If Cheney is Fitz's ultimate target, isn't it time to get to know him?

John Nichols' book, The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History (The New Press) is available nationwide at independent bookstores and at www.amazon.com. Publisher's Weekly describes it as "a Fahrenheit 9/11 for Cheney" and Esquire magazine says it "reveals the inner Cheney. The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney includes an interview with Joseph Wilson and details the inner workings of the vice president's office at the time of the Plame-Wilson leak.

Buzzflash interview of Nichols, before the latest edition, mentioned above, came out:


BuzzFlash: Some would say, us among them, that Dick Cheney is Co-President of the United States, sharing power with Karl Rove. Which is to say, Cheney controls foreign policy, energy policy, defense policy and corporate crony welfare. Meanwhile, Rove controls domestic policy and cultural wedge issues, for the most part. What's your thought on that?

Nichols: That's a pretty fair assessment. Cheney and Rove work closely together. They talk constantly, plot constantly and often launch initiatives in tandem -- such as their failed attempt to woo organized labor in a closed-door meeting in 2001 and their ongoing efforts to ramp up turnout among evangelicals.

It is important to remember that Cheney is the dominant player in this relationship, however. Rove is powerful, but Cheney is more powerful.

Additionally, it is important to remember that Cheney has a great interest in domestic policy, as well -- particularly tax policy. He and Rove team up on some issues. Again, it is instructive to recall the meeting where Bush raised some concerns about further tax cuts and Rove and Cheney jumped in to tell him to stay "on message." That was a good example of how they work together; and of how, when they are on the same side of an issue, they easily trump everyone else in the administration.


lots more
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/09/int04046.html

the book:



some reviews of the first edition (without the Wilson interview):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/1565848403/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/102-5880494-0156939?%5Fencoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155

this book never gets discussed, but I sure hope that's going to change in the not-too-distant future

No top office within the administration was better positioned than Cheney's to gather the information that was used to attack Wilson and his wife and to peddle that information to the press. In fact, as Joe Wilson told me in an interview about the leaking of his wife's name that we did early in 2004, "With respect to who actually leaked the information, there are really only a few people -- far fewer than the president let on when he said there are a lot of senior administration officials -- who could have done it. At the end of the day, you have to have the means, the keys to the conversations at which somebody might drop my wife's name -- deliberately or not -- a national security clearance, and a reason to be talking about this. When you look at all that, there are really very few people who exist at that nexis between national security and foreign policy and politics. You can count them, literally, on two hands."

Wilson added that, without a doubt, "the vice president is one of those people."

And no one, repeat no one, in Washington is known to be more vindictive than Dick Cheney. So the notion that Cheney would not only have been aware of but in fact delighted in punishing Wilson by ruining the career of the ambassador's wife is entirely plausible. By all accounts, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating that prospect as his long examination of crimes that may have been committed in relation to the Plame leak draws to a close.

Does this mean that the vice president will be indicted by the federal grand jury that is currently examining the actions of White House political czar Karl Rove and, more importantly, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby?

Don't bet on it.

Libby is blood-oath, fall-on-the-sword loyal to Cheney. A Reagan-era State Department hand and Congressional staffer who came to know his future boss when Cheney was serving in Congress during the 1980s, Libby went with Cheney to George H. W. Bush's Defense Department -- serving Secretary of Defense Cheney as Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Strategy and Resources and Deputy Under Secretary for Policy. Libby was then a founder of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, which promoted the vision of American Empire that Cheney and his staff had cooked up in their controversial draft Defense Policy Guidance statement during their final days at the Pentagon. And when Cheney returned to the corridors of power, as vice president, Libby was at his side.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=29442

Done under the name of *ush, Cheney used 9/11 as an excuse to set up a shadow government, one that will come into play should he ever be given an excuse. He and Rummy head up this thing and it should scare the wits out of the American people, but who knows about it?

Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret
After Attacks, Bush Ordered 100 Officials to Bunkers Away From Capital to Ensure Federal Survival

By Barton Gellman and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 1, 2002; Page A01


“President Bush has dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack on the nation's capital.

Execution of the classified "Continuity of Operations Plan" resulted not from the Cold War threat of intercontinental missiles, the scenario rehearsed for decades, but from heightened fears that the al Qaeda terrorist network might somehow obtain a portable nuclear weapon, according to three officials with firsthand knowledge. U.S. intelligence has no specific knowledge of such a weapon, they said, but the risk is thought great enough to justify the shadow government's disruption and expense.
Deployed "on the fly" in the first hours of turmoil on Sept. 11, one participant said, the shadow government has evolved into an indefinite precaution. For that reason, the high-ranking officials representing their departments have begun rotating in and out of the assignment at one of two fortified locations along the East Coast. Rotation is among several changes made in late October or early November, sources said, to the standing directive Bush inherited from a line of presidents reaching back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Officials who are activated for what some of them call "bunker duty" live and work underground 24 hours a day, away from their families. As it settles in for the long haul, the shadow government has sent home most of the first wave of deployed personnel, replacing them most commonly at 90-day intervals.

The civilian cadre present in the bunkers usually numbers 70 to 150, and "fluctuates based on intelligence" about terrorist threats, according to a senior official involved in managing the program. It draws from every Cabinet department and some independent agencies. Its first mission, in the event of a disabling blow to Washington, would be to prevent collapse of essential government functions.”cont….


http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20584-2002Feb28?language=printer

*shadow government*

in memory

she's one of the VERY VERY worst

just ask Joe Conason or Gene Lyons

''Interestingly, the Washington Post's "Clinton scandals" ace correspondent, Susan Schmidt, also failed to report Lewis' dramatic swoon -- much as Schmidt saw fit earlier this week to leave out exculpatory information from her "exclusive" story about a former Secret Service agent who said he'd seen Monica Lewinsky enter the Oval Office alone in the fall of 1995 carrying a stack of documents.''


http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:no-D9X26ohAJ:dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_09_14_dneiwert_archive.html++gene+lyons+susan+schmidt+l.+jean+lewis+perjury&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1



footnote to 'history':

I talked to Schmidt on two radio shows...Jim Bohannon (which I taped; it was on CSPAN that day), and a show from KOA, Denver, both times about the L. Jean Schmidt perjury before congress

during the Bohannon show I asked her why she didn't report it in her coverage of Lewis' testimony, and she said that she LEFT during lunch, not to return, BUT that somebody from the Post DID cover it. I couldn't prove a negative at the time, but they did NOT. Neither did the New York Times, whose Jeff Gerth broke the Whitewater "scandal," and, like the Post, covered the hearings breathlessly, yet incompletely, especially when incidents like the Lewis perjury occurred.

the book any time soon. Not unless I find a freebie.

it's really worth it, except it'll make you REALLY mad

he's much worse than you think, if possible

there's a thread here that starts with that, and gave me the idea to link this book

see:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1186412

Question: Mr. Nichols the scandal in the US vice president’s office is currently one of the hottest topics being debated. What this all about?

Answer: It really is about the war on Iraq as much as about anything else. Back in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on the United States a group of people within the administration including the vice president and his chief of staffs Lewis Libby began to agitate or an invasion of Iraq by the United States and they also took charge of a great deal of the rest of US foreign policy and really made the vice president’s office be central force in driving foreign policy issues.

They succeeded in leading the country into war and then shortly after the country went to war a former US ambassador to Iraq and several African Nations, Joe Wilson exposed that some of the arguments that the administration had made for going to war had been based on faulty intelligence. It was a bad point that appears Mr. Libby who was the vice president chief of staff set out to destroy US former ambassador reputation by licking information to journalists that would put him in the bad situation. This attack on the former ambassador, particularly an attack on the former ambassador’s wife caused a scandal in the United States and led to a legal procedure that looks into whether there was any wrong doing and what has happened as of last week is that the grand jury bound that the vice president office had indeed committed serious crimes in an effort to undermine Joe Wilson as ambassador and apparently they were doing so in order to prevent a serious discussion about whether the administration lied in making the case for war with Iraq.

So this is a very, very big deal and in the United States it has been a dominant new story for the last several days. Yesterday in the US senate the Democratic party forced a close session of the US senate to discuss the use and misuse of intelligence by the Bush administration to be really have reached one of the more critical points in American history where you have a real fight going on about whether the White House says committed a serious acts of wrong doing.

http://english.irib.ir/ARCHIVE/INTER/Aban/John%20Nichols.htm

LOL

But I prefer black and white stripes for this MF.

In the 2004 vice presidential debate, Cheney noted that, “One of my strongest allies in Congress when I was Secretary of Defense was Jack Murtha, a Democrat who is chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.” The vice president was particularly complimentary over the years of the Pennsylvania representatives decision to provide high-profile backing of the administration’s 2002 request for authorization to use force against Iraq.

But the cross-party relationship has soured as Murtha, whose concern has always been first and foremost for the men and women who serve in the military, has reached the conclusion that the Iraq intervention has steered U.S. troops into a quagmire from which they must be extracted. Typically blunt, Murtha said this week: “The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring (the troops) home.”

Cheney’s response to the man he begged to help him understand military affairs during the first Bush administration was to rip into Murtha and other Democrats who had tried to work with the administration. “Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorising force against Saddam Hussein,” the vice president growled in a speech to the conservative Frontiers of Freedom Institute. In another clear reference to Murtha, Cheney said, “The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone — but we’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite history.”

Of course, it is not Murtha but Cheney who is rewriting history — or, at least, attempting to obscure it.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:OOoyBq5xXAIJ:squish.us/+++john+nichols+joe+wilson+interview&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=13

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, John, your reaction to Vice President Cheney’s speech and, tell us a little bit about him and what you found in your research on your book.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, my first reaction to Vice President Cheney’s speech fits for Zell Miller, as well. This is probably the last time, in our lifetimes that we will see two speaker, one after another. The first of whom began his career as an American segregationist, opposing integration in the south. The second of whom highlighted his career in Congress as being one of the few people who voted consistently to keep Nelson Mandela in jail. A remarkable signal. In most countries in the world, people with that sort of track record wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the amount of power that these gentlemen have.

Dick Cheney’s speech was a classic Dick Cheney speech. I mean there was always the joke of if you watch him closely, maybe this time the lizard will actually come out when he opens his mouth. But, the reality is that he went back to his core themes. And it's important to note those. He was mostly talking about foreign policy. He's obsessed with foreign policy. His two big messages were, there will be no break in unilateralism. This country will be hard core committed to a unilateral vision of how it operates in the world--no permission slips from any other countries. And two, a passionate defense of presidential war making. It's important to remember this is the guy who was central to the defense of Ronald Reagan during the Iran contra process. He's the one who wrote the dissenting opinion that essentially shot down any possibility of an impeachment of Ronald Reagan for Iran contra. Dick Cheney has been at the core of some of the darkest activities in this country over the last four years. The man who began in the Nixon white house, key player in the Ford white house.

Went to congress and was Reagan’s key defender on the far right. Somebody that Newt Gingrich said it much more conservative than me. Someone who in the national journal checked the voting record found he was a little to the right of Jesse Helms. This is our vice president. And people ought to watch him closely because George Bush will give a compassionate conservative speech tonight. But if you want it see what will happen in the next four years, go back and list tone what Cheney said last night because that's the blueprint for the next four years and noted, that just as in 2,000, he mentioned countries that the united states might have to deal with. In this case, Iran and North Korea.


http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/02/1455206

he's the worst person on earth

http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20040607&s=hartung

Outsourcing Is Hell
William D. Hartung


The war on Iraq has made us all painfully aware of the Pentagon's growing reliance on private companies. Commercial firms have been hired to do everything from cooking meals to interrogating prisoners to providing security for US proconsul Paul Bremer. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution estimates that for every ten troops on the ground in Iraq, there is one contract employee. That translates to 10,000 to 15,000 contract workers, making them the second-largest contingent (betweenAmerica and Britain) of the "coalition of the willing."

Military outsourcing is nothing new. The latest wave of military privatization started in the first Bush Administration, when Defense Secretary Cheney asked Halliburton to study what it would cost to have a private company take charge of getting US forces overseas in a hurry. Halliburton was hired to do just that in Somalia, employing 2,500 people. The Clinton Administration picked up where Bush/Cheney left off, hiring Halliburton--then run by Cheney--as the logistics arm for the war in Kosovo. Halliburton's contract started out as a $180 million deal but soon mushroomed to more than $2.5 billion as the company built Camp Bondsteel and other military facilities on lavish, cost-plus terms.

The 1990s military outsourcing boom was driven by a combination of practicality and ideology. With post-cold war troop strength dropping from 2.1 million to 1.4 million, there was a certain logic to contracting out nonmilitary functions like laundry and meals, to free soldiers for strictly military duties. But the urge to privatize soon expanded to include anything and everything, up to and including hiring former Green Berets and Navy SEALs for serious security and training functions.

The "privatize first, ask questions later" mentality has led to the situation we face now in Iraq, where private companies are performing front-line military functions ranging from providing security to the Coalition Provisional Authority (Blackwater) to training the new Iraqi army (Vinnell) to protecting oil pipelines (Erinys) to interrogating prisoners (CACI).

http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20040607&s=hartung

Nichols covers this extensively in his book, which epitomizes all that's run amok since maniacs like this came on the scene over THIRTY YEARS AGO

the guy * referred to as "a major league asshole"?

think the vid is taken from a distance

will see if I can find it....looks like it might be, though

ha!

And it was Adam Clymer of the NYT

Story here:
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/09/04/cuss_word/