How scared is Dick Cheney?

Every day a new detail comes out about his role in the torture of prisoners and the lies told the American people. He is quickly running out of places to hide.

Now we learn that he was advising a few members in Congress and swearing them to secrecy. Unfortunately, these few in Congress were hoodwinked and tricked by Mr Cheney. They only served to cover up the lies and propaganda coming out of the Office of the Vice President.

The question that remains is: How much did President Bush know? Did he sign off on everything that Cheney did? This is one fact we do not yet know.

to him, Bush, Gonzalez, Addington, Rumdummy or any of the other criminals.

The guy is going on all the talk shows, admitting torture, admitting and justifying his role.
Brazenly.
He would not do that unless he assumes/knows full well "the system" is not going to pursue him.
He has played in the political arena for 30 some years, knows DC/government like few people do.

In fact, his insouciance is enough to tell me the deck remains firmly stacked in favor of the privileged few.

do you think cheney gave those few members a ultimatum that if he goes down all of them do?

...but it's an unjust world if Cheneny isn't quaking in his boots.

And what does that say about our country when a band of sociopaths can declare an unnecessary war
on a country, slaughter 100,000 of their citizens and enact torture as a national policy--and have
no fear of consequences?

It's revolting.

His lies no longer work. The facts are backing him into a corner. If you have noticed, he has backtracked on al Qaeda ties to Iraq and Saddam connections to attack on 9/11 in just the last couple of days. The wheels of justice are powered by the truth. It can be exceedingly slow at times.

Old wicked Dickey will never believe things for him could get that sticky, he thinks himself entirely too tricky.

indicates he is not sleeping well.

on a plan ... a sinister plan.

You don't get to be that evil with covert tentacles everywhere without being able to "turn off" all emotion.

If Cheney is afraid, it's only that HIS PLAN MAY NOT WORK.

No way he's going to spend one minute in jail.

When the authorities supplying the evidence can be suspected of tampering with the record, one cannot use the normal legal standards of evidence. Probative evidence is rare, because if the party is not doing something the record isn't there, and if it is doing something the record may still not be there, or may be moved, redacted, edited, or otherwise poisoned.

The culprit has to screw up badly to incriminate itself, something the Bush Administration, with its absurd combination of sociopathic evil and Marx Brothers incompetence, managed to do all the time.

The scandals which surround Karl Rove are usually pretty obvious. But Dick Cheney was rarely incompetent. Like the poor dead soldiers at Verdun, the facts which surround Cheney's scandals are rotten, dismembered, and repeatedly buried and disinterred by the investigative efforts to expose them.

In such cases, one must adjust the standards of evidence. I'm familiar with the standards used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs when they question whether to recognize an Indian tribe. The shorthand term is "reasonable likelihood." It's not a 100% standard, or even 51%. Instead, it relies on circumstantial evidence, absence of evidence, evidence of cover-up, evidence of concealment, observing who benefited from the crime (if one can even guess what the crime was), and so on.

The standard is necessarily shakier than most others, because it takes into account the ability and sometimes intent of one or more of the parties to alter the evidence and disrupt its recovery and flow.

Using that relaxed standard, I think it's pretty obvious that the Bush Administration sanctioned and encouraged the use of torture, or something very, very close to it. I won't write the "proof" (which it is not) here, as many others have been writing at length about it for years. Let's just assume it for the moment and call it fact 1:

1) The Bush Administration sanctioned and encouraged the use of torture.

But beyond that, we're still making guesses about the scope of the program, and its relationship to other programs.

Here are some further facts which appear to have survived scrutiny well enough to be considered viable:

2) In the past--the living past--the United States has engaged in "liquidation" programs which entailed kidnapping and mass murder. Most notable is the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Similar efforts appear to have taken place in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, and other places going back all the way to the Philippine Insurrection.

3) From at least 2005 to January, 2007, dead bodies were dumped by the truckload in Baghdad at a rate of 500 to 1000 bodies a month. This can be circumstantially shown by a review of Juan Cole's news archives, where he regularly passes on news stories of such incidents with alarming frequency. One attempt at forming aggregate figures can be found here. Pay particular note to this observation at that link:

Bodies found in Baghdad (usually executed after torture) have shown the steepest decline, from nearly 1,000 reported in January to around 120 in December 2007 .

3a) It's not possible to prove a negative, but it must be noted that there is a surprising dearth of stories about truckloads full of bodies being intercepted in Baghdad. No nervous "terrorist" ever took a wrong turn into a checkpoint? None ever broke down and had to be abandoned? Well, using a relaxed standard we can make some guesses from the absence of evidence, and my guess is that the trucks weren't caught because the United States and its Iraqi puppet didn't want them to be caught.

4) Dick Cheney's former company and notoriously corrupt Defense contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, is currently defending itself for its usual hijinks, but in this case it involves transporting dead bodies using KBR trucks. And right there is an example of how bodies could be distributed throughout the city without being caught.

There is no "proof" to be derived from these facts, because Dick Cheney has busted his can to ensure that it can't be proved. But I "believe" I can see where it's going.

I believe (and I choose that word carefully) that the Bush Administration operated a massive program of kidnapping, torture, and eventual execution of thousands of Iraqi citizens. I believe that Cheney's public efforts are designed to stabilize a base of public support for himself now, before the exposure of that program. The torture is part of a ball of yarn that unravels to something far darker and larger than most Americans dare to imagine.

I further believe that President Obama is now aware of this program, at least in the same foggy way that I am and possibly armed with something more than the tools of speculation, and I think that he is weighing whether or not to allow its disclosure, through either investigation or through release of documentation he may already have.

One reason to avoid releasing torture photographs right now may be that the victims themselves might be identified, and that identification may somehow offer further clues to the scope and extent of the overall operation. The President may be trying to simply control the pace and release of the information so that he has any sort of control at all.

There is a lot to be weighed, for if such a thing is disclosed, there is almost certain to be an explosion of further violence against Americans around the world, against the current Iraqi government which must have been aware of it, and no doubt other governments from the Israelis to the Pakistanis and who knows who else. The United States will have to seriously consider how far to lower the sovereignty shields, because the Hague is going to want Cheney's ass if it can be pinned on him.

Such a decision would be a personal one for President Obama, because if he cuts Cheney loose he also opens himself up to similar efforts in the future--on this very issue, even, because like it or not he's now involved. I will avoid the temptation to offer an off-color observation about hanging and who's usually holding the rope, but some of you will guess what it is.

But if it is not disclosed, plenty of us will still be able to guess what happened and some of us will never stop attempting to expose it, and if this President stands in the way of that it is possible he will be carried along with it. Seymour Hersch seems to be on top of it, and reasonably unafraid to pursue the story.

Nondisclosure also appears to be at odds with this President's fairly strong code of ethics, so there is some hope that he will find a way to expose the criminals and make amends, without getting many more thousands of people killed in the process.

But hell if I know how he's going to do that.

as you are of him.


Guys who have a lot of people killed often go mad trying to protect themselves from both justice and revenge.