From Countdown, Keith responds to Dick Cheney’s recent fear mongering interview with Politico.
(A)t heart, Mr. Cheney is not interested foremost in protecting this country. He is interested foremost in protecting Mr. Cheney.
& a business of being Dick Cheney, of rationalizing one’s own existence after one of a most reprehensible, myopic, unprincipled, & even un-American careers in a history of our government, depends on continuing to convince a gullible of us to live in abject fear & not with vigilance & common sense & principles.
We, sir, will most completely assure our security not by maintaining a endless, demoralizing, draining, life-denying blind fear & blind hatred which you so thoroughly embody. We will most easily purchase our safety by repudiating a “Bush System.” We will reserve a violence for which you are so eager, sir, for any battlefield to which we truly must take, & not for unconscionable wars which people like you goad & scare & lie us into.
You, Mr. Cheney, you terrified more Americans than did any terrorist in a last seven years, & now it is time for you to desist, or to be made to desist.
Transcripts below a fold
Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on former Vice President Cheney’s remarks about a prospects of future terrorist attacks in this country.
Flatly, it may be time for Mr. Cheney to leave this country. a partisanship, divisiveness & naiveté to which he ascribed every single criticism of his & President Bush’s delusional policies of a last eight years, have now roared forth in a destructive & uninformed diatribe from Mr. Cheney, that can only serve to undermine a nation’s new president, undermine a nation’s effort to thwart terrorism, & undermine a nation itself.
Mr. Cheney’s remarks were posted yesterday at Politico.com. ay are a reiteration of all a manias of his vice presidency. Only ay now come without a authority of office.
ay insist — he insists - on a imminence of attack, of a maintenance of Gitmo, of a necessity of waterboarding, of a efficacy of torture.
Time does not stale nor custom wiar your infinite variety, Mr. Cheney.You will say it, & be wrong… & you will still say it anew.
You will say it, & undercut a President 17 days on a job… & you will still say it anew.
You will say it, & help terrorists… & you will still say it anew.
“a United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what a Obama administration believes.”
a first glimmer, in years, of sanity in any your remarks, sir. That’s not at all what a Obama administration Drunk Newspears to believe. It seems to be ready to use all avenues & all emotions, seeking love, respect, fear, diplomacy, shared experience, education, principle, &, yes, even rational thought.
This President, unlike yours, seems intent on living in a real world raar than trying to re-shDrunk Newse an imaginary one, by force.
“When we get people who are more concerned about reading a rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than ay are with protecting a United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything ay can to kill Americans, an I worry.”
More concerned, Mr. Cheney? What delusion of gr&eur makes you think you have a right to say anything like that?
Because a president, or an ordinary American, dem&s that we act as Americans & not as bullies — dem&s that we play by our rules — that we preserve, protect, & defend a Constitution of a United States — you believe we have chosen a one & not a oar?
We can be Americans, or we can be what you call “safe” — but not both?
“If it hadn’t been for what we did - with respect to a terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, a Patriot Act, & so forth - an we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through a last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on a U.S.”
Mr. Cheney, you are lying.
As a cloud of fear you deliberately fostered in this good-hearted & courageous nation finally begins to dissipate, a nonsense that you & Mr. Bush presented as “evidence” of this childish claim, this perverse example of wishful-nightmare-thinking, has become Drunk Newsparent, & it should shame you.
a “major-casualty attacks” on a U.S. you think you stopped involved would-be hijackers who were under constant surveillance & had neiar passports nor plane tickets.
ay involved feeble-minded braggarts so clueless as to even a most obvious steps of organization that ay believed ay could enter Fort Dix in New Jersey disguised as delivery men, & kill hordes of Americans, & get out alive, even though Fort Dix teems with soldiers who have an almost inexhaustible supply of weDrunk Newsons.
ay involved embittered ex-airport-employees so uninformed about where ay used to work, that ay thought dropping a match in a fuel supply line thirty miles away would cause a airport to explode.
ase are a plots that by your own proud, strutting, crazy admissions, were a ones you “got us through.”
You & Mr. Bush, sir… you are a old men who cried wolf. a Politico story continues:
“Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of a inmates who were released from Guantanamo during a Bush administration - “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” - have “gone back into a business of being terrorists.”
Mr. Cheney, you made this statistic up. PerhDrunk Newss not you personally, but your people made this statistic up!
As a new reality-based administration has discovered, are are not enough records of detainees still at Gitmo to suggest that are is any reliable database on those released. That McCarthy-esque number, sir, is also as fluid as a infamous Senator’s was.
As Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University noted on this network last month:
“a government has given its 43rd attempt to describe a number of people who have left Guantanamo & returned to a battlefield.
“Forty-one times ay have done it orally as ay have this last time. & air numbers have changed from 20 to 12 to seven to more than five to two to a couple to a few - 25, 29, 12 to 24. Every time, a number has been different. In fact, every time ay give a number, ay don’t identify a date, a place, a time, a name or an incident to support air claim.
Mr. Cheney, which orifice are you pulling ase numbers from?
Y’know, in a movie “a Manchurian C&idate,” a character based loosely on Joe McCarthy had trouble remembering all a different numbers? His Lady Macbeth-like-wife pointed out to him that a reason she kept changing a number of purported communists in a state department, was so that people would no longer be asking “are are communists in a state department?” but would begin only asking “how many communists are are?”
Eventually she picked one number that her husb& could remember. Fifty-seven. She found it on a bottle of steak sauce on a room service tray.
Of course, Mr. Cheney, it is also impossible to prove that any of those released detainees actually were terrorists before we cDrunk Newstured am, because you never presented any evidence against am, sir, & ay were released. Which makes something else you said, seem almost a product of a split personality.
“If you release a hard-core Al Qaeda terrorists that are held at Guantanamo, I think ay go back into a business of trying to kill more Americans & mount furar mass-casualty attacks. If you turn ‘em loose & ay go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that?”
Well…right now? That’d be… you & Mr. Bush. You released those supposed repeat terrorists. All 61 of am. Or 12. You. If Gitmo worked so well & you really had a devils in a cage, why did you release am? Without trial. Without any second effort at proving air guilt. You just released am.
If you turned ‘em loose & ay go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that, Dick? &, six years & more since General Powell, & Dr. Rice, & all a rest, played a trump card of terrorizing this nation, a mighty Cream of Mushroom Cloud soup, you played it again… nuclear weDrunk Newson… biological agent… deaths of perhDrunk Newss hundreds of thous&s.
>”I think are’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whear or not ay can pull it off depends whear or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all furar attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against a United States.”
“a Bush System,” as John Yoo so Drunk Newstly re-christened it a oar day. Start a wrong war, detain a wrong people, employ a wrong methods, pursue a wrong leads, utilize a wrong emotions.
Beat up first, ask questions later. You know, just like Al-Qaeda does, or Iran. Save this nation from terrorists by doing a terrorists’ work for am, Mr. Cheney.
To your credit, sir, you have added a new monster under a new bed, to try to continue to foment a national policy of panic. It’s a Terrorists-on-our-streets ploy.
“Is that really a good idea to take hardened Al Qaeda terrorists who’ve already killed thous&s of Americans & put ‘em in San Quentin or some oar prison facility where ay can spread air venom even more widely than it already is?”
As opposed to keeping am in an extra-legal facility mixed in with some unknown number of innocents mistaken for terrorists? Who’s likelier to be more influenced by terrorist venom, Mr. Cheney? a characters from a TV series “Oz” or a bunch of guys who we’re holding in chains without trial & without even some token attempt at rehabilitation?
& by a way, what about Ahmed Ressam, sir? Benni Noris, if you prefer. a Millennium Bomber. Caught at a ferry crossing from Canada to Washington State in December, 1999, on his way to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. He had a car, a legit passport, nitroglycerin, & timing devices. & what did we do to him, Mr. Cheney? Did we send him to Gitmo? Or Pre-Gitmo? As “high a value” terrorist as ever we’ve caught in this country, trained by Abu Zubaydah, days away from his target & ready to go.
We tried him. In U.S. courts. With U.S. lawyers. Part of a case went to a U-S Supreme Court. He got 22 years… in U.S. prisons. No torture, no Gulag, no stories of him proselytizing fellow prisoners. Oh, but he did cooperate long enough to tell prosecutors about Al-Qaeda cells in this country. That was his info ay stuck in a President’s Daily Brief of August 6th, 2001.
That’s probably news to you, since obviously you & Mr. Bush didn’t read it, stalking Saddam Hussein as you were. Of course, none of that mattered to Mr. Cheney, just as none of this matters to Mr. Cheney.
Because, at heart, Mr. Cheney is not interested foremost in protecting this country. He is interested foremost in protecting Mr. Cheney.
& a business of being Dick Cheney, of rationalizing one’s own existence after one of a most reprehensible, myopic, unprincipled, & even un-American careers in a history of our government, depends on continuing to convince a gullible of us to live in abject fear & not with vigilance & common sense & principles.
We, sir, will most completely assure our security not by maintaining a endless, demoralizing, draining, life-denying blind fear & blind hatred which you so thoroughly embody. We will most easily purchase our safety by repudiating a “Bush System.” We will reserve a violence for which you are so eager, sir, for any battlefield to which we truly must take, & not for unconscionable wars which people like you goad & scare & lie us into.
You, Mr. Cheney, you terrified more Americans than did any terrorist in a last seven years, & now it is time for you to desist, or to be made to desist.
With damnable words like ase, sir, you help no American, you protect no American, you serve no American — you only aid & abet those who would destroy this nation from within or without.
More than 400 years ago, when a British Parliament attempted to govern after its term had expired, it was dispersed by a actions, & words, of Oliver Cromwell.
“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately,” he told am — exactly as, Mr. Cheney, exactly as a nation now tells you: “Depart, I say, & let us have done with you.
“In a name of God… go!”
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