WASHINGTON, May 23, 2009
V.P. No More, Cheney Makes Curtain Call
Behind-The-Scenes Power Broker Of Bush Presidency Raises Profile In Attacks On Obama
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney has turned to the podium, television news shows and interviews to insert himself in the public debate. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
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Interactive Second In Command A closer look at Vice President Dick Cheney's career and his much-publicized health problems.
The former vice president's voice appears to carry even more weight than it did in the waning days of the Bush administration.
Some people want him to be quiet and disappear. Others are cheering the public relations tour that Cheney began halfway through President Barack Obama's first 100 days, defending the Bush administration's harsh interrogation tactics and other anti-terrorism policies.
Vice presidents typically fade away quietly.
Not Cheney.
When Mr. Obama released memos detailing Bush-era interrogation techniques and wouldn't completely rule out prosecuting or disciplining former Bush administration officials, Cheney couldn't stay silent.
"It wasn't like on Jan. 21, he planned that he was going to speak out in this way," said Cheney's daughter, Liz, a former State Department official who has traveled extensively with her father. "It was driven by events and I think he will continue to do it if he feels it's important to the public debate."
"You just have to know the way he works," she said. "He was watching what was going on. He knew it was wrong and he knew he had an obligation to say it was wrong."
The Cheney camp says it's not about politics.
In Washington, however, everything is about politics and Cheney's decision to make his case on talk shows and deliver speeches at think tanks cuts both ways. His message fires up conservatives, but also rallies Democratic opponents who don't miss an opportunity to portray the unpopular Cheney as the lead spokesman of the Republican Party.
"I would think the Republicans ought to be shy in using him as their front," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He dismisses Cheney's appearances as if they were old TV reruns.
Even some prominent Republicans aren't too happy about Cheney's message.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the nation's first homeland security chief, was asked if he agreed with Cheney's assertion that the Obama administration has made the country less safe. "I do not," Ridge said.
Cheney supporters say the former vice president has received an outpouring of supportive e-mails, calls and comments from the military community, the families of those who died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and from people at the CIA, which helped carry out the interrogation program.
His backers claim Cheney is having an impact. They point to Mr. Obama's move to reverse himself and fight the court-ordered release of prisoner abuse photos and his decision to revive military tribunals for some suspected terrorists, although he is revamping how that system would work.
They also cite the Democratic-controlled Senate's vote to deny Mr. Obama $80 million to close the prison camp in eight months, as the president promised.
"It's nothing personal. It's nothing political. It's not legacy," said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin, who has known Cheney for three decades. "There's one and only one thing that's animating and motivating his advocacy and that's Mr. Obama's behavior relative to these security policies - the release of the legal memos and the open-endedness of the potential prosecution of the intelligence gatherers or the lawyers."
Matalin said Cheney wouldn't stop talking even if leaders of the GOP asked him to.
Cheney, 68, has squeezed public defense of Bush policies into his private life, which he splits between his suburban Washington home in McLean, Va. and his homes in Wyoming and on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
He still has Secret Service protection, but drives himself whenever possible. He spends time working on his memoirs and at his transition office in McLean. Every few weeks he hosts lunch for guests around his kitchen table to discuss foreign policy and national security issues. He is with his grandchildren at softball games and Sunday dinners. On Mother's Day, he brought the youngsters all the makings for s'mores and roasted marshmallows.
Cheney has always been straightforward. But when he walked in Bush's shadow he had to temper his public remarks, stay on the White House message. He could manipulate the levers of powers behind the scenes, which conjured up the image of "Star Wars" villain Darth Vader.
Out of office, he has turned to the podium, television news shows and interviews to insert himself in the public debate - and not only on national security.
In first television interview after leaving office, just 54 days after Mr. Obama was sworn in, Cheney said that it's not fair to blame the economic woes on the Bush administration. Cheney said it was a global financial problem that he feared the new administration could use to justify a massive expansion in the government and meddling in the private sector.
"I don't know if this is some sort of psychological liberation," said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at Saint Louis University who has written extensively on the vice presidency. "Now he can come out of the undisclosed locations. He's his own man again. He's free from those restraints that are inherent in being vice president - even if you are the most powerful vice president in history."
It's deja vu for Cheney, who once was on the other end of a former vice president unplugged.
In September 2004, Al Gore, the cautious campaigner, transformed into a Bush basher, faulting Cheney for "sleazy and despicable" criticism of the Democrats. A Bush White House spokesman dismissively responded: "Consider the source."
The tables have turned. At the White House on Friday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said it appears that Cheney's latest speech was an extension of the same argument that occurred "inside these walls" for many years during the administration in which he served for eight years.
© MMIX The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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See all 505 CommentsContext is also very important. You would think someone who used a household drill to bore a hole into another person head is torturing but in fact, he was called a hero for savings a life.
Posted by ReallyMeanIt
hmmm....context?
lol
let's see now? by that definition that japanese fella we executed for waterboarding was actually a 'hero'? so what you really are saying is that it's ok if we do it to others people, but if someone does it to an american it's wrong?
sir (or madam) you are one mixed up person. and i pity you. not only for justifying torture, but for the most difficult task of picking some weird explaination justifying it. that's a tough row to hoe (as they say) so i'm sorry the american people have made your task so difficult.
you say it it saves lives it's justified? well what did they say at nuremburg? they were saving german lives? weren't they?
you logic is off-kilter and twisted if you think tehre is any justification for torture under our laws or under our treaties and calling it enhanced techniques instead of what it is (torture) doesn't change what it is one iota. does it?
and this little absurdity below???-----!
Jesse Ventura misunderstood about waterboarding. Lets say you waterboard someone to force him to reveal the lottery number for next week then of course it's not going to worked. Technique is everything!
Posted by ReallyMeanIt
you sir are an idiot.
jesse ventura actually experienced waterboarding.
has cheney?
has bush?
has any of the cowards who prosecuted the war in iraq?
no they haven't and if they ever did they would tell every secret they possess. or i should say they will tell anything they had to to get it to stop.
saying that an honest upright plain speaking american who served his country with honor and who loved his country enough to endure what navy seals endure, has it wrong in regards to torture is ludicrous.
jesse calls it torture and i bet every single navy seal who went thru it calls it torture, but your twisted explaination should be accepted as fact and logical?
very hunorous.
watch the jesse ventura / hannity interview. jesse told hannity that every one of them should be prosecuted. from the ones who approved it all the way down to the operatives who carried it out.
those sir are the words of a righteous man and someone i am proud to call him my brother in service.
cheney was a coward as well as bush. they dodged the service to their country and like so many cowards they had no problem having others suffer and die for what they wanted.
"the generals sat as the lines on the map moved from side to side"
us and them by pink floyd
"haven't you heard it's a battle of words the poster bearer cried"
that's how cowards in government are.
it's just a battle of words.
no americans were killed or injured in the making of this movie. animals have better protection in the movies than american heroes have from uncrupulous people like cheney and bush and rumsfeld and wolfowitz and rice. i hope the haag has something to say to them..
please, oh please keeping talking and remain a public figure and the defacto head of the Republican party.
Along with Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Anne Coulter etc., you virtually guarantee political oblivion for the Republicans for decades.
19% approval rating does not equal cheers.
You draft dodging-old crank.
So please, please, please Unca Dickie, keep going on the television and spewing more cr@p from your pie hole. Your country needs you and you've graciously stepped up for the good of all. Thank you from every American.
Context is also very important. You would think someone who used a household drill to bore a hole into another person head is torturing but in fact, he was called a hero for savings a life.
Jesse Ventura misunderstood about waterboarding. Lets say you waterboard someone to force him to reveal the lottery number for next week then of course it's not going to worked. Technique is everything!
that's like the cia term 'with extreme prejudice'.aka murder them.
i hop you keep talking dick. you convict your own self in america's eyes with a confession of guilt even without a trial.
go ahead and defend the indefensible. it will bite you in your proverbial buttocks.
btw
jesse ventura has offered to give your some experience with waterboarding and then you can say it isn't torture. come on dick----bring us all those experts who've experienced waterboarding and have THEM tell the american people it isn't torture. yo have zero credibility!
After all if plecenta is rich in vitamins and minerals then fetus must be wonderful for ones heath.
I hear it's all the rage in Pyonyang.
Posted by maxcoffee-2009 at 9:12 PM : May 24, 2009
I understand dried fetus make cute little christmas tree ornaments. LIGHTEN-UP NEONUTS!
It's just dead tissue. It can't think, walk, talk, smile... those things don't take place until life begins..... AT BIRTH!!
Sounds like "ronnie the rat" raygun during his second term!
By Ezra Klein | May 22, 2009
This doesn't fit. Dick Cheney is the inside man. The quiet guy. The Secret Service literally referred to him by code name "backseat." It's not that he's never given an interview or a speech. But that's not how he acts.
Dick Cheney, rather, acts by acting. That is, in a way, his legacy. The simple insight that power need not be popular. That you don't need to follow the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group if you actually direct the army. That you don't need to follow the provisions of the Geneva Convention if you control the CIA. That you don't need to be transparent or well-liked or broadly trusted. What you need is a hand on the levers of power. Let others argue. You can act.
The problem, however, is that if you act alone, your impact is not durable. It can be undone. Cheney didn't build -- didn't even seem interested in building -- consensus around his vision. He forged on even as the public turned angrily against him. In the short-term, that allowed him to avoid significant compromise with the trends in public opinion. In the long-run, it rendered his achievements fragile once they lost their protector.
And so now Cheney is in an unexpected position. He is without agencies to direct or armies to control. But he cannot bear to see his policies unwound. The consummate inside player is forced into an outside game. But there is no outside game. Barack Obama controls the levers of power. And no one knows better than Cheney what that means. It means that Obama can act. All Cheney can do is argue.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/
In Washington, however, everything is about politics.....
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Of course everything that dirty dickie has ever done is all about politics and money!
We know whom the true puppet master was behind the bush monkey!
How could America turn it's back on such a Giant Self Imposed Power Broker as The Big Richard?
As a senior interrogator in Iraq (and a former criminal investigator), there was a lesson I learned that served me well: there's more to be learned from what someone doesn't say than from what they do say. Let me dissect former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on National Security using this model and my interrogation skills.
First, VP Cheney said, "This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately... it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do." He further stated, "It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so." That is simply untrue. Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.
Secondly, the former vice president, in saying that waterboarding is not torture, never mentions the fact that it was the United States and its Allies, during the Tokyo Trials, that helped convict a Japanese soldier for war crimes for waterboarding one of Jimmie Doolittle's Raiders. Have our morals and values changed in fifty years? He also did not mention that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both prohibited their troops from torturing prisoners of war. Washington specifically used the term "injure" -- no mention of severe mental or physical pain.
Thirdly, the former vice president never mentioned the Senate testimony of Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully interrogated Abu Zubaydah and learned the identity of Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber, and the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) was the mastermind behind 9/11. We'll never know what more we could have discovered from Abu Zubaydah had not CIA contractors taken over the interrogations and used waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Also, glaringly absent from the former vice president's speech was any mention of the fact that the former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice and that our best chance to locate him would have been through KSM or Abu Zubaydah had they not been water boarded.
In addition, in his continued defense of harsh interrogation techniques (aka torture and abuse), VP Cheney forgets that harsh techniques have ensured that future detainees will be less likely to cooperate because they see us as hypocrites. They are less willing to trust us when we fail to live up to our principles. I experienced this firsthand in Iraq when interrogating high-ranking members of Al Qaida, some of whom decided to cooperate simply because I treated them with respect and civility.
The former vice president is confusing harshness with effectiveness. An effective interrogation is one that yields useful, accurate intelligence, not one that is harsh. It speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of interrogations, the goal of which is not to coerce information from a prisoner, but to convince a prisoner to cooperate.
Finally, the point that is most absent is that our greatest success in this conflict was achieved without torture or abuse. My interrogation team found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq and murderer of tens of thousands. We did this using relationship-building approaches and non-coercive law enforcement techniques. These worked to great effect on the most hardened members of Al Qaida -- spiritual leaders who had been behind the waves of suicide bombers and, hence, the sectarian violence that swept across Iraq. We convinced them to cooperate by applying our intellect. In essence, we worked smarter, not harsher.
Cheney would have you believe that only he, and people like him, know what's best for you. We may be attacked again, but I will never surrender my freedoms or liberties to a man like ***** Cheney, not for any price.
?If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.? - Joseph Goebbels
It sucks that some teachers do molest children. There will always be bad apples. Same with gun control laws, preachers, money managers, or whatever. There is always going to be someone the screws it up for the rest of us, which ever group you might fall in. Education doesn't seem to get much attention... Only when the system starts to fail. I can't say that thier is justice in raising taxes to pay for things like class size bils or what have you. Raising taxes seems tobe the result of not being able to create new taxable things... Tabacoo and booze have been taxed to death, transfats and other things that are "unhealthy" have been tried to be taxed. If we could find new taxable items that would remove the burdon that would be great. Saddly many of those "things" have been demonized.
After all if plecenta is rich in vitamins and minerals then fetus must be wonderful for ones heath.
I hear it's all the rage in Pyonyang.
I'm hoping for higher taxes so people will not be able to have children. Perhaps the abortion rate will increase and there will be more babies to kill. At least that's what I'm gunning for. When the abortion rate goes up... I'll open a small recreational bussiness where people can come and kill babies for tickets to win prizes. Like skeeball only a bit bloodier.
I have a job...
I pay taxes...
I don't feel low... I feel pretty up beat actually... when i feel low I usually kill a baby. It's way
more effective than anything a doctor could give me.
From your posts it seems as though you are the one whos is crying.
It would also seem that you do not care much from democracy either.
They caught Mr. Agnew taking cash payoffs in brown paper bags that he would toss in the bottom draws of his office desk!
And like Mr. Cheney---he went on a "i'm innocent, I know what I'm talking about" tour de force---relying upon the goodwill and support of his loyal supporters, the whole while he was negotiating with the prosecutors and judge for a lenient sentence if he RESIGNED from
the vice-presidency!
Well---Mr. Agnew was never REALLY punished, but at least they got him out of government BEFORE he did too much harm! In Mr. Cheney's case---we haven't been as lucky!
Instead, Mr. Cheney---hoping to avoid prosecution---has come out "swinging"---believing that an aggressive offense is the best defense, he has! But, he's making a mistake---
Because taking the "public stage" again---only reminds most of us---of what a thoroughgoing, evil criminal he truly is! And it reminds us---how the government and the Democrat party has FAILED to investigate and bring this criminal to justice!
Cheney is NOT giving the power base in Washington D.C. a reason NOT to pursue him, but just the opposite! Because their failure to do so, destroys their own credibility to govern and sooner or later they will be forced to!
Posted by BornFreeorDie
Yeah, I would imagine that would be a sore spot for you, to see President Obama where he is today and you being where you are(a loser), in comparison, I'm sure that makes you feel like a total failure in life. I guess what mommy and daddy told you about you being superior to others was totally wrong and really set you up for this really big let down.
When the libs and whackjob like olberman, matthews, maddow, etc are all bent of of shape about Cheney, you know he's on the right track
Posted by ReallyMeanIt
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Oh and let me guess, people like O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck and Coulter are normal, unbiased newspeople.
The whackjob is you
Posted by taebok
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Thanks for proving my point for me.
Try to relax, and put down the kool-aid.
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