide Suggests That Hersh’s Account Of ‘Executive Assassination Ring’ Is ‘Certainly True’