Romney doing fundraiser with Darth Cheney

Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney together at last.  Boy, to be a fly on the wall during that conversation. Read the rest of this post...

Dick Cheney just got a heart transplant

Apparently the surgery was today.  He was on the donor list 20 months.  I checked Wikipedia to see what the prognosis is:

The prognosis for heart transplant patients following the orthotopic procedure has increased over the past 20 years, and as of June 5, 2009, the survival rates were:[8]

1 year : 88.0% (males), 86.2% (females)
3 years: 79.3% (males), 77.2% (females)
5 years: 73.1% (males), 69.0% (females)

The Mayo Clinic concurs. Read the rest of this post...

Is Dick Cheney lobbying for gay marriage in MD?

The world was so much easier when the good guys wore white were Democrats. Read the rest of this post...

Dick Cheney thinks Hillary should challenge Obama in 2012

This is odd on so many levels. From ABC News:

Hillary Clinton for president?

“So far she hasn’t said she would, but I think it’s not a bad idea,” former Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC’s Jonathan Karl in an interview on Wednesday to promote his new book “In My Time.”

I shudder to even suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, Cheney is simply being honest. But it's hard to imagine Cheney suggesting anything not intended to hurt Democrats, but at the same time he knows that we'll suspect anything he suggests. All around weird.

Then again, maybe even a broken Cheney... Read the rest of this post...

Cheney’s lies of omission on Plamegate

David Corn has been reading Cheney's memoir. Would it surprise anyone here to know that Cheney lies?

It's not shocking that in Cheney's telling, Libby, his loyal lieutenant, was no more than an innocent bystander sideswiped by a runaway investigation caused by a cowardly Powell and a guilty Armitage. To protect Cheney (and presumably distance the vice president from the White House's get-Wilson crusade), Libby had lied to FBI agents about how he had come to learn of Valerie Wilson and her CIA position, and a jury found the evidence against him convincing. Yet Cheney claims that nothing untoward transpired and that Libby had merely experienced "a faulty memory." Cheney suggests that Bush, who commuted Libby's prison term, failed the guts test by declining to pardon Libby at the end of his presidency.

In his memoir, Cheney is not experiencing faulty memory; he is photoshopping history in the most heavy-handed manner. But that's appropriate. The Wilson scandal was a microcosm of the larger tale of the administration's use of false information and misrepresentations to guide the nation to war in Iraq. Cheney, Libby, Rove, and their allies always knew this. And with this new book, Cheney is again trying to beat back the judgment that he and Bush dishonestly pitched the case for the Iraq war. Yet his retelling of the smaller story of the CIA leak affair is proof he remains an unreliable source.

Read the rest of this post...

Cheney doesn’t think the Iraq war has hurt the US’ image abroad

Sure.

“I don’t think that it damaged our reputation around the world,’’ he told Matt Lauer. “I just don’t believe that. I think the critics at home want to argue that. In fact, I think it was sound policy that dealt with a very serious problem and eliminated Saddam Hussein from the kind of problem he presented before.

“What would’ve happened this week if Moammar Gadhafi had still been in power with a nuclear weapon in Libya? Would he have fled? I doubt it.’’

I love that last little line about Gadhafi he threw in there. What does that have to do with anything, since of course we now know that Saddam not only didn't have nukes, he didn't even have any WMD at all. Now we're pretending Gadhafi had them too? Read the rest of this post...

Cheney’s memoir, surprisingly, misses a few things

Nice piece by Robert Kaiser in the Post about Dick Cheney's new memoir:

If this book were read by an intelligent person who spent the past 10 years on, say, Mars, she would have no idea that Dick Cheney was the vice president in one of the most hapless American administrations of modern times. There are hints, to be sure, that things did not always go swimmingly under President George W. Bush and Cheney, but these are surrounded by triumphalist accounts of events that many readers — and future historians — are unlikely to consider triumphs.

Cheney is far from candid about the many ways he exploited that unique arrangement. There isn’t space in a book review to retell the story, but curious readers should compare, for example, two accounts of the fight waged by the vice president and his staff attorney, David Addington, against the Department of Justice over the legality of post-9/11 eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.

One account, which appears in the best book on the Cheney vice presidency, “Angler,” by former Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, describes how Cheney and Addington provoked “a flat out rebellion” in the Department of Justice, prompting most of its top officials and the director of the FBI to draft letters of resignation in the spring of 2004, to be used if the White House refused to change course. This raised the specter of a Watergate-like scandal. Gellman shows how Cheney and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card kept Bush in the dark about this battle royal until the very last minute. When he learned about it, Bush took DOJ’s side and ordered changes in the surveillance program.

Cheney’s account of the same episode is much briefer and far less dramatic or detailed. It ends this way:

“Faced with threats of resignation, the president decided to alter the [National Security Agency] program, even though he and his advisors were confident of his constitutional authority to continue the program unchanged.” Cheney does not say who threatened to resign, nor does he note that the entire senior staff of Bush’s Justice Department disagreed with his legal interpretation.

Read the rest of this post...

Greenwald: Post-Weiner, the private sexual activities of public figures are inherently newsworthy and need no other relevance

This may be my last post on the Weiner frenzy, barring any political relevance (for example, to what extent will Weiner be even more wedded to the Clintons if he and his marriage to Huma Abedin survive?).

But as to the spectacle, Glenn Greenwald says exactly what I'm thinking (thus my emphasis):

There are few things more sickening -- or revealing -- to behold than a D.C. sex scandal. Huge numbers of people prance around flamboyantly condemning behavior in which they themselves routinely engage. Media stars contrive all sorts of high-minded justifications for luxuriating in every last dirty detail, when nothing is more obvious than that their only real interest is vicarious titillation. Reporters who would never dare challenge powerful political figures who torture, illegally eavesdrop, wage illegal wars or feed at the trough of sleazy legalized bribery suddenly walk upright -- like proud ostriches with their feathers extended -- pretending to be hard-core adversarial journalists as they collectively kick a sexually humiliated figure stripped of all importance. The ritual is as nauseating as it is predictable.

What makes the Anthony Weiner story somewhat unique and thus worth discussing for a moment is that, as Hendrick Hertzberg points out, the pretense of substantive relevance ... has been more or less brazenly dispensed with here. ... This is just pure mucking around in the private, consensual, unquestionably legal private sexual affairs of someone for partisan gain, voyeuristic fun and the soothing fulfillment of judgmental condemnation. And in that regard, it sets a new standard: the private sexual activities of public figures -- down to the most intimate details -- are now inherently newsworthy, without the need for any pretense of other relevance.

I'd really like to know how many journalists, pundits and activist types clucking with righteous condemnation of Weiner would be comfortable having that standard applied to them. ... If Chris Matthews or Brian Williams or any politician ever patronized or even visited a porno site on the Internet or had a sexually charged IM chat with someone who isn't their spouse, shouldn't that now be splashed all over the Internet so we can all read it -- not just the fact of its existence but all the gory details?

Read the rest; he drills down.

I think two point are worth considering.

First, Glenn's right about the relevance. There's none in the Weiner case. It's all about the ick. (Even the self-shot explicit photo is badly done.) This is basically a tabloid story, made more so by Huma's pregnancy (which Breitbart is calling a "PR attempt" — another ick).

It's a brave new world indeed, and only the brave should apply. The gun used against Weiner can and will be fired again. You might think the IOKIYAR rule applies in Village-land, and for all the Dainty Minds who rule the (air)waves, that will be true. They and the Republicans they love will be safe.

But at some point, someone will get even, again and again. There are a lot of frustrated someones out there. So watch for it. Got porn, Mr. Matthews? There have never been more ways of finding out.

Which brings me to the second point. Remember the John Ashcroft–James Comey hospital scandal in 2004? Recall that this was about Ashcroft and Comey refusing to sign off on a never-defined Bush-Cheney NSA domestic spying program, and Bush sending Alberto Gonzales to apply the screws.

Think for a second. Ashcroft and Comey refused to re-confirm a spying program. Now, Ashcroft and Comey are Movement Conservatives down to the decoder ring. Ashcroft "lobbies for and invests" in the homeland securities industry. Comey went on to be Senior VP at Lockheed before moving to Money Street.

What NSA bridge was a bridge too far for even James Comey to cross? The program he and Goldsmith wouldn't sign off on was never revealed:

In early January 2006, the New York Times, as part of their investigation into alleged domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to "certify" the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time. The certification was required under existing White House procedures to continue the program. After Comey's refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and future Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program.

Comey confirmed these events took place (but declined to confirm the specific program) in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on 16 May 2007. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, like Comey, also supported Ashcroft's decision; both men were prepared to resign if the White House ignored the Department of Justice's legal conclusions on the wiretapping issue.

Let's say you were a relentless power-freak and culture commando who ran Bush's foreign policy from his office at the Naval Observatory. Let's say a 2001 disaster handed you the keys to the NSA spy capability and an unlimited domestic mandate. What would you do with that power?

Would you spy on just "the enemy" or "your enemies" (broadly considered)? What about political opponents? What about the press? And what better way to keep folks in line than via the nation's obsession with porn? If you could find out, for example, that one of the Dainty Minds noted above has "interesting interests" — what would you do?

You could buy a lot of fawning coverage and suppressed investigations, for starters, with some press schmuck's porn list in your pocket. And nail your share of opponents as well. (How do you think the FBI caught on to Eliot Spitzer? Lindsay Bayerstein thinks the Roger Stone story is a "red herring." Maybe the Feds were preemptively watching his bank transfers. Would that be a bridge too far for someone like Mueller?)

I'm concerned that these stories, and story-types, intersect. If so, we're just starting down a long and dirty road.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Supreme Court approves class action lawsuit against Cheney's Halliburton

It's surprising that the right wing Supreme Court is allowing legal action against Cheney years at Halliburton. Not that you would know it, but cooking the books is illegal in the US. Bloomberg:

The U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for investors to press securities fraud suits, ruling for shareholders who accuse Halliburton Co. (HAL) of misrepresenting its financial condition while under Dick Cheney’s leadership.

The justices today unanimously said the shareholders can sue as a group without first establishing that they lost money as a result of the alleged fraud.

The shareholders, led by the Erica P. John Fund, contend that Halliburton from 1999 to 2001 falsified earnings reports, played down estimated asbestos liability and overstated the benefits of a merger. Cheney, later the U.S. vice president, served as chairman and chief executive officer of the oilfield services provider during part of the disputed period.

Read the rest of this post...

Sy Hersh: No evidence of nuclear program in Iran, despite Obama administration assertions

Seymour Hersh, longtime and well regarded investigative journalist, has a new piece in The New Yorker about Iran. From the online teaser Abstract (subscription or print edition required for full article; my emphasis, elision, and paragraphing):

Iran and the Bomb
How real is the nuclear threat?

ABSTRACT: ... Is Iran actively trying to develop nuclear weapons? Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush.

There’s a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago—allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state’s military capacities and intentions.

The two most recent National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.s) on Iranian nuclear progress have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003. ...

Obama has been prudent in his public warnings about the consequences of an Iranian bomb, but he and others in his Administration have often overstated the available intelligence about Iranian intentions. ...

Israel views Iran as an existential threat. Nevertheless, most Israeli experts on nonproliferation agree that Iran does not now have a nuclear weapon. ... In his recent interview, [Mohamed ElBaradei, a recent director-general of the I.A.E.A.] said, “I don’t believe Iran is a clear and present danger. All I see is the hype about the threat posed by Iran.”

I've seen reporting like this for years, going back to Cheney's Bush II second-term push to drive us to war against them — the push for bombing, the appeal to manly posturing, which papers over all lack of evidence that Iran even has a program, much less a bomb. Cheney almost got us there, in my view; he did get Fallon fired.

In the face of this lack of evidence, the hawks have (1) insisted that their critics prove a negative, (2) tried to dominate the press with their single-minded point of view, and (3) tarred its opponents as unmanly, loony, or (in ElBaradei's case) pro-Muslim. Evidence to the contrary can grab its hat and go home. On the press front (2 and 3 above) I think the hawks have succeeded.

This really matters. It would change the world. If we get this one wrong, we'll be at war with someone who can bring the war back to us, to our Midwestern towns and suburban malls. The population of Iran is more than double that of Iraq (Iran is the 17th most populous nation on Earth). It has four times the GDP of Iraq. It's not peopled by tribesmen and sheepherders alone, but contains a great many urbanized professionals.

Iran is a society that, if pushed to war against the West, will go. The secret services in Iran include groups like the Revolutionary Guard and the paramilitary Basij. The last two groups alone are more than 200,000 strong. Ugly as they are in that spy-vs-spy way (are we more pretty?), they could easily bring the global war to our cities as a regular feature. Imagine Omaha or Moline getting the Tel Aviv treatment. There are lots of Molines. Is that a world you'd choose to live in?

Imagine the oil shocks after sabotage bombings in the Persian Gulf. Imagine oil priced in euros on an Iranian bourse. Imagine security checkpoints in every mall in America after the first couple of bombings. Imagine the eager, muscular overreaction of our national security protectors. Imagine the budget for war on steroids.

And please, let's not imagine that if the Israelis bomb Iran for us, we won't be blamed. If you were Iran, would you not strike at the source first, and the client after? We struck at Al Qaeda by taking down Kabul.

So what is Obama's response to the article? A campaign in Politico sourced to "senior Administration officials" who say, in effect, "We think he's wrong, and you can't use our names. Just type it as we say it." The article's lead sentence announces (h/t Glenn Greenwald):

[T]he Obama administration is pushing back strongly, with one senior official saying the article garnered “a collective eye roll” from the White House.

They're giving Sy Hersh the Noam Chomsky treatment. Loony.

The Politico person assigned to this task is a staff writer named Jennifer Epstein, a 2008 graduate of Princeton. She's recently been writing about pro-profit colleges (which we cover here). Epstein needs to be careful — she could end up with a reputation as a stenographer.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Even Dick Cheney offers praise of Obama for getting Bin Laden

In an interview with ABC News, even Cheney offered praise for Obama:

"The administration clearly deserves credit for the success of the operation," Cheney told ABC News, adding that getting bin Laden has long been "the ultimate goal, the ultimate objective" of the U.S. counterterrorism program.

Cheney praised President Obama for the judgment he exercised in making the call to go forward with the raid.

"We all owe him the same sense of satisfaction that I'm sure they feel," Cheney said.

That last line is telling. Cheney wanted that sense of satisfaction. But, his boss gave up the hunt for Bin Laden and invaded Iraq -- at Cheney's urging.

Of course, he couldn't leave it at that. Cheney also said:

"For us to spend so much time patting ourselves on the back because we got bin Laden that we miss the next attack would be a terrible tragedy."

The Obama administration isn't ignoring the prospect of future attacks. The President talked about that last night. And, talk about patting ourselves on the back, I believe it was George W. Bush who was patting himself on the back for "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq eight years ago.

The full transcript is here. Read the rest of this post...

Sy Hersh on Obama & Afghanistan: 'The stuff that goes on in the field, is still going on in the field'

Here are a few excerpts from a speech given by award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in January 2011, as reported in Foreign Policy magazine. Hersh has a long career that includes the exposure of the Vietnam-era My Lai massacres and the Abu Graib prison-torture scandals. (That whole last link is worth a read.) A good overview of Hersh and his career is here.

Now the excerpts from the speech. Keep in mind this is a transcript, so there are a lot of retracements of thought. Unlike in his writing, Hersh is a wandery speaker. Much of this is coming from his research on an upcoming book on Dick Cheney.

First, on differences between Obama and Bush in the use of torture (my emphasis throughout):

In any case, Obama did abdicate, very quickly, any control, I think right away, to the people that are running the war, for what reason I don't know. I can tell you, there is a scorecard I always keep and I always look at. Torture? Yep, still going on. It's more complicated now the torture, and there's not as much of it. But one of the things we did, ostensibly to improve the conditions of prisoners, we demanded that the American soldiers operating in Afghanistan could only hold a suspected Taliban for four days, 96 hours. If not... after four days they could not be sure that this person was not a Taliban, he must be freed. Instead of just holding them and making them Taliban, you have to actually do some, some work to make the determination in the field. Tactically, in the field. So what happens of course, is after three or four days, "bang, bang" -- I'm just telling you -- they turn them over to the Afghans and by the time they take three steps away the shots are fired. And that's going on. It hasn't stopped. It's not just me that's complaining about it. But the stuff that goes on in the field, is still going on in the field -- the secret prisons, absolutely, oh you bet they're still running secret prisons. Most of them are in North Africa, the guys running them are mostly out of Djibouto [sic]. We have stuff in Kenya (doesn't mean they're in Kenya, but they're in that area).

On Cheney and the "whacking" in Afghanistan:

Stanley McChrystal had been in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command [see below] from ‘03 to ‘07 under Cheney. In the beginning under Cheney -- what I'm telling you is sort of hard to take because the vice... In the beginning they would get their orders, they would call up on satellite phones, from the field, to Cheney's office, and get authority, basically, to whack people. Sometimes names were given, sometimes generic authority was given. This was going on. There's still an enormous amount of whacking going on right now. What happened is after McChrystal ran into trouble and he was replaced, Petraeus took over the war, General Petraeus -- they call him King David, David Petraeus -- and he has done this in the last 6, 8 months; He has doubled up on the nightly , nightly assassinations. He's escalated the bombing. He's gotten much tougher. His argument is: Let's squeeze them, let's bomb ‘em, let's hit ‘em, and then of course they'll be open to negotiation.

For background on JSOC, here's Hersh from a different speech, given in 2009, as quoted in Alternet:

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. [...]

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

And finally, this — Hersh on the relationship between the military and right-wing Catholic societies like Opus Dei. Quoted without comment (though others have had much to say). This is about the "Knights of Malta" (really, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta) — a land-less state with many diplomatic privileges, by the way:

[I]n the Cheney shop -- I can write about it in ways I could not then, because I didn't want expose anybody who was there -- in the Cheney shop the attitude was, "What's this? What? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? And wait a second, Sunnis don't like Shia? And there's no WMD? And there's no democracy? Don't they get it? We're going to change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get hold of all the oil, nobody' s going to give a damn." That's the attitude: "We're going to change mosques into cathedrals."

That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command and Stanley McChrystal, the one who got in trouble because of the article in Rolling Stone, and his follow-on, a Navy admiral named McRaven, Bill McRaven -- all are members or at least supporters of Knights of Malta. McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the Knights of Malta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They're all believers -- many of them are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they are doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. [...] Look, Knights of Malta does great stuff. They do a lot of charity work; so does Opus Dei. It's a very extreme, extremely religious, Roman Catholic sect, if you will. But for me, it's always, when I think of them, I always think of the line we used about Werner von Braun [a Nazi rocket scientist brought to the US to help with the missle program] [...] "Werner von Braun, he aimed for the moon but often hit London." With his rockets.

As with my earlier Robert Fisk article, I can only present this as representing Hersh's research, which he isn't yet sharing. On the other hand, this is Seymour Hersh, not Swiss cheese.

There's much more to this speech; please read it all if this stuff interests you. (And if you find an online link to Part II, please post it in the comments. Thanks.)

GP Read the rest of this post...

New CPAC head apparently plans to ban Dick Cheney next year

The new head of CPAC, the biggest conservative conference of the year, just said that you're not welcome to next year's conference if you support gays in the military and/or marriage equality for gays.  At first he said "groups" wouldn't be welcome, then he went on to say that individuals would be welcome if they didn't support lifting the ban or marriage.

That means Dick Cheney is banned from CPAC.

As is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

And Ted Olson.

And Laura Bush.

And let's not forget that Sarah Palin tweeted a comment about the gay ban being silly.

CPAC may need to trade that big tent in for a pup tent next year.

The good news, at least the official hate groups may now come back next year.  Pretty clear where the GOP's loyalties lie.  Better to have the attendance of a group listed alongside the Klan than to have some gays (and gay-lovers) show up. Read the rest of this post...

Hillary calls out Cheney

Good for her. Read the rest of this post...

Cheney attacks Obama for doing what he and Bush did, expand govt and increase the deficit

Of course, Cheney's an idiot for suggesting that Obama shouldn't have increased the deficit. The alternative was letting the country sink into another Great Depression. It's troublesome that the man who was just recently vice president, and de facto president, is suggesting that we should have let the country fall into a depression rather than increase the size of the deficit.

The media needs to hold Cheney to this comment. So do the Democrats. Unless the President wants to give in to the Republicans on the notion that the stimulus was not necessary, someone at the senior levels of our government, preferably President Obama, needs to hit back hard on Cheney, and ask why he favors sending the country into a Depression.

The President can't win by sitting back and pretending these attacks won't matter. As we've seen time and again, they do matter, and they work. We won't stop them by publishing economic treatises, we'll only win by hitting the Republicans back, hard, every time they make an idiotic statement like Cheney did today.

Above the fray hasn't really worked, in terms of defeating the GOP lies. Read the rest of this post...

Nigeria's deal to drop Cheney bribery charges 'illegal'

Sounds like more deal-making could be ahead in Nigeria.

In a letter to Nigeria’s anti-corruption watchdog, Osuagwu Ugochukwu, a prominent lawyer in Abuja, said the withdrawal of charges against Cheney was a breach of the law.

“We know as a point of law that once a criminal charge has been filed in a competent court, issue of penalty of fine is for the courts to impose and not parties,” he wrote. “Hence, we are shocked to hear that EFCC imposed a fine on an accused person. We also know as a point of law that criminal matters cannot be settled out of court as in civil matters in Nigeria.”

“The outcome of the deal with Halliburton tends to suggest a smart way of making quick money while leaving the culprits unpunished,” an editorial in Nigeria’s Daily Sun argues. “This method invariably has its own drawbacks that could encourage similar criminal acts in future.”

Read the rest of this post...

Halliburton pays $250 million to have Cheney bribery charges dropped

This doesn't sound suspicious at all.

Nigeria's anti-corruption police have dropped charges against Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president, over a multi-million dollar bribery case after the energy firm Halliburton agreed to pay up to $250m (£161m) in fines.

The move followed the intervention of ex-president George Bush Sr and former secretary of state James Baker, according to Nigerian press reports.

The country's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said it met officials representing Cheney and Halliburton in London last week after filing 16-count charges relating to the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in the conflict-ridden Niger delta.

Read the rest of this post...

Nigeria to file bribery charges against Dick Cheney

Now this is shocking. Not the charges, but that someone is serious about pressing charges against Cheney and that Interpol will issue a warrant.

Nigeria will file charges against former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and officials from five foreign companies including Halliburton Co. over a $180 million bribery scandal, a prosecutor at the anti-graft agency said.

Indictments will be lodged in a Nigerian court “in the next three days,” Godwin Obla, prosecuting counsel at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said in an interview today at his office in Abuja, the capital. An arrest warrant for Cheney “will be issued and transmitted through Interpol,” the world’s biggest international police organization, he said.

Peter Long, Cheney’s spokesman, said he couldn’t immediately comment when contacted today and said he would respond later to an e-mailed request for comment.

Read the rest of this post...

Juan Cole on the Asian Century & what Bush-Cheney bought us

Buried in a great article by Juan Cole on Obama's Asia trip is this comment on the Bush-Cheney "foreign wars" project. It's the clearest statement yet of what those two were really up to, and what they, and we, got for their trouble:

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney thought in terms of expanding American conventional military weapons stockpiles and bases, occupying countries when necessary, and so ensuring that the U.S. would dominate key planetary resources for decades to come. Their worldview, however, was mired in mid-twentieth-century power politics.

If they thought they were placing a marker down on another American century, they were actually gambling away the very houses we live in and reducing us to a debtor nation struggling to retain its once commanding superiority in the world economy. In the meantime, the multi-millionaires and billionaires created by neoliberal policies and tax cuts in the West will be as happy to invest in (and perhaps live in) Asia as in the United States.

I'm sure in Cheney's mind, his foreign wars project was patriotic, an attempt to use American military power to secure control of vital resources ahead of our international competitors, like China and India. Occupying Iraq, for example, would prevent the Chinese and Russians from accessing Iraqi oil. Occupying Afghanistan, and placing an ex-oil industry shill in the nominal seat of power, would guarantee control of the planned natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan.

Again, the goal would not be to secure those resources for us (they would be secured for the oil and gas companies); the goal would be to block "unfriendly" access to them, thus boxing in our competitors and giving us a deciding international hand in resource allocation.

This is the Great Game, 21st century style. It failed, and we live among the shards of the result — Cole's point in the passage quoted, I think.

Read the rest of the article for more on the present — Obama's Asia trip and American prospects, as seen from Cole's perspective. It's very good. But I thought the above was an interesting post-scriptorial comment on the era just ended, the failed Bush-Cheney project.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Blair: Cheney wanted to invade Syria and Iran

The chickenhawk couldn't get enough of war, provided someone else's kid was on the front line. Imagine the possibilities of more GOP rule in Washington.

Describing the former US vice president as an advocate of “hard, hard power”, Mr Blair said Damascus was next on Mr Cheney’s hit list.

“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hizbollah, Hamas, etc,” Mr Blair wrote in his autobiography, A Journey. “In other words, he thought the whole world had to be made anew, and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency.”

Syria’s correct assumption that powerful US forces wanted to attack it had profound implications, domestically and in Iraq. Although no friend of Saddam Hussein, Damascus had every reason to want the American occupation to fail and, therefore, no incentive to stop Islamist militants crossing the border to fight US troops.

Read the rest of this post...