The Beast From The Sea (Revelation 13:1-10)

Were There Norms Dick Cheney Wasn’t Prepared to Transgress?

George H.W. Bush tells his biographer that his secretary of defense considered using tactical nuclear weapons against Iraqi forces in the First Gulf War.

National Archives
Conor Friedersdorf Nov 5, 2015

When Dick Cheney left the vice presidency his approval rating stood at a dismal 13 percent. As it turns out, even George H.W. Bush thought that he did a bad job.

“After years of holding back, former President George Bush has finally broken his public silence about some of the key figures in his son’s administration, issuing scathing critiques of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,” the New York Times reported, cribbing from a Jon Meacham biography of the 41st president that will be in book stores beginning next week.
Said the newspaper:

In his interviews with Mr. Meacham, the former president returned several times to the topic of Mr. Cheney, who handled the role of vice president very differently from the way the first Mr. Bush did under Ronald Reagan. “He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer… He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” Mr. Bush said. He attributed that to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything...”

He speculated that Mr. Cheney was influenced by his wife, Lynne, and his daughter Liz, both strong conservatives. “I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here – iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” he said. Still, he called Mr. Cheney “a good man” who pushed boundaries too far. “The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department,” Mr. Bush said. “I think they overdid that. But it’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault.” By that, he meant his son. “The buck stops there,” the elder Mr. Bush said.

That critique of Dick Cheney is consistent with how the former vice president has been rendered by journalists like Jane Mayer and Barton Gellman, who’ve cast him as a master bureaucrat who used his insider knowledge of how the executive branch works to shape policy, sometimes without the president’s knowledge.

It is newsworthy that Bush 41 made that critique of his former secretary of defense and his son, and I’ve relayed his comments much as the New York Times journalists did, having not yet seen Jon Meacham’s biography myself. But I was most struck by something that the newspaper mentioned only in passing:

The book includes diary entries…

It reports that as defense secretary for the elder Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study of how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary.

(The answer: 17.)

Cheney’s interest in tactical nukes has been reported before, but garnered little attention, and escaped my notice.

Like Bush 41, my understanding had been that 9/11 radicalized Dick Cheney. But I’m tempted to change my view of the torture advocate if, prior to 1993, he was contemplating a first-strike use of nuclear weapons against the Iraqi army.

Did Cheney ever see a norm that he didn’t consider transgressing against?

Hey Dick: Your Iraq War Will Lead To First Use Of Nuclear Weapon Since Hiroshima And Nagasaki

 

Dick Cheney: Iran Deal Will Lead To First Use Of Nuclear Weapon Since Hiroshima And Nagasaki

“Nearly everything the president has told us about his Iranian agreement is false.”

1 hour ago | Updated 1 hour ago

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney launched a broad attack against President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in an excerpt of a forthcoming book that was published in The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

Both Cheneys accused Obama of lying about the Iran nuclear deal and said that the agreement would lead to the first use of a nuclear weapon since 1945.

“Nearly everything the president has told us about his Iranian agreement is false. He has said it will prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it will actually facilitate and legitimize an Iranian nuclear arsenal,” they wrote. “The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East and, more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The Obama administration has aggressively defended the deal, saying that it cuts off all pathways to a nuclear bomb. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that a better deal simply does not exist.
The Cheneys also blamed the rise of terrorist groups like ISIS on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011 –– a talking point that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has also used.
“He has abandoned Iraq, leaving a vacuum that is being tragically and ominously filled by our enemies. He is on course to forsake Afghanistan as well,” the Cheneys wrote.

But former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno, who was one of the architects of the 2007 surge and a top official in Iraq, has disputed that the decision to leave Iraq was Obama’s.
“I remind everybody that us leaving at the end of 2011 was negotiated in 2008 by the Bush administration. That was always the plan, we had promised them that we would respect their sovereignty,” Odierno said at a press conference earlier this month.

The Cheneys’ book, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, will be available Sept. 1.

That Dick Is Full of Crap, & Vice Versa (Revelation 13:5)

Cheney: ‘The report’s full of crap’

By Eric Bradner, CNN

updated 3:28 PM EST, Thu December 11, 2014

 

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Dick Cheney called the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogation techniques a “terrible piece of work”
• He said he has no regrets about the tactics used after the 9/11 terrorist attacks

Washington (CNN) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney called a Senate panel’s report on U.S. interrogation tactics during George W. Bush’s administration is “deeply flawed” and a “terrible piece of work.”

“The report’s full of crap,” he said in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday evening.

Bush’s Republican vice president insisted that the Central Intelligence Agency’s rough tactics — which the report said included mock executions, beatings, “rectal rehydration” and feeding, sleep deprivation and more — helped the United States “catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11.”

“It did in fact produce actionable intelligence that was vital in the success of keeping the country safe from further attacks,” he said.

Asked specifically about the rectal rehydration instance detailed in the report, Cheney said: “I don’t know anything about that specific instance — I can’t speak to that.”

He also said he hadn’t actually read the report. Its full 6,000 pages haven’t been released, but a lengthy summary was issued Tuesday. Cheney said he’d “seen parts of it. I read summaries of it.”

Contrary to the report’s conclusion that Bush didn’t know the extent of the CIA’s efforts, Cheney said the President was involved in discussions about the interrogation techniques, and that Bush even pointed out some of those conversations in a book he wrote after leaving office.

He said he has no regrets about the tactics used after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks.

“I think what needed to be done was done,” Cheney said. “I think we were perfectly justified in doing it. And I’d do it again in a minute.”

That Dick (The Beast of the Sea) Is Finally Right About Something

That Dick Is Finally Right

By KENDALL BREITMAN | 8/21/14 7:30 AM EDT Updated: 8/21/14 11:24 AM EDT

 

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is predicting that the beheading of American journalist James Foley is just the start of more violence if President Barack Obama doesn’t “deal with this crisis” in Iraq.

“The ISIS organization in charge is very much a threat to the United States, to our friends and allies, not just in the Middle East, but in Europe, and when you see them behead an American reporter, as they did today, that’s obviously a terrible development,” Cheney said Wednesday on Fox News’ “Hannity.” “But magnify that a million times over because that is what’s in store for the rest of the world if we don’t deal with this crisis.”

On Tuesday, a video was posted on YouTube by men claiming to be part of the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The graphic video shows Foley’s murder and includes threats to the life of American journalist Steven Joel Sotloff if Obama does not end the airstrikes in Iraq. On Wednesday, the National Security Council said the video is authentic.

“I think every single day that goes by [Obama] is finding that there’s a bigger and bigger gulf between his hoped-for view of the world and reality,” Cheney said. “I think the danger is enormous, I don’t think the president understands it.”

Cheney commented that he believes Obama’s view of the world is “fundamentally flawed” and that his aversion to military action has made other world leaders view the president as “weak and ineffective,” saying “there is no question … he is viewed as perhaps the weakest president in my lifetime.”

Because of these perceived weaknesses, Cheney argued that while Americans may be war-weary, sometimes military action is “absolutely necessary” in order to prevent more attacks.

“I am absolutely certain that someday there will be another mass casualty attack against the United States,” Cheney said. “Except next time they will have far deadlier weapons.”

Mike Morell, who was CIA deputy director when Foley was captured in Syria in 2012, also warned about the threat from ISIL on Thursday.

“If an ISIS member showed up in a mall in the United States tomorrow with an AK-47 and killed a number of Americans, I would not be surprised,” he said on “CBS This Morning.” “Over the long term, I worry that this group could present a 9/11 style threat. It took Al Qaeda two-and-a-half years to plan 9/11. It would not surprise me to know that ISIS may be thinking about going in that kind of direction. Short-term threat, long-term threat.”

What a Dick… He Is Finally Right About WMD

Iraq War redux: Dick Cheney warns Fox that nuclear weapons are ‘spreading’ to terrorists

Dick and Nuclear Terrorism

By David Edwards
Wednesday, June 25, 2014 10:48 EDT

Former Vice President Dick Cheney showed up on Fox News on Wednesday to make a familiar case for going back to war in Iraq: Nuclear weapons are “spreading” to extremists across the globe.

In recent weeks the al Qaeda splinter group ISIS has taken advantage of a power vacuum left after the U.S. invaded Iraq to take over large parts of the country, giving Cheney and other architects of the 2003 invasion an opportunity to use some of their original talking points for military action.

Cheney’s recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal stopped just short of accusing President Barack Obama of treason, saying that he had been determined to take the United States “down a notch” before leaving office.

“Defeating them will require a strategy—not a fantasy,” Cheney wrote. “It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts—not empty misleading rhetoric. It will require rebuilding America’s military capacity—reversing the Obama policies that have weakened our armed forces and reduced our ability to influence events around the world.”

After a campaign of television interviews failed to make his case against Obama, Cheney was back on Fox News on Wednesday to play the same nuclear weapons card that he used in 2003.

“The focus shouldn’t be just on Iraq,” he insisted. “It’s indicative of a much broader problem. We’ve had — The Rand Corporation just recently published a study that shows there’s been a 58 percent increase in the number of al Qaeda-type terrorist groups in the last four years. Fifty-eight percent! Doubling the number of terrorists roughly, and they’re spreading out from West Africa all across North Africa to East Africa, up through the Middle East, all the way around to Indonesia.”

“And the other problem, of course, is the developing possibility that sooner or later some of them will get their hands on deadlier weapons,” the former vice president added.

While Cheney was taking a breath, Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck tossed him a softball
“Are you indicating that we could be on track for something worse than 9/11?” she asked.

“I think that’s a possibility,” he declared. “You know, I can’t say at this point specifically when something like that might happen. But it would be foolish of us to ignore the extent to which there are people who — terrorist-sponsoring states who have in fact tried to provide nuclear technology.”

“The North Koreans, for example, built a nuclear reactor in the Syrian dessert,” Cheney continued. “We’ve also had testimony from the man who created the Pakistani [nuclear] program publicly, A.Q. Khan, that the North Koreans bribed the Pakistanis for the latest enrichment technology.”

“So, it’s spreading. And access to those kind of capabilities, I think, is on an increase.”

In 2002, Cheney had argued that the United States must attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein would have nuclear weapons “fairly soon.”

“We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon,” Cheney told NBC later that year.

President George W. Bush also used similar talking points, warning that the U.S. could not wait for proof of Cheney’s claims because “the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

And then in his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush included the now-infamous “16 words” that put the country on a path to war: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”