You're a good man Hosni Mubarak

"I also think there comes a time for everybody when it's time to hang it up and move on"

Said Former Vice President Dick Cheney. It would seem that he didn't feel the end of his term in office was such a time for him, smoothly transitioning from denouncing all critics in an official and perhaps illegal fashion to doing as much as a private citizen. He's only moved out, not moved on.

He was of course referring to the apparent end game of Hosni Mubarak, a "Good man" says he.

"he's been a good friend and ally to the United States, and we need to remember that"

That's a statement hard to remark upon so I won't. I'll only add the good Mr. Mubarak to the list of rogues our government has supported for similar reasons through the years, choosing "stability" over every other consideration. Like many administrations from Reagan, whose anniversary he was celebrating, to that of Cheney and Bush, we've provided weapons to tyrants while the people suffered from want. We've overthrown democratic choices and prevented elections and installed monsters and looked the other way at nauseating atrocities simply to serve our appetites.

Yes, Mubarak did what we paid him to do and you'll note that those are American tanks patrolling the streets, American jets overhead. He maintained an uncomfortable peace with Israel and helped us punish oil-rich Iraq. He did resist the pressure from fundamentalist Theocrats and he helped us to apply torture methods even our own flimsy consciences wouldn't allow -- and we paid him to do it and didn't place many strings on our largess. He was a good man.

Cheney as an unhealthy old man, younger but much sicker than Mubarak and I'm sure we can look ahead to other, not too distant days and the gathering of other people telling us Dick Cheney was a "good man" just like the other good and bloody handed friends and allies. Let the circle be unbroken.

Obama goes to bat for the bad guys

Well, I was there and I saw what you did
Saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

-Phil Collins-

The truth can set you free, and it can get you hanged. It all depends on who you know and how much they owe you. Yes, we may live in a world of denialism, mythology and cover-ups but I hope truth still has a few teeth left. That's why I'm rarely the first to scream 'treason' when someone blows a whistle or leaks a secret. Sometimes it even gives me hope.

So people have been asking me, since my last post on the latest Wikileaks fatwah, just what we learned that was useful enough to warrant embarrassing our delicate diplomatic efforts. Well a number of things, in my opinion. For one, we now have cause to reflect upon the Obama administration's efforts to thwart international prosecution of Bush, Cheney et al, for using torture to extract confessions from suspects.

Spain has had a lot of experience with torture and gruesome treatment of prisoners from the Inquisition right up through the last of the Fascist dictators. I think they've grown a bit intolerant and perhaps touchy on the subject of right wing excesses. So perhaps when that country set out to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, our current administration had many reasons to worry about turning tables, embarrassing revelations and the repercussions of such an investigation on our future conduct. Without Assenge and Wikileaks, we might never have known that Obama and company had a rare bipartisan success in 'persuading' Spain to squelch the effort. It's nice to know and it sheds some light on the puzzling friendliness that Bush has recently shown the man his party has been presenting as something loathsome and dangerous.

We didn't need any breaches of state secrecy however to learn that Dick Cheney's vast ossuary of a closet still has occupants with inconvenient stories to tell. Nigeria is planning to charge him and his Halliburton cronies with bribery and to issue an Interpol warrant, says Bloomberg Businessweek. You may recall that the Right Wing US Chamber of Commerce has been pushing Congress to ditch The Foreign Corrupt Practices act which makes such practices illegal under US law. If you were puzzled as to why we needed so badly to do that so quickly, perhaps we now can answer the question.

Will Wikileaks make Obama think twice about protecting war profiteers and international criminals - maybe even think a third time about trying to portray leakers as dangerous traitors now that we have had a glimpse of what's been going on?

Cry Havoc -- please!

Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay were arrested very early this morning in New York as part of an investigation into a foiled plot to explode a bomb on the 8th anniversary of 9/11/2001. Najibullah Zazi and two other men are already in custody on charges related to this attempt. The evidence against the men seems substantial and we can expect that he won't be the only one to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Of course this is an outrage. If we had a real Republican he-man in office we wouldn't be calling this a foiled plot or talking about trials and convictions, we'd be screaming Terrorist attack - terrorist attack and the cruise missiles would already be on course for somewhere.

So, I'm sure it won't be long before Snarlin' Dick is back on TV explaining to us that our educated and therefore unmanly President is pretending, by not running naked through the streets screaming TERRORIST ATTACK, that "we are not at war." Of course it takes considerable screaming and snarling to keep the discussion away from what a real war really is -- especially one in which victory is nearly impossible to define much less than to achieve.

Like our valiant war on poverty, war on drugs, war on crime and war on pornography, this one resembles a struggle against human nature; that nature including religion, nationalism and the tendency to hate people we see as exploiting and manipulating us. Fail to make that all change and you fail to win. In saner times and amongst saner people the eternal struggle against crime has usually been seen as the job of law enforcement and indeed this failed plot was foiled by good police work and a little luck. To men like Cheney, the danger in foiling plots and prosecuting the criminals who attempt to carry them out is precisely that we have a harder time crying war and without a war, we have to conduct ourselves more in accordance with the law and indeed with reasonableness and sanity.

That the terrorist acts carried out in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center resulted in the perpetrators being caught, imprisoned and even executed will remain a thorn in the paws of people like Cheney for whom the system needs to be shown as not working when it's under a Democratic administration and working well when under a Republican. So what if it results in hundreds of thousands of innocent casualties, the destruction of countries, the exile of its citizens and of course, the creation of vastly increased anti-American hatred. In this respect, Cheney's objectives, being aided by every attack and thwarted by every foiled attack or captured terrorist, are often congruent with the objectives of al Qaeda and similar groups. In other words, America's success -- Obama's success and Clinton's successes in finding and capturing terrorists hurts Cheney and Associates; hurts their chances of defaming the Democrats, returning the berserkers to power and keeping those huge Halliburton checks rolling in.

If you're following this line of reasoning, you won't be surprised that I'm concluding that Snarlin' Dick wants more than anything to keep us all crying "terrorist attack" and to keep them coming. By the way, isn't being on the side of terrorists treason?

SOP

It would be hard to substantiate a claim that the United States of America hasn't been a country safe from foreign invasion, at least since the war of 1812 ended, although politicians have been shouting "danger" and starting profitable wars to ward it off for a long time. Even during the infamous first year of this new millennium, more people died of influenza in the US than in the World Trade Center; more than ten times as many on the highway. There's no money in perspective however and there's no safety for the Republican party in it either and so we still have dishonest intellectual lightweights like Liz Cheney claiming that "We" have kept the country safe since September 11, 2001 by launching the second most expensive war in US history and torturing prisoners while essentially refusing to do a damned thing about the surviving perpetrators.

Her crime boss father may or may not be able to keep a straight grimace telling us tall ones like that, but she is and although she has no way of knowing much of anything (unless the old man has been giving away State secrets,) she claims that getting close to Cheney's crimes is demoralizing the CIA which is putting us all in further danger, danger, danger. Yes, the bogeyman will crash more planes into New York if we try to prove that her father broke the law by authorizing torture, lying to Congress and a host of other unprecedented crimes.

The evidence however is that the CIA isn't demoralized at all, but of course we have Fox and Friends to further the fallacy as they always do. It's their own private sector version of Screwing America for Profit, or from the viewpoint of the GOP, it's SOP.

Torture, Cheney, and Spineless Democrats

First, the good news. Chicago-based conservative radio host Eric "Mancow" Muller underwent waterboarding in an effort to silence critics of the procedure by showing, once and for all, that it is not torture (no, that's not the good part). But, as it turned out, Muller decided waterboarding is torture. I'm thrilled for Mancow's revelation; hopefully his words rang true in the ears of torture excusers across the land.

Here's the video:



Now some more good news. A former 14-year interrogator thoroughly rebuked last week's remarks by former Vice President Cheney on torture. The interrogator has overseen more than 1,000 interrogations and conducted over 300 himself in Iraq, including the interrogation of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And guess what? He did it all using traditional methods - no torture. Here's the video (a quadruple-level, immediate must-watch):



And now even more good news (we're on a roll). General Petraeus has endorsed Obama's close Gitmo/no more torture decisions.

I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines.

With respect to Guantanamo. I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice -- I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary -- again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees.

That's pretty staunch support from a very prominent military leader (and one who has been praised up and down by all manner of conservatives).

And now the bad, yet unsurprising, news. The Democrats are wimps. I know, I know. It's a shock. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in particular, is a wimp. The Nevada senator reportedly led the charge against the bill to provide funding to close Gitmo out of a concern of appearing too "liberal". Reid is, justifiably, afraid of losing his senate seat. But maybe, instead of trying to play politics with issues as important as national security and torture, he should do his job. Just a thought. It is nothing short of astounding that even though the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House and have at their helm the most charismatic, pragmatic leader in a generation (that being Obama) they are still bowing to Republican ideology at every turn. Furthermore Obama has already paved the road for them by taking very early stands on torture and closing Gitmo. All they have to do is follow. Yet they are completely inept at doing even that. Someone mentioned to me the other day that the Democrats are still acting like their in the minority (and the Republicans, unfortunately, think they're still in the majority). Mr. Reid, grow a pair or get out.

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Originally posted at The Political Panorama.

Dishonesty is strength

Dick Cheney is a man of short declarative sentences. He packs a lot of venom and a lot of mendacity into each one.

"What I find disturbing is the extent to which he’s gone to Europe and seemed to apologize profusely, been to Mexico and seemed to apologize there,” said Cheney to Raw Story's David Edwards. “The world out there, both our friends and foes, will be quick to take advantage of that… I don’t think we’ve got much to apologize for."

"Seemed to" shouldn't slip past the reader unnoticed, since it's an attempt to elevate a convenient assumption to the point where his baseless argument can pivot on it. To be equally as curt and declarative: Cheney lies. It didn't seem so to me or to those who listened to all the words, rather than the tendentious extracts wrapped in tactical opinion we got from Republican sources.

It doesn't seem beyond the pale to recognize that swaggering "kiss my ass you dirty wogs -- I'm AMERICA" foreign policy that has been the joy of the thundering classes who see the world as ungrateful and arrogant for wanting some measure of independence. It doesn't seem like an unqualified, abject and grovelling approach when Obama says we haven't been fair to the world all the time either. It sounds, in fact, like honesty and of course to the man of the perpetually undisclosed location, who keeps his lunch and shopping list in a vault, that's a sign of "weakness."

It's "weak" to disclose that we tortured people to death and lied about it. It's weak to shake hands with Chavez, says Cheney -- but only if a Democrat does it -- and of course any sign of honesty, humanity or willingness to promote peace that does not depend on unqualified, abject and grovelling acceptance of American Empire can be a fatal weakness.

I have trouble understanding the level of fear Cheney lives with; the kind of fear that drove him and his puppets to military aggression, pathological secrecy and a domestic paranoia that led him to think the suppression of civil rights and constitutional law is "nothing to apologize for." It's harder to understand than starting a war on false pretenses for his own profit.

Paranoia: the feeling that even our friends will take advantage of us if we're not unrelenting in our refusal to admit mistakes and uncompromising in our rage for dominion; law, morality, truth and justice notwithstanding. Quite an opinion and what better place to discuss it than with Sean Hannity and what better audience than the people who still watch Fox News and who are sure to fail to notice just how Cheney and his party equate ganging up on a new administration in time of extreme crisis as patriotism, but of course these are the people who accused the Democrats of caving in to terrorism in 2001 even after they voted unanimously to support George W. Bush.

Accepting the consequences of your actions is so unmanly.